more on Kaplan

Oh yes, and lets not forget Mr. Kaplan’s shock that Bush failed to mention the disgruntled Sunni’s in his catalogue of who we are fighting in Iraq. K agrees that it is mainly former regime holdouts and Jihadists, but feels it an unforgivable lapse in nuance that Mr. Bush failed to mention the plain garden variety Sunni tribesmen that don’t particularly like the fact that, at 20% of the population, the Sunnis will no longer call the shots in a new democratic Iraq. Notice the sly way he puts it: "driven by Sunni fears." They are worried that the Shiites won’t treat them right, you see.

Now that is a nice circumlocution. No need to ask if there is any basis to these fears. No need to actually catalogue any mistreatment of the Sunnis by the new government. You just have to refer to their ‘fears’ that they might be. So, having no choice in the face of such fears they do what any other reasonable group with such fears might do and launch a campaign of murdering civilians, a great many of whom are Sunnis too.

He cites Sunni fears because there is no actual mistreatment. The fact is that the Shiites and Kurds have acted with amazing forbearance and the holdout Sunnis that Mr. Kaplan is so solicitous of aren’t even a majority in their own minority. And what does it mean to point out that some of the Sunnis fighting now were not in Sadaam’s regime? Have they made any demands? Have they put forward any constructive proposals for constitutional reform or safeguards for Sunni interests? Can you remind yourself how extraordinary that is, to be fighting without any list of demands? How can you fight without saying what it is that you want? Of course they do say one thing they want, the Americans and other international forces out. Is there any reason to think that if they got what they wanted, the removal of American troops, they would do anything other than set up a new dictatorship of a Sunni strongman? That is when you fight without making a list of demands for the kind of government you want: when the kind of government you want is so morally unacceptable that it can’t be defended in public. Not even with the UN crowd.

So what if some or even most of them did not serve in the former regime? A lot of Clansmen spent the real civil war behind the lines and only decided to join the fight when it could be waged against civilians instead of armed men. Does that make them somehow more legitimate? Here again in his ignorance of some details I think bush has grasped the nettle better than his more informed intellectual critics: we are fighting for democracy against people that want a dictatorship. We cannot give up just because the people that want to rule their society by force are willing to murder.

Politicians and Intellectuals

For the most part, what we intellectuals ‘consume’ from policy is confirmation of our own belief system. We have all taken a big lifetime pay-cut to seek after truth. But truth very quickly and inevitable becomes ‘our truth,’ a set of propositions we are committed to proving. Moreover, the propositions we are proving are ones that are not easily disconfirmable—if they were, they would not be the provenance of intellectuals but of professionals and technocrats. For most policies, the consumer gets something tangible and measurable. They get a bridge or an education or an unemployment benefit or farm subsidy. For the intellectual he gets the satisfaction of seeing his belief system defended. Notice, that the great thing about the intellectual as client in politics is that you can pay him off even better when you loose the vote than when you win it.

If you are trying to please a constituent interested in having the highway in front of his store improved you do little for yourself by sending him a reproduction of your impassioned floor speech denouncing the rival politician that got the money to go to improve a different highway in a different district (or extreme environmentalist that got the funds diverted to a different concern altogether—though in that case there may be some ideological satisfaction involved from being about to explain one’s hardships on the basis of actions by ideological opponents—loosing to a politician with the same desire to distribute tangible goods to his constituents is just admitting you aren’t as good at is as he is, rather than being the victim of an evil ideology). Since politicians never have to compromise with other politicians to deliver for their intellectual constituents they are free to make unreasonable demands and vilify their opponents. Indeed, vilifying their opponents may be part of the ‘good’ they are delivering.

This is why foreign policy is the ultimate fountain of ‘distributive politics’ for politicians hoping to cater to intellectuals. They are able to deliver an endless supply of self-righteous condemnations of opposing believe systems with even less concern than in arenas like education, where something might actually have to be done at the end of the day. In foreign policy one can moralize, escape responsibility for the policies chosen by the national government (since, after all, in this case the people doing the choosing aren’t even other legislators but the President), and not even have to worry about your constituents suffering for your decisions. the only people hurt are usually people that can’t vote in the first place.

Power Use

How ironic that Kaplan’s criticism of Bush’s press conference performance and statements on Iraq and North Korea is entitled “Power Failure” after Kaplan’s thesis that the President’s answers disclose a misunderstanding of power. The real failure in this regard is Kaplan’s.

Kaplan’s analysis of the President’s demand for six party talks instead of sitting down one on one is that the President fails to understand that the US is the only country with the power to give the North Koreans what they want: security guarantees. “does he really not understand why the North Koreans want one-on-one talks? Is he really blind to the power politics of the situation—to the power that the North Koreans are trying to amass by going nuclear and to the power that they see in the United States as the one country that can provide those security guarantees?”

Doe Kaplan really think the North Koreans are only pursuing these weapons because they are afraid of the US? That part of the reason they are afraid of the US is because they do things that should make them afraid of us and that they would like to go on doing if they could only get US assurances of their security or be able to guarantee it with the ability to blackmail us and our allies with nuclear weapons? And is he really so blind to the fact that power is based on having something the other side needs? And that in addition to security guarantees from the US the North Koreans need practically everything? And that they get practically everything for the other parties in the six party talks?

The only way the North Koreans will ever be brought to heal is if the nations that enable them—China and to a lesser extent Russia, Japan and South Korea—step up to their responsibilities and cut their pets off. The only way to make them do that is to make the other powers sit down and agree to do so. The whole idea that Bush wants six power talks because he thinks that five people telling you to play nice is better than one is laughable. The reason he wants them is to make others responsible. In any case, even if one believed like Kaplan that the only thing motivating the North Korea’s was their fear of us, what difference does that make? Why does that require that there be bilateral talks with the US and the North Korea’s? Can’t the security guarantee’s that supposedly motivate the course of action they embarked on so long before Bush was on the scene be given in the context of six party talks? Indeed, if they were really so mistrustful of the US—and I can only consider the mistrust of such scum a badge of honor—wouldn't’t they

I am so indignant that Kaplan has the temerity to blame Bush for this situation because finally someone hand the guts to point out the plane facts—that this is an evil regime. I am made physically ill at the suggestion that we can only have peace with dictators if we agree speak in a kind of code that doesn't’t call murder, depravity and evil by their names and that anyone who dares to do so has brought whatever vile regimes like the North Koreans do to us on themselves. I am sure that if Kaplan had been around during the interwar years he would have castigated Churchill for stoking Hitler’s insecurities by calling attention to his atrocities. Appeasement of the kind that Kaplan advocates is what got us into this mess.

The real criticism of Bush is not that he is unwilling to truck down to North Korea’s demands and give him a security guarantee. It is that Bush hasn’t been hard enough on China. It is only China that has any real leverage. If the US did give North Korea security guarantees would that change anything? They started their program while Clinton was in the White House and sold it to us the first time for billions in aid. Did the North Korea’s fear that Clinton was going to invade them because of their human rights violations? Did Clinton’s actions in Kosovo, based on humanitarian considerations, cause the North Korea’s to be afraid? Force them to develop a nuclear program out of concerns of being invaded by the great crusader from Hope?

The North Korea’s want the weapons because they give them power. They might be willing to sign agreements to get rid of them in exchange for yet more billions in aid. But those agreements will never be worth anything until they are backed up by something the North Korea’s really fear.

The real flaw in Bush’s performance

This is the real failure of the Bush policy. Having the six party talks at least puts the people with the power to actually force them to change their behavior in the same room together. But to really change the North Korea’s he has to pressure their enablers. First and foremost this means the Chinese. The security guarantees against a hypothetical future US invasion that Kaplan believes the North Korea’s are worried are worth a lot less than the fact that North Korea can hardly feed itself, hardly keep its lights on for a day without the Chinese.

Pressuring the Chinese is something the administration has so far been unwilling to do, at least publicly. Until they do nothing the administration does or does not do will make any difference. I think the solution is straightforward. The Chinese are aiming missiles at Taiwan. Give Taiwan nuclear missiles unless the North Korea’s come clean. This would be the only thing we could do that would hurt the Chinese without costing us much money or trade. It would force the Chinese to either get the North Korea”s to come around or allow us to do something that I think would be good to do anyway. And in opposing it the Chinese would be forced to justify their own placements of offensive nuclear missiles aimed at the very people they are supposedly hoping to ‘liberate’.

The fact that North Korea can’t go without Chinese support for an afternoon without a power failure is the real pressure point. And the failure of the Bush administration to make the Chinese pay for their support of this vile regime in the same way he holds regimes that give aid and comfort to Islamic terrorists is the real power failure of the Bush administration.

Leo--Could we drop the War Thing?

Future historians forced to rely on Hollywood movies to recontruct the concerns of 21st Century Americans would be justified in identifying the cheif threat to the security of ordinary Americans was neo-Nazi cabals ensconsed in the highest reaches of government. There would certainly be little evidence to suppor the contention that some Americans were worried about Muslim terrorists. A young maverick assistent prof looking for tenure will advance the bizarre thesis that there was such a thing as Islamic terrorists and that for a few years Americans were prone to cite terrorism from these groups as their chief security concern--neo-Nazis didn't even make the list. He will build this iconoclastic thesis on the slim reed of a single documentary by one Michael Moore, which claimed to examine the greatest single attack on the leading country in the 21st century in its history.

His collegues will make some prefuctory comments to the effect of admiring his enginuety in coming up with this thesis but then proceed to dismantle his argument. The weight of the cellioud evidence is overwhelming on the side of the Nazi-corporate nexus at the heart of the US government. Can our young scholar cite a single additional piece of evidence supporting his argument? Is it really plausible that an industry that survives on market revenues and revels in any excuse to explode things on screen would ignore WWIII happening in front of it. Why would an industry facing competitive pressures serving a religious and intensly patriotic market bother to mine the exploits of Greek pedophiles from 2,500 years ago ignore a subject with such dramatic possibilities and ready made interest from their customers?

Say what you will about the biases 1940s film makers brought to thier treatments of WWII, you must credit them with having noticed that WWII was happening. To an economist at the time that fact would have seemed an instantiation of a sort of universal law--a market driven industry will have no choice but to make movies about what its customers care about, regardless of the ideological convictions of the film makers themselves. Otherwise, someone would make films closer to the concerns of the ticket buying public and steal market share from them. Not happening. Go through your local video store at any time in the last four years and try to convince a Martian that the chief security issue confronting Americans is terrorism. Outside of a few documentaries exposing American perfidity--grabbing oil on the pretext of fighting terrorism, say--there is no evidence that such a thing as an Islamic terrorist exists.

The most striking cases of this can be seen when Hollywood adapts a novel. Islamic terrorists, no matter how central to the plot, are invariably changed to evil right-wingers. Such was the fate of Clancey's "The Sum of All Fears".

This Hollywood aversion to certain kinds of controversy is not limited to books about terrorism. "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was adapted straight to the screen except for the theme of the entire book--race. (even more bizarrely from the entertainment perspective, they also took out the endlessly entertaining America hating, alcoholic English journalist and changed him into a generic Bruce Willis smart ass)

It's like taking the War out of War and Peace. Anna Kirenina--great book, but could we not make them adulters? Brothers Karamozov--great murder mistery once you get rid of all that God stuff. "The Possesed"--are people going to want to sit through all that 19th century radical politics? Why spoil a great male bonding movie?

It can't be just fear of ethnic protest that makes Hollywood avoid its most interesting and marketable topics. It seems that a public that is willing to pay to see things blown up by military men would be only more willing to pay if these pyrotechnics involves story lines with some relevance to their lives. Its like we are living in one of those communist countries where they could only make historical movies--anything that happened under the current regime was too sensitive. Of course we can make movies set in our own times as long as the villians are strictly re-animated Nurenburg defendents (defendants from the Tokyo trials need not apply).

Gay marriage

Libertarian Jane Galt makes an interesting argument about gay marriage that largely parallels my own thinking. She makes a point that I have made myself, but she uses economic thinking. She argues that saying, "Letting gay people marry is not going to change my decision about getting married," is wrong because "you" might not be the marginal case. Just as in many situations in economics where an incentive might not change the behavior of the typical person but might have an effect at someone at one extreme or another of the distribution the same may be true of Gay marriage. A change in the minimum wage might not make you fire anyone but then your business might not, indeed probably is not, the marginal case.

She brings in the examples of welfare benefits and its effect on marriage in poor communities. The argument is more or less the same one that a lot of neo-conservatives made in the '90s about changing social rules on the basis of thier effect on the upper-middle-class while failing to take into account that an arrangment that might work well for the group making the rules could have disasterous effects on those farther down in the distribution of income, intellegence and education. This is really the argument at the center of Murray's book, Losing Ground. The framing in terms of economics and marginal effects is a real contribution, I think.

The other really nice thing about the post (and it is a very long one) is her citing of an argument made by G. K. Chesterton. He argues that those who see no need whatever for a social institution are precisely the people who have no business getting rid of it. Her setup and the quote itself are both worth reproducing at lenght:

"But as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it:

'In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.'

Now, of course, this can turn into a sort of precautionary principle that prevents reform from ever happening. That would be bad; all sorts of things need changing all the time, because society and our environment change. But as a matter of principle, it is probably a bad idea to let someone go mucking around with social arrangements, such as the way we treat unwed parenthood, if their idea about that institution is that "it just growed". You don't have to be a rock-ribbed conservative to recognise that there is something of an evolutionary process in society: institutional features are not necessarily the best possible arrangement, but they have been selected for a certain amount of fitness.

It might also be, of course, that the feature is what evolutionary biologists call a spandrel. It's a term taken from architecture; spandrels are the pretty little spaces between vaulted arches. They are not designed for; they are a useless, but pretty, side effect of the physical properties of arches. In evolutionary biology, spandrel is some feature which is not selected for, but appears as a byproduct of other traits that are selected for. Belly buttons are a neat place to put piercings, but they're not there because of that; they're a byproduct of mammalian reproduction.

However, and architect will be happy to tell you that if you try to rip out the spandrel, you might easily bring down the building."

That whole way of thinking should be kept in mind when thinking about social reform. The fact that you can't imagine what purpose is served by such and such a rule is precisely why you should be careful about doing away with it. It is evidence not that the arrangment is useless (though it well might be) but that you don't understand the process that brought it about.

Of course the problem with social arrangements like marriage is precisely that people do think they understand the process that brought them about--religion. In former times people had these strange ideas about the Bible and Preists having some sort of supernatural insight into God's laws and people adopted them in much the same way that people earlier adopted practices like animal sacrifice. If the process that enforces practices like hetrosexual marriage are the products of the same process that inspecting lamb entrails before battle then we understand and reject the process that brought it about and feel perfectly free to discard the social arrangement.

That is why I think the evolutionary analogy is so useful in her argument (again one I have made many times). The very thing that makes ancient social arrangments suspect on process grounds--their association with ancient reasoning systems which no have credibility (at least among an influential subsection of the population)--ends up being what should make us reluctant to discard them willy-nilly on evolutionary grounds. Old arrangments are ones that have been selected for. Ultimately, she is saying that the religious arguments butressing social arrangements like marriage are artifactual.

I think the "spandrel" terminology is quite useful here. It focuses on a body of knowledge and a bit of experience that we all find accessible. The interesting thing is that it also cuts both ways. The arguments of environmentalists also have the spandrel idea in them. The argument against allowing species to go extinct because we can see no apparent use for them is precisely what should make us nervous about allowing them to go extinct.

freedom of speech vs. freedom from fear

Here is an interesting item in today's Opinion Journal round up of good news from Iraq:

"the poll showed 60 percent of those interviewed thought that democracy was preferable to any other kind of government. Democracy could give better education, jobs and wages for more of the population, they said. Ninety-one percent said living without fear was essential to democracy, but freedom of speech and political participation ranked lower. "

Notice how ranking freedom from fear higher than freedom of speech and participation is viewed as a mistake. Isn't that rather parochial on our part? Maybe given the situation of Iraqis they are right. We don't have a memory of a time when people were killed for expressing the wrong views or being preceived as being on the wrong side. Remember in the aftermath of the Italian journalist's shooting at the check point it came out that one of the problems with the system was that Iraqis are afraid to slow down and look--under the old regime, if you looked at the security officers you were liable to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night. With a society facing that level of fear the ability to read the newspaper you want is reasonably less important than freedom from being targeted by the police. The closest thing we have to the level of terror that Iraqis face is among blacks in the deep south. Ask people that were getting lynched for looking at someone the wrong way to rank freedom from fear against freedom of the press.

schiavo

I am telling you, these living wills will never work. Please, save us all some trouble. We can't go through another media feeding frenzy like this. If you are going to go in the hospital and think you might be incapacitated the only prudent thing to do is kill someone.

Terri

Want to be safe from death by starvation? Kill someone. That was Terri’s big mistake. Being a wife and beloved friend was what doomed her.

Take any of the arguments being put forward to justify the slow starvation death of Terri Schiavo to justify the execution of a murderer and you would be—what—called a murderer yourself. We are told without a trace of doubt that a convicted murderer put to death on the word of a jail house snitch who testifies in exchange for a lighter sentence that society is executing an innocent man. But question whether the word of an estranged husband (living with his new “wife” and two kids) who stands to gain a cool million that had been awarded to him to pay for Terri’s care and you are given a tired lecture on the importance of states rights.

Of course I can believe that Mr. Schiavo has her best interests at heart, I could even believe he did suddenly remember the little snatch of conversation that justifies the claim that we are only carrying out Terri’s wishes in starving her to death. But what I can’t believe is that a reasonable person can’t have some doubt. And that is the standard that we apply to murderers before we subject them to a painless death. Why is the bar so much lower to subject someone to this agony. And the person I saw on TV definitely looks like someone that can feel pain.

What is so striking is the seeming rush to judgment. To act when there is no necessity to do so. Her loving and distraught family ready to take all the responsibility and expense of her care.

……….

We want this to be about living wills. What nonsense. What can hardly be less than clear is that there was a decision made. The judge and Terri’s husband decided the outcome they wanted and looked for a way to get it. They found it in some imagined statement that supports the argument that Terri would have wanted it this way. They ignored evidence on the other side of the proposition that was clearly stronger.

But the idea that a living will would stop the professionals from doing what they want to do is fanciful. Remember the first the issue in the case was whether the husband of the family had the right to make the decision. When that stopped working the TV utterance was discovered. And it happily jogged the memory of The husband’s sister and old friend. The legion of Terri’s friends and family that remembered the exact opposite views from this devout Catholic woman were found to be not credible (if he bothered to pronounce on them at all). But if it had been the other way around, if the parties on the side of death and raising the bar to a be considered a living human being had been reversed is there any doubt that the exact opposite parties would have been found to be credible? Or that some other principle in the law would have been found to make the parents the final arbiters?

…….

What is happening in this country. The judge orders death and no pictures. No recording devices. No way are we allowed to judge for ourselves. The pictures that we see of Terri and her eyes watching the balloon were taken illegally, against the judge’s orders. If the evidence in a murder case were kept away from the public like this we would be outraged. If the judge’s decision, the precious words of his opinion that are the really important thing nowadays, were kept from the public the outrage would be palpable. The people cannot be deprived of moral instruction, but evidence—that is for the important people to see.

But what is so disturbing is that people don’t seem to mind the evidence being kept from them. They want to keep this out of sight.

…………….

Mickey Kaus:
“One way of putting it is that the end of life is so messy, and riddled with potentially guilt-inducing glitches, that nobody wants to be judgmental about it (as the pro-tube position requires).”
But that is the key thing. How is it that the life side is the judgmental one? What has happened that not wanting to starve a person to death is judgmental? It would seem that the people wanting to end a life on the reasoning that the life in question is not worth living are at least as judgmental as the ones that want to give a person food and water.

…………


We have unknowingly decided to change what medicine is. We have changed it from being a group of people that try to keep you alive to a profession that decides whether to keep you alive. We have changed the hospital to a place where they decide whether your life is worth living. People think that will make things better. I think they will be disappointed.

Schiavo--random thoughts

The real key to winning political battles is to have your interests defined as disinterested. That has clearly been achieved by the pro-euthanasia side.

The judge considered dis-interested. The supporters of Schiavo are said to have interests or, worse, ideological/political motivations. The parents have personal interests which lead them astray, make it impossible to see the truth that is so obvious to experts. They are to be pitied but not respected in their judgments. The pro-life people are ideologically motivated. This is the big no-no. But those who want life redefined as a bundle of goods to be weighed as plusses and minuses are the dis-interested voice of reason. They do not have an ideology. Thus a judge who goes to perverse lengths to ignore or not hear evidence that might work against his ideology’s preferred conclusion.

A judge, a real judge, has decided not once but twice that she has no hope and would want to die. People actually say this as if it should convince anyone. Would that cut any ice if it were a murderer we were talking about killing?

It is very important and little remarked upon that the debate has shifted from the husband’s right to speak for the wife to a simple question of what would Terry have wanted. Apparently this had always been the basis for the judge’s ruling. How did attention come to be shifted to this aspect of the case, or, rather, why was it on the ‘husband’s’ authority issue before?

Polarity of the fork. The other key to ideological hegemony is the polarity of forks. Every fork cuts both ways, has two heads, so to speak. In this case the two sides face the federalism fork. Pro-life people are forked between federalism and their preferred policy outcome. They are usually in the position of wanting state autonomy. The pro-euthanasia forces are facing the opposite fork. They are usually in the position of federal supremacy. They are forced to choose between their preferred policy outcome and federal supremacy. The fact that the pro-life forces are the ones routinely forced to account for the tension in their principles while the pro-euthanasia forces are not is a good indicator of which side is hegemonic.

An alternative hypothesis is that the side that is asking for a change in the status quo is the one that has to face this sort of question. A possible answer to this hypothesis is that defining one side or the other as changing the status quo is itself part of the powers of ideological hegemony. Maybe any policy involves changes in the status quo. In the Schiavo case there is a change—taking out the feeding tube for starters. What is considered a “change” of the sort that must give an account of itself is itself socially constructed.

Isn’t this a lot like those cases where the guy is convicted of murder on the strength of the testimony of a jailhouse informant? The guy claims that his cellmate one day just admitted to the murder. This is bad because the informant has an interest—he gets his sentence reduced. In the case at hand he gets a million dollars that he can think of a better use for than therapy for an invalid wife.


And I am so sick of the “how can we waste time on this while the ________ problem goes un-addressed?” comment. Some problems are important because of the value conflicts they involve, not the dollar amounts or number of persons immediately effected by their outcome.
And how bad were the Romans, anyway? Terri has a lot more going on than the average newborn. So we don’t starve babies because they are going to get better. But is it that far away?

Terri Schiavo

What about the 8th Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment? Death by starvation would certainly be considered cruel and unusual punishment if she were a murderer. Would the "trial" that effectively sentenced a human being to death by starvation even begin to pass muster for a murderer?

Defensiveness

The key to winning a political debate is getting the other side to buy into your assumptions, to argue on your turf. A case in point is this entry from "Rantingprofs" on a Newsweek article describing an insurgent ambush that left 26 enemy dead with no American KIA:

"Then comes the daily roundup of violence.
No doubt, there's a daily roundup of violence to be had, no doubt the security situation isn't good, isn't what it should be.
The place ain't Shangri-la.
But there are more and more people on the ground saying the situation isn't just getting better, but that it's getting better to the point that it genuinely looks as if the enemy is in real trouble."

I think it is interesting to note the defensiveness in the author's analysis of the situation. It is as if we are to apologize for the lack of security. Here are Iraqis killing other Iraqis in order to impose a dictatorship and we are apologetic because we haven't "provided" enough security.

This way of looking at it just seems so wrong. Our soldiers are selflessly laying down their lives, taking no profit or tribute from the people of Iraq, only fighting to give the people of Iraq the right to live freely under a government of their own choosing and still we are somehow to apologize because some other Iraqis, who want to re-impose a dictatorship, are going around killing people at random. The thing that is so perverse is that we feel an obligation to put a good light on this because if the Iraqis trying to impose a dictatorship on the rest of the country.

We are trying to protect people and the more murderous the other side is the more we are apologetic about not providing enough security? It is as if the Federals and Abolitionists were expected to apologize for freeing the slaves because of the Klu Klux Clan riding around hanging black people. Was the violence of the Klu Klux Clan, the terrorism, used as an argument for not fighting the Civil War? How can the degenerate terrorism of the Baathists and Jihadists be used as an argument for having left them in charge?

N. B. Forest

Reading great biography of Nathan Bedford Forest.

He is a study in contrasts. He begins his life as a slave trader and ends--at no small cost to himself--as an advocate of a racially inclusive democratic party. First Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Clan he ends up disbanding it in Tennessee and denouncing its continued operations elsewhere.

He illustraites and challenges a lot of theories. Famous for having 30 horses shot out from under him, he would seem to be the embodiment of the sort of "charge with banners flying" ethos we associate with 19th century military. But, untrained in military theory, he was one of the few civil War era generals that saw the futility of the frontal assault. All of his victories, and they were almost always victories when he was in sole command, were won by doing exactly what theory of the time said you should never do: divide his forces. He rebukes a superior saying, "If I knew as much about West Point tactics as you do I'd get whipped everytime for sure."

An interesting thing about 19th century battles was that because communications were so slow and uncertain on the battle field, most coordination depended crucially on commanders being able to anticipate what their fellow commanders (on the same side) would do in a given situation. This is one of the reasons Forest does not work well in groups where he is not in sole command but is instead the head of only a part of the army. Once the battle begins the other commanders are not able to anticipate what he will do. This causes problems even though his decisions are sometimes, in fact, usually, better than what the other commanders expect him to do. The local efficiency represented by Forest's ability to make full use of local information is to some extent counterbalanced by the loss in coordination with other commanders. Chicamagua is a possible case in point (though there even more traditionally trained commanders would have done what Forest was expecting others to do and it was only the unusual timidity of ?Buford? that lead to a failure to follow up on the initial breakthrough in Federal lines). An army may sometimes be better off with a lot of commanders making bad decisions, but the same bad decisions, than having individual geniuses making better but unpredictable decisions.

Interesting article on liberal icon Alfred Kinsey from the City Journal by Edward Feser:

"One particularly monstrous pedophile, a man who had sexual relations with various of his family members and molested hundreds of children, kept regular contact with Kinsey and his associates. They assured him that they wouldn’t turn him in to the authorities, despite the fact that he continued to molest children throughout the time of their correspondence. Kinsey justified such aiding and abetting of criminality in the name of “science,” of course. "

Reminds me of the Tuskegee syphilis study that is so justly infamous. Notice how in both cases the researcher is not causing the problem, just allowing it to go on. Of course the number of victims was much larger in the Tuskegee incident and the harm presumably greater to each individual victim (though the harm of a pedophile to his victim may be as great as an early death and the harm of not getting medical care for syphalis in the mid-20th century may, due to the state of medical science at the time, much less than we might suppose--I genuinely have no idea on either account). Still, it is lucky for the sake of Kinsey's reputation that none of the pedophile's victims were African American.

Democracy and the Middle East

I think that the arguments against the possibility of democracy in the Middle East are wide of the mark. One of the more common themes in such arguments is that Democracy takes a long time to grow and has to be the result of an historical negotiation, not something imposed by force. The first has a ring of truth. Most democracies were the result of a long historical development. But that doesn't mean all of them have to be. The analogy could be with market economies. The first market economies take centuries to develope, but once the template is developed and seen to be working it is a much shorter process to adopt in late adopting societies. We are all quite unsurprised to see countries that have never had anything like the long process that lead to market economies in the West quickly adopting them successfully in the last half of the 20th Century. This is because market economies may have developed according to a very historically specific process but the elements of human nature that drive them are just that--elements of human nature. Likewise with democracy. The second argument, that you can't impose democracy by force, faces some obvious counter-examples, noteably Germany and Japan after WWII. But more to the point, the question to ask is why would not democracy be the sort of thing you could impose by force? You can certainly impose other sorts of governments by force? It is quite simple to impose it. The question is do the majority of the people in a country want to keep it? If they do, then the only way to stop democracy is by force. Democracy has become the only legitimate form of government. By legitimate, I mean it is the only one that can be defended by rational argument among political elites throughout the world. The fact that democracy is still rare in parts of the world is a reflection not of its legitimacy but of force. The fact that we are still fighting opponents of the government in Iraq is evidence not that democracy is unpopular there but that the people fighting it are unpopular. If it were otherwise, they wouldn't be fighting.

right again

ok, gloating done.

Now, on to the fun part, complaining. I find it a little tiresome, this line that people have on the election, that, now, OK, the ball is in the court of the Shias to show that they can be responsible and give the Sunni's a place at the table anyway. Obviously it would be prudent to try and peel off the moderate Sunni's to the extent practicable, but does anyone else find it a bit odious that we continue to put the onus on the Shias? Have they been the ones going around threatening to and sometimes succeed at blowing people up for having the termerity to vote? I think the most striking fact has been the amazing restraint shown by the Shia in the face of the most extraordinary provocation. It is a little like going down to Mississippi after the voting rights act is passed and saying, "Ok, now, the important thing is for the negroes to act responsibly and make sure that the KKK supporters have a reason to feel that their interests are not going to be prejudiced by the fact that they succeeded in terrorizing so many people from going to the polls."

released

Andrew Sullivan reports:

"RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE: The final four Brits in Guantanamo were immediately released by the British government upon returning to the UK. They are charging torture. No formal charges of terrorism have been brought against them. Either we should be deeply concerned that potential terrorists are now at large or that innocent men have been held without any due process for three years and, if they were not British, would still be in jail. Which is it?"

I think he asks a very interesting question but one that excludes the middle, as Aristotle would say. One would presume that a large number of Al Qaed members were in Afghanistan but that most had never gotten to the point where they had committed what would normally be called a crime, i.e., participating in a direct conspiracy to perform a specific terrorist act at a specific time and place. There must be a large number of detainees that they were members of al Qaeda and had therefore taken an oath to attack America, went through a training program to do that and fought with them in the war. Those actions are good reasons for the Americans to hold them even though none of those actions are explicitly crimes. Applying standards of criminal law to such persons would mean they were innocent.

But innocent does not mean not dangerous. Imagine that they had been let free soon after being picked up in Afghanistan but were subsequently involved in a terrorist act against the US. What would be our reaction? I can imagine us saying now, "Well, that is the price we pay for being a civilized world," but I can also imagine a government being in a great deal of trouble. After all, they had by their actions clearly conveyed in a general sense thier intention to do harm to the US. No government whose citizens having subsequently been attacked by such people would have a right to say they didn't see it coming.

I think there is a problem applying the legal paradigm to this problem. After all, I would imagine that many of the soldiers in the German or Japanese Armies never fired a shot in anger or directly participated in anything that they could be arrested for. My Uncle delivered mail in the Phillipines in WWII, not a crime against the Japanese but still part of the American War effort and still enough for any Japanese soldier that saw him to lawfully shoot him or take him prisoner. Maybe the problem is that we need to make joining certain types of organizations itself a crime?

The whole thrust of western civilization has been to move from treating people as members of collectives to treating them as individuals. This is surely an advance to the extent membership in these collectives were based on characteristics that a person can do nothing about, e.g., being of a certain race or nationality. But that may not be true for a collective one voluntarily joins. The reason you can shoot members of the opposing army without inquiring what they have done as individuals is that war is a clash of groups, not individuals. Asking what crimes these released members of Al Qaeda have committed seems to being applying the standards applied to individual activity through criminal law to the collective activity of war.

Michael Reinhard

Predictions

I predict these elections in Iraq will be a huge success. I think the turnout will be above 60% even in Sunni areas and even if it isn't it won't matter. Sunni's not being able to vote because of Sunni terrorists is really not a knock on the other 80% of Iraqis and in any case, a democratically elected government is a very hard thing to dismiss.

Predictions

I have a horrible cold and workload that prevent me from blogging just at the moment, but I would just like to go on the record for the benefit of the contemporary world and posterity that I think the Iraqi elections will be a big success. I have thought that all along and nothing has happened to make me less confident. I think turn out will be in the 60% range enven in Sunni areas and even if it isn't I predict that it will not matter. A democratically elected government is a difficult thing to dismiss.

society for self-congradulatory anachronism

There is a pattern in movies where we go back but take most of ourselves with us.
The pattern is straightforward. A hero, tortured by the his own past and his participation in the crimes of his own society is thrust into the midsts of an oppressed group. He learns their ways and comes to understand them. Then he has a great moral revalation about the importance and moral superiority of this oppressed group and, of course, the moral inferiority of his own group. The climax of the story is involves the hero making some sort of revelatory speech and members of the oppressed group looking on in gratitude for his revalation of thier own moral superiority and members of the hero's group sputtering in anger and storming away in a huff as only those who know deep down inside that they are truly the guilty ones can do.
These movies serve a political purpose just as plain as the movies made during WWII did--they validate the moral order that reigns among the people making the movies. The key is that the hero reacts to the situation not as a man of that time would but as a person of our time would. And the oppressed and oppressors have little relation to the historical groups they are to represent but are fully determined by the supposed virtues and faults of the contemporary political collectives they are meant to represent. Even when the story draws from a history situation where there was a hero acting against an oppressive group the hero's motives and conduct are not one of a person of thier time but of a person of our time transplanted into historical reality that is only costume deep. The three examples of the genre I will examine in this chapter are "Dances with Wolves," "The Last Samurai," and "Iron Jawed Angles."

Cosmotopia

Fellow came up to me. He was from Sri Lanka. He mentioned how funny it was the Americans started doing something about disaster relief only after the argument was made that failure to do so would be used by Al Qaeda to increase support among the Muslim victims of the disaster. Aside from being patently false the interesting thing is that he did not expect me to be offended. Nor did he have any reason to think I would be. After all, I am an academic and academics aren’t Americans, they are citizens of the world. His years in the U.S. academic world had lead him to expect that a professor would naturally see himself as a citizen of the world, not of America. He was not being provocative in insulting my country since, as a fellow academic, he implicitly assumed that my country was the “cosmopolitos” or “cosmotopia” that imagined community of the enlightened that will one day rule the world as soon as the U.S. can be persuaded to cede sovereignty to the UN and fund enough international bureaucrats.