Month: June 2005

“Ask the men and women who stood on top of the (World) Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment,” – Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif, on the moronic abuse of the constitution known as the Flag Burning Amendment. Can these people sink any lower? Hell, yes.

“Keep it up! You’ve got to keep giving it back to the Taranto’s of the world. Morally, the defense of torture is a form of relativism. Usually, defenses of moral relativism give pragmatic reasons. But these guys are so wrong pragmatically! It seems like they lack confidence in Western liberalism. I don’t mean just the ideological attractiveness of being free, at the level Bush is always talking about, but liberalism’s advantages for the long-term generation of state power.

Why is this relevant? OK, it’s well established that torture doesn’t work. All those “ticking bomb scenarios” assume a) that you’ve got the right guy and b) that he’s not just telling you what you want to hear until the bomb goes off. So, knowing that torture doesn’t work, a liberal pragmatist tries to find out what does: language skills, a detailed knowledge of individual weaknesses, the painstaking study of political conditions, strong alliances and cooperation among security forces, the cultivation of international moral prestige, and even the humane treatment of prisoners. The chauvinist rejects this pragmatism as a lack of moral clarity. But which approach defends us better?

These guys remind me of the people in the late forties and early fifties who thought that liberalism would never be able to remain true to itself and still defeat the USSR. Even on the economy, there were plenty of respectable forecasts showing the USSR passing the West in per capita income. They posed as the West’s staunchest defenders, yet at bottom they’d lost confidence in it. They didn’t believe Hayek when he concluded that central planning gives you not only serfdom, but economic decline. But they were wrong, and containment worked. That’s why it’s so important to fight this battle. Hayek in the realm of ideas is a marketplace of free, sincere criticism. The torture-defenders are already showing us the alternative: a descent into ineffective mendacity and, when the failure and lying become obvious, desperate chauvinism.”

All great points, in my book. Torture and abuse haven’t made us safer. Sending too few troops to Iraq hasn’t made us safer. Israeli interrogators do not kick the Koran or pee on it or throw it to the ground. They learn it word for word. They quote it back to their prisoners. They win their confidence and infiltrate their networks. They gain good intelligence by eschewing the goon-like antics of the Gitmo clowns. Fake menstrual blood? If it weren’t so disgusting, it would be risible. But it’s true. Remember that, whatever the Tarantos of this world want to deflect the conversation to. It’s true. It happened. In the end, reality will count.

Remember how Chirac and other Euro-creeps in France used the tale of the “Polish plumber” replacing French drainage experts to argue against free labor markets in Europe. Well, the Polish government has come up with a brilliant response: a new ad campaign. Tom Palmer has the goods.

The real news in the Downing Street memos is not, I think, some non-existent plot to lie to America about the war. The administration genuinely believed Saddam had WMDs, planned to remove him very shortly after 9/11, and made the broader case for democratization long before the war broke out. I agreed with them on all of it, and still do, apart from the obvious fact that we were wrong about the WMDs. But none of this is what is really scandalous about the memos. What’s scandalous is that they reveal that the administration had no real plans for running Iraq after victory. Kevin Drum lays out the evidence here and calls it “criminal neglect.” He’s right. I assumed that this vital war would have enough troops to succeed and that there was a detailed and smart plan for the post-war. I was wrong. In retrospect, I should have been far more aggressive in asking questions about this before the war; and I apologize for negligence in that department. But I trusted in the competence of the Bush administration. When critics say I’ve changed my tune, they’re wrong about my position on the war on terror in principle. I still support it, believe we are still at enormous risk of catastrophe, desperately want to win in Iraq and see the terror-masters in Tehran and Damascus go down. I have simply lost confidence in this administration’s capacity to wage it effectively, honestly and morally. In the second term, I’ve seen nothing that would allow me to feel cheerier. They’re all we’ve got and we have to support them when they do the right thing and hope that they succeed. But hope is not the same thing as confidence. I’m clinging to one even as I’ve lost all grip on the other.

THE BUSH SPENDING SPREE: That’s not hyperbole. It’s reality. Veronique de Rugy, that flaming leftist from AEI, spells out the appalling Bush record here. Money quote:

Today, we know that compassionate conservatism is really just big government and changing the tone means his veto pen is buried under the ground. The last four years, total spending has risen 33 percent – a figure larger than Clinton’s two terms combined. Adjusted for inflation, one would have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a larger increase. Moreover, real discretionary spending increases in FY2002, FY2003, FY2004 and FY2005 are 4 of the 10 biggest annual increases in the last 40 years.

But, as the president constantly tells us, he believes in “spending restraint.” And he doesn’t condone torture. And the Iraq insurgency is in its “last throes.”

They have always had more in common than partisan Democrats would concede. Now they even hang out at late night London clubs together. Clive Davis elaborates.

THE IRA’S FUTURE: Mick Fealty looks into his crystal ball for the future of terrorism in Ireland.

LOTT AND DURBIN: An absurd comparison, as a bilious young fogey explains.

Well, it’s an argument worth reading. On the other side of the ledger, we have the following story about a record number of increasingly effective insurgent attacks:

The insurgents “certainly appear to be surging right now,” Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, who leads the anti-I.E.D. task force, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. “Time will tell about their ability to sustain this.” American officials also worry that the increase in attacks threatens to disrupt Iraq’s fledgling government further and could threaten the Bush administration’s strategy for maintaining public support for the American presence in Iraq by holding down American casualties. “We’re in a very, very dangerous period,” said a senior military official at the Pentagon. “To be a successful insurgent you need to be able to create spectacular attacks, and they’ve certainly done that in the past several weeks.”

I link. You decide. And the obvious corollary to the fact that U.S. forces are getting one hell of a training in fighting urban terror in Iraq is that … so are the Jihadists in fighting back. It would be a pretty awful historical irony if a war designed to cripple Jihadist terrorism ended up making it leaner, meaner and more lethal. Merely another consequence of too few troops. But, hey, better to risk losing a war than have Rumsfeld admit he was wrong, right?

HOW THEY DISTORT: You’ve got to hand it to the partisan right. Here is what James Taranto did to yours truly yesterday. He cites four different quotes from my blog over the past few years and implies inconsistency or what Glenn Reynolds calls “spin.” The four quotes make the following points: there is no moral equivalence between the widespread, totalitarian barbarism perpetrated by Saddam and the abuse, torture and inhumane treatment of detainees by American forces; at the same time, the dehumanization of detainees by U.S. interrogators, as cited by Durbin, is indeed something that could have happened under totalitarian regimes and is pragmatically and morally indefensible; we should treat the war on terror as a war – not as a police operation – and take the war to the enemy as effectively and as relentlessly as we can; but we should also abide by our historic commitment to fair and humane treatment of prisoners captured in such a war. How is any of this spin? How is any of it illogical or internally incoherent? How is any of it “excitable”, unless it is somehow now unacceptable to be shocked to the core by what we have discovered about the treatment of many detainees by U.S. forces? There is a distinction between how we deal with the enemy in the field of battle and how we deal with prisoners of war captured in such a battle. You can be ruthless in the former and humane in the latter. In fact, this was once the defining characteristic of the Western way of war. Now it is a subject of mockery from the defend-anything-smear-anyone right.

“You’re on the mark about the Durbin comments, although I might wish that he’d phrased it more clearly in order to avoid this entire mess. He was not making a direct analogy between our government and the Nazis, but it ‘sounded like he was’. In any case, although he’s right and you’re right, the Republicans will definitely gain ground riding this issue. The reason is that people don’t want to believe that their government (and, by extension, they themselves) are responsible for heinous torture and meaningless deaths. So they will find that they agree with those who dismiss it, minimize it, or justify it. In order to maintain their mental block, they’ll have to attack those who challenge it all the more fiercely. Many Americans are reading the conservative rebuttals of Durbin with a great deal of relief right now.” I’m reminded of Mayor Daley’s amazing quote: “I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military act like that.” Some questions: Is Daley denying the incident Durbin described? And what does he mean by “like that”? We know for a fact that some U.S. interrogators have tortured some detainees to death. We know it because the military has conceded it. Is it now “a disgrace” to report that? Is it “a disgrace” to lament that? And how exactly is torturing innocent people to death via presidential memo utterly different than the behavior in many vile regimes?

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “It occurs to me to note that much of the debate is not (as you know), between Americans and anti-Americans, as the Bush administration and its flacks disingenuously contend. Nor is it primarily between those who believe in American exceptionalism and those who dispute it. Rather, it is between those who espouse it in a narrow, brittle way (“We’re America, we’re special, so don’t ever question our motives or tactics!”) versus those of us who believe it with a deep, abiding faith (“We’re America, we’re special, so we CAN AND MUST win a difficult war even constrained by moral principles that lesser countries flout and ignore!”)”

It’s been a far bigger story abroad – for a long time. Some of this can be attributed to anti-Americanism. But what a gift Gitmo is to the anti-Americans!

With the debate about Durbin, we’ve clearly reached a moment of some clarity. I’m not adding anything to what I’ve already said. But here are a few of your responses:

I’m surprised at your defense of Sen. Durbin. But maybe you’re on to something – I don’t know. We’ll see at the next election. We’ll have some races between those who defend Sen. Durbin’s comments, and those who think his insults were vile and unjustified. And we’ll see who wins. I predict the support-the-troops side will make headway. The left will sink further into oblivion the more they identify with Sen. Durbin and his supporters.

Point taken. I think this is a net political gain for the president and Republicans, if they really want to use it. I’m expected to be shocked by what Karl Rove will use in political warfare? What’s relevant is our deployment of cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, against the law of the land and the most basic principles of Western justice. My email bag has been evenly divided between those appalled by Durbin and others appalled by my defense. Here’s one from a Christian theologian:

I myself am in the midst of a scholarly writing project on torture. As a fellow Christian, I am grieved and appalled at what is going on. It is an ambomination, a desecration of the image of God which no child of God should allow to be undertaken in the name of their self-defense. I am also deeply disturbed at the rhetoric of those who would defend the administration’s ‘dirty hands’ policy. And at the way that, increasingly, criticizing the Administration is equated with anti-Americanism, immoralism and the like. Thank you for refusing to be cowed by these tactics.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed that the Christian right hasn’t been more vocal. But, hey, once faith has been transformed into partisan politics, you end up justifying any number of things. Here’s another point aginst my argument:

“A soldier sat in his barracks, shining his shoes. So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that soldiers had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s barracks, would you have believed it? Of course, you would.” This is the fundamental problem with Durbin’s analogy. The are many things that are “encompassed” in the behavior of those regimes. However, we remember those regimes for the worst of their behavior not the behavior slightly below the median. You know this, dude. Don’t play dumb.

I’m not playing dumb. Shining shoes is not the same thing as treating prisoners as animals. It’s not the same thing as smearing them with fake menstrual blood, or tying someone to the ceiling (as in Afghanistan) and beating their legs to a pulp while they scream for mercy until they die. It’s not the same thing as an emailed memo from a military intelligence officer in 2003, saying: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” According to the Red Cross, an organization that the U.S. still allows in its facilities, one prisoner in Iraq (where the Geneva Conventions are supposed to be applied)

“alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.”

Club Gitmo? Give me a break.

Some fascinating stats on declining infection rates among military personnel. The military stats are often among the best, because they have a very large population and can test those in uniform in ways civilians can avoid. Bottom line from the November 2004 report: “Incidence declined between 1985 and 2003 from 0.46 cases/1,000 person-years [py] to 0.07 cases/1,000 py.” African-Americans are still most at risk. But this is good news in general, which is why you won’t read about it in the New York Times. They prefer to hyper-ventilate over one case, rather than a study based on 1,732,419 servicemembers.