Year: 2005

THE AIR FORCE ACADEMY REPORT

It’s worth reading in full, although it gets repetitive at times. There’s no way to judge independently how fair or tough the report is. Its assessment that the academy is not “overtly discriminatory” against non-Christians has to be weighed against the following findings: the commandant of cadets sent an academy-wide email promoting the national day of prayer, created a “J for Jesus” hand signal, designed to get the “Rocks!” response, and used it on drills that included all cadets; an advertisement in the Academy Spirit, signed and paid for by key USAFA personnal, stated: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world”, and “there is salvation in no one else;” over 4,000 flyers were distributed on campus for “The Passion of the Christ;” the group of cadets that does not attend voluntary evening prayer services is known as the “Heathen Flight”; an atheist cadet who wanted to start a “free-thinkers” group was denied permission because the group was not “faith-based”; the head football coach put up a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room; one cadet complained that “freedom of religion does not exist if you are not a Christian;” calls to Bible study were made over the PA system. Some faculty were more emphatic about a climate of intolerance:

The non-Christian members of this group indicated that Senior Leadership, to a person, made them feel like ‘evil people’ if they were not one of the Christians. A few acknowledged that some of the leadership is ‘extraordinarily aggressive’ in the expression of their faith … The Christian faculty members of this group expressed their belief that Christianity is a ‘proselytizing religion’ and they have a right, even duty, to do so.

On the other side of the ledger, it’s clear that the leadership in the military takes its religiously neutral mission importantly, many of these incidents were dealt with at the time, and things seem to have improved over the past couple of years. The report wouldn’t exist if that were not the case.

THE WIDER ISSUE: Much of the problems come from the new passion of evangelicalism in America. Individual fundamentalists regard their faith as something that trumps everything, and cannot be curtailed for any principle, even military effectiveness. As one cadet said, “The Air Force I signed up for didn’t say I had to leave my religion at the door – it’s part of who I am.” The atmosphere – especially the anti-Semitism – comes as much from the cadets themselves as from any official policy. As one faculty member states, “The kids we are bringing in here no are not a reflection of America. Whether they realize it or not, people of religion are selecting kids of religion to fill USAFA.” One omission from the report are the anti-Semitic slurs from some cadets to others, which the report says have been handled between the individuals involved. One suspects that an offical report which cited cadets calling Jews “Christ-killers” would have made too many unsavory headlines. One can only guess at the rampant homophobia that must exist, especially since it is implicitly endorsed in official military policy. All in all, it seems to me that a decent start has been made to rectify the worst of the intolerance, but that the core issue is that recruits are more and more likely to be influenced by a resurgent Christianism before they arrive, come from backgrounds in which religious dissent or pluralism is simply unknown or suppressed, and don’t fully understand why that atmosphere might be inappropriate in a secular, national institution like the military. The Academy is obviously trying to do something, but they are fighting an uphill battle. We should all worry about a military that seems to be becoming the repository of one brand of Christianity. It’s deeply counter-productive in a war where we have to be extra careful not to look like crusaders and where we need all the good soldiers we can find, regardless of their personal faith or lack of one.

THE JOYS OF ENGLISH CUISINE

Roger Scruton describes, in part, how he tried to make the delicacy known in northern England as “black pudding”

Detaching and cleaning [the pig’s] small intestine was the easy part. Harder by far is turning sickly blood into savoury stuffing. The English way, of sopping it up in rusk or barley, loses both texture and flavour. The right way is to pour in masses of cream, which lightens the texture and prevents the blood from clotting, and then to add warm fat from the flank, onions melted in lard, salt, pepper and quatre epices. Sections of stuffed gut, tied at both ends and gently simmered, emerged from this ordeal looking exactly as Zola might have described them–le ventre de la famille, in which need and greed lay coiled together.

Mmmmm.

EMAIL OF THE DAY III

“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.

THE DSM, AGAIN

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.”

WOLFIE AND LEFTIES

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.