Month: July 2006

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake," – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798.

A reader writes:

Where is the line between passion and sanctimony? Your stance of moral superiority over those who, believing ourselves to be faced with an unprecedented threat reluctantly endorse what in normal times we would abjure, is too easy. I do not fit into your categories of either ‘Christianist’ or principle-less conservative. Rather, I am someone who worries if the liberal societies I treasure can remain liberal in the face of this particular enemy. I don’t believe the enemy can ‘win’ but I do think they can have more devastating successes and that the reaction to them will deform our society beyond recognition making what you object to today seem like a civil libertarian’s paradise.

And even if they did not, we wonder what point is keeping our souls uncorrupted if we lose our cities? So my point is, while you are preening and damning you need to make more explicit the down side to your lofty position, fairly acknowledge the hard case – not the easy ones – against it and deal forthrightly with that for once. We may be paranoid or proto-fascist or blinded by religious fervor but you may be being naive and self-righteous – excusable in peacetime but unforgivable if even one American dies as a consequence. Time will tell.

A couple of responses. I believe in an aggressive fight against our enemy. I would have sent twice the number of troops to Iraq. I’d add a war-tax to gasoline. I would have expended whatever resources needed to find and kill Osama bin Laden. I’m in favor of an aggressive, dynamic, enterprising war against these barbarians. But I believe that part of that long war is continuing to insist on humane treatment of prisoners of war. And I believe that the laws of warfare need to be written and, if necessary, adjusted, to fight this new war. So I’d be happy to see the 1978 FISA law amended to make it easier to wiretap genuine security threats. I have no problem with the Swift program. I’d be happy to see enemy combatants detained indefinitely as prisoners of war, if so proved under a fair process.

Where I dissent is in the claim to grant the president extra-constitutional monarchical power to make this stuff up as he goes along, and to shred the Anglo-American principles of justice and war-making at the same time. I also believe that the United States must never torture any prisoner of war or enemy combatant, and must always treat them humanely. Real intelligence is gained by steady and long-term infiltration of terror networks, not crude torture of random individuals in dark cells. So let us fight by using our strengths – an executive whose errors are subject to checks from both judiciary and legislature and a free, robust press. That’s a democracy’s advantage in wartime over dictatorships – an openness to internal criticism and thereby correction. The results of one man deciding everything are already evident in the shambles of the Iraq invasion. We are better than that – and it befuddles me to see how little faith some "conservatives" now have in the procedures of constitutional democracy.

I have the Kyocera router he touts today, lauded and reviewed here. I second the good reviews. you carry your own WiFi everywhere, and if you have a Mac, it’s particularly useful, since EvDo cards don’t work on Macs. In some distant places – and Ptown is stuck on the end of a long peninsula – the service is not much better than dial-up, I’m afraid. But most other places, it’s mobile broadband. Works on trains too.

Bush’s ratings remain mired in disappointment. But the Congress should be more worried:

Americans have grown more critical of the job Congress is doing, compared with three months ago. Only 31% approved, down sharply from 39% in March. Asked whether they would be more likely to vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate in the district where they live if the election were held today, 47% said Democrat and 35% said Republican, a two-point improvement for Democrats.

Have they gerrymandered the system so much they can stay in power regardless? That seems to me the real question of this year: whether the corruption has gone too far to be corrected.

This piece of hysterical support for an unlimited executive power in a permanent war, and contempt for the critical role of the judiciary in a constitutional republic reveals the depth of the rot in the American conservative mind and soul. From conservatism being a political tradition rooted in freedom from government control, and in the checks and balances of a constitutional order, conservatism has now morphed in America into a defense of unfettered executive power, in which all judicial checks are regarded as a form of tyranny. Yes: an executive empowered to be judge, jury, torturer and executioner is no problem. A Court attempting to uphold the constitution, in contrast, is a sign of outrageous tyranny. We truly have passed through the Looking Glass.

My reflections on the Hamdan decision in the Sunday Times of London are here. Money quote:

America is not in essence a geographical entity. When it was founded, it occupied a fraction of the land it now does. Nor is it defined by an ethnic group or a royal line. Its core is essentially a piece of paper, a written constitution, a formal set of procedures designed, before everything else, to protect individual liberty. At the heart of that liberty is the right to a fair trial and the insistence that nobody — especially not the president — can take that away.

Happy Independence Day. It came early this year.

I’m no sports fan, but I’m an Englishman by birth and upbringing, and so, when the World Cup comes around, I was brought up and ingrained with a sense of dread. This is England’s game; and England’s domestic league is arguably the best in the world. My family was a rugby household, and my dad never placed soccer on the same moral plane as the bloody butchery of muddy doggedness that is his sporting lodestar. But the World Cup is as much about national identity as it is about sport, and my dad knew whose country he supported. And so, every four years, the English people go through a period – longer or shorter – of emotional trauma and agony. I was two when England last won the World Cup. I remember one day in my youth when, unable to cope with the tension of another grueling match, I went for a walk in my home town. The streets were deserted. No cars; no people. The silence was deathly. And as I turned a corner in the street, I heard from inside all the houses within range, a collective, anguished groan go up simultaneously – as, once again, England choked.

I couldn’t watch yesterday either. At least it was against Portugal, a wonderful little country, with old friendship with England. Losing to France and Germany is existentially far worse. But all the classic elements were there: the endless tension, the injury of the good player, the explosion of the hothead, the injustice of being clearly the better team but without the ability to score, the over-time, the penalty kicks, and then the inevitable emotional collapse; and the consumption of enormous amounts of warm beer to dull the pain. The hangovers in England today are probably epic even by that island’s exacting standards.

The Observer captures a bit of it:

The supporters, so resolute and so fervent, deserved something special from England – and what they got, once Rooney was gone, was the kind of robust, dogged performance in which they take a kind of ironic pride: determination in adversity. It is not for nothing that the fans’ chosen anthem is Elmer Bernstein’s theme tune from the prisoner-of-war movie The Great Escape – a film that celebrates the nobility of courageous, if ultimately futile, resistance.

Played in high humidity beneath the closed roof of the magnificent Stadium AufSchalke, one of the most technologically sophisticated arenas in world sport, the game was, after a slow start, a splendid spectacle, fraught with tension and a slow-burning dread that the game would ultimately be decided on penalties. What else?

What England and their supporters feared most as the drama of the occasion intensified was the horror of repetition: the knowledge that, when it mattered most, England had failed before and perhaps were destined to fail again. ‘Ever tried,’ wrote Samuel Beckett. ‘Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

This was the story of Dunkirk: fail better. But one day, one day, England will win. I know they will. Just not this time. Never this time.

(Photo: Muran Sezer/AP).

Washington, D.C., 7.30 pm.

A reader comments on my post this morning:

The real question, it seems to me, is whether the difficulties and possibilities are legal, political, or some mixture of the two.
My call would be: prosecuting Rumsfeld, Bush, and the others responsible for war crimes is legally possible (i.e. there is enough to make a case), but politically difficult.
There is no legal difficulty about it: the law is quite clear that responsibility flows uphill.  There is already a great deal of evidence available to show the responsibility of those in charge, and only more will come out.  So far as the law goes, it is no more conceptually difficult than the prosecution of Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.
Politically, of course, it could be very painful and divisive – it will depend on the extent to which people of good will can put aside party for the good of the country and its deepest ideals.
So:  is it "difficult to imagine circumstances in which charges might actually be prosecuted"?  Given the degree of partisan entrenchment in the country right now, yes, it is politically difficult.  Is it legally difficult to imagine?  No, no more than for any case in which there is enough prima facie evidence to bring an indictment.

If not the president, then the defense secretary. At some point, someone will have to be held accountable for what they have done. Here’s an op-ed on the same subject which I missed yesterday.