Month: August 2006

"There were other (U.S.) government agencies who would come into the prison and handle prisoners. I can’t say which agencies, but you can probably guess. One night, this Black Hawk landed at about 4 a.m., and a couple guys came in with a prisoner and took him to tier 1, put sheets up so that nobody could see, and spent the rest of the night in there. They told us to stay away, so we did.  Then a couple hours later, they came back out. They were like, "The prisoner is dead." They asked for ice to pack him, and then they said, "You guys clean this up. We weren’t here. Have a good day.’ Got back on the bird and took off, left the dead body right there. Those guys can come in and kill a guy, and there’s nothing you can do. There’s no record of them. They were never there. They don’t exist," – Joe Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, in this month’s GQ.

Yep: a few rogue grunts on the night shift. Yeah, that’s what it was. And is.

It speaks well of NRO that the resistance to the religious make-over of conservatism is finally being aired more thoroughly. Here’s Heather Mac Donald yesterday:

It is just not the case that only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives.

Meanwhile, another reality-based, liberty-loving conservative, Andrew Stuttaford, states what is now undeniable, it seems to me:

Conservatism is being changed (to use a more neutral word) by the greater role that an explicitly religious activism is playing within it. Specifically, it’s easy to discern a strain of conservatism emerging (and within the GOP and the administration it has emerged a long way) that more resembles European Christian Democracy (or, in its more robust forms, Gaullism) than the small government, skeptical, ‘leave me alone’ conservatism that brought so many into the fold and which (for what it’s worth) I, for one, prefer.

It may be that turning conservatism into a religiously-centered Southern-based, big-government movement makes electoral sense. I doubt it. But my objection to it is not that it hinders Republican dominance, but that I disagree with it. I believe in a separation of church and state, balanced budgets, low taxes, law that is as neutral as possible between competing moral and religious claims, and a "leave-me-alone" presumption when it comes to government power. And I’m sick of being told that excludes me from being conservative any more. I venture to suggest I’m not the only one. Vive la resistance.

That’s George F. Will’s conclusion today:

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry’s belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates’ debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Military force is still essential, although it can sometimes be more powerful withheld as a deterrent than unleashed in an asymmetrical war. Few also doubt that democratic reform would help the Middle East in the long-term. In the short-term, however, it might be terribly dangerous, as the increasingly popular Hamas and Hezbollah regimes in the West Bank and Lebanon are proving. But what has struck me in the last year or so, as someone who has always supported democratization as one tool to defang Islamism, is whence many of these religious fanatics are coming. Many of the most lethal Islamist agents of terror have been coming from democratic societies, like Britain. Many are middle-class or even aristocrats, like bin Laden. If the real root causes are in the fundamentalist psyche, then police-work and internal religious reformation are indeed our most effective weapons. I regret my decision to ditch Bush in ’04, despite my extreme distaste for John Kerry, with less and less regret.

(Photo: Charlie Niebergall/AP.)

Andy McCarthy is now calling John Podhoretz a leftist. Excuse my unseemly enjoyment.

The miraculous YouTube is down for repairs. The embedded links will return at some point.

I blog from a parallel present in an alternative universe in this week’s New York magazine. Here’s how it begins:

September 1, 2006, 7:32 a.m.

After a somber beginning, the president finally found his voice last night. It’s been hard for him to connect viscerally to the public, and the formality of a congressional address doesn’t exactly help. He remains awkward, stiff, emotionally detached. That strange interlude in the 2004 campaign, when he finally seemed human enough to be elected, has evaporated again—just when he needs it most. His approval ratings still haven’t gotten past the mid-fifties—and it doesn’t help, of course, that he lost the popular vote the one time it counted. Karmic payback, I suppose.

But the facts are on his side. As he amassed the evidence for WMD materials and hundreds (possibly thousands) of trained terrorists in Afghanistan’s camps, as he made the case for what he calls “aggressive defense” against the Taliban, as he linked this threat to the newly belligerent regime in Tehran, he gained a certain logical and emotional traction. At least I hope he did. This is what he ran on, and although it’s taken him almost two agonizing years to get to this moment, he still gets credit in my book. Yes, it took aerial photographs of alleged chemical factories in Kandahar to get him to closure. But he got there—which is more than Bush ever did in four years.

Yep, without 9/11, Gore was elected in 2004. And he ran to Bush’s right on Islamo-fascism. Read on …

So we now have evidence that he is also happy to use ethnic putdowns for people supporting his opponents. Money quote:

"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great," Allen said, as his supporters began to laugh. After saying that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls. Let’s give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

It’s almost classic populist bigotry: create an enemy out there – fags, Indians, Jews, Hollywood, immigrants, whoever – and use them to build support for you as representing the "real world of Virginia." In one word: Rove. Yes, the word was deliberate and Allen knows what it means. Some background on his racist college prank here and his fondness for the Confederate flag here.

Marty Lederman has an important take on the latest draft war crime bills the White House has been circulating on the Hill. Marty – who has emerged as the most perceptive and subtle legal analyst on the whole torture issue – thinks the whole Bush-critic emphasis on exculpating civilian officials from war crimes charges is off-base. (I’d be included in his criticism.) His interpretation of the draft legislation is that it is designed to ensure that the CIA retain the right to cruel treatment of detainees, including potentially "water-boarding." Money quote:

I happen to think it would be a mistake to exclude humiliating and degrading treatment from the WCA. But many will disagree with me. What’s important is to realize that this dispute about how "degrading" treatment should be handled is not why the Administration is proposing an amendment to the WCA. Their public focus on subsection (1)(c) of CA3 – the provision dealing with humiliating and degarding treatment – is a feint to throw everyone off the scent. The real issue is the CIA. And that agency is not so interested in making use of the stupid and offensive techniques that were used on Al-Qahtani at GTMO – religious degradation, underwear on the head, etc.

What they are interested in are the "enhanced" techniques that they’ve been authorized to use — including hypothermia, threats of violence to the detainee’s family, stress positions, "long-time standing," prolonged sleep deprivation, and possibly even waterboarding. With respect to these techniques, the issue isn’t the ban on humiliation or degradation – it’s that they are "cruel treatment," perhaps even "torture," under subsection (1)(a) of Common Article 3.

And so the administration wants to rewrite the War Crimes Act to permit the CIA to continue the KGB-innovated "cold cells", the immersion in freezing water, the threats to wives and children, and the "water-boarding" techniques that the Bush administration has made part of American military practice. Knowing how passionately Cheney and Rumsfeld feel about retaining the right to inflict cruelty on military prisoners, this makes sense to me.

Gilroy, California, 8.30 am.

A reader writes:

You are correct in saying that the Muslim mind set is that of Nietzsche’s ressentiment. However, you err in saying "but with God re-attached." We all know that Nietzsche had his Zarathustra declare that god is dead (god was dead, at least in those days). But the death of god followed the advent of ressentiment by many centuries. In fact, god was historically and conceptually attached to the concept of ressentiment from the beginning. Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment was meant to describe historical circumstances that preceded the "death of god" by around two thousand years. For Nietzsche ressentiment was the emotional sensibility that motivated the rise and triumph of Christianity. In Nietzsche’s moral philosophy "moral values" and rules are simply interpretations of deep emotional and aesthetic sensibilities, not transcendent objects.

Behind this pedantic little point of mine lies a very important insight, however, that can throw a much deeper light into this historical juncture. The concept of ressentiment is not only very apt to describe the Muslim pathos, but also the Christian pathos of which you partake, Mr. Sullivan. It describes the entire geopolitical ethos we are living through. It asks the inquiring mind to search for the root forces, the root emotions, that constitute the fundamental conflicts that define our times.

Even more importantly, Mr. Sullivan, is that if you take the concept of ressentiment seriously, you also have to buy into the theoretical frame in which it is embedded. That theoretical frame is a theory about the nature of values and its roots in perception. That understanding of values, if properly understood and disseminated, would transform civilization as we know it. Nietzsche understood this, and he predicted the "overman" – the man who lives after historical man as we know it. Nietzsche developed a truly non-platonic (thus also non-Kantian) moral philosophy of revolutionary potential – potential for good. In gaining acceptance this perspective would ground values within our very natures, our bodies and sensibilities. Eventually this would diminish the appeal of moralities that rely on subjection to a heteronomous power.

I know you are a Christian, and you might cringe at the thought. No one is talking about coercion. I am talking about the obsolescence of god, not the outlawing of god.