Month: June 2007

Just Rounding Them Up

Der Spiegel seems to be the go-to place for accounts of the Bush administration’s record of just arresting large numbers of random people, sending them off to be "interrogated" or subjected to the now-familiar Verschaerfte Vernehmung tactics (or much worse in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere). Money quote:

On Jan. 27, 2007, Saafia was flown to Mogadishu in Somalia on an African Express Airlines flight (flight number AXK527), along with 84 other "terror suspects," including several children.

US citizens were present at each of these stops, Saafia’s husband Mounir Awad told SPIEGEL. "When we landed, we were immediately photographed by Americans in civilian clothing," he says, adding that he and the others were repeatedly insulted as "Qaeda bastards" …

Well, they looked nasty, especially those "Qaeda bastard" children. And every enemy we have is a subset of al Qaeda, aren’t they? Ask Rudy. Meanwhile, back on planet earth:

Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson estimates that the US administration has arrested between 30,000 and 50,000 suspects during the past year. Eighty-five percent of them were innocent, according to Wilkerson. "We really have created a mess here. A terrible mess," Wilkerson says. "This has been incredibly damaging."

Rorty, Rawls, Oakeshott, Neuhaus

The Damon Linker-Matt Yglesias conversation about the scope of "political liberalism" is worth a few moments. Start with Matt’s latest post on the subject and read on back. I think Matt is right, by the way, although it’s been a while since I read either Rawls or Rorty. Both agree on this fundamental piece of non-fundamentalism, as expressed by Matt:

The goal is to hive off an autonomous political domain in which we bracket our views on broader, deeper questions and engage one another on the basis of a much-shallower but more widely held set of views about the conception of a citizen.

When I was studying political theory at Harvard, this was the big debate. For my part, I do not see why one cannot strive both to maintain the possibility of Truth or Meaning (or even one’s own private mastery of such), while treating political interaction in a liberal democracy as a necessarily shallower enterprise. But then, I think seeing politics as a lesser form of human activity is more conducive to traditional conservatives than to left-liberals. Oakeshott tackled all of this, more elegantly and more brilliantly, long before Rawls or Rorty (as Rorty belatedly saw). But Oakeshott was a "conservative" (boo! hiss!) and so ignored by most academics until the last few years.

Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please.

If Neuhaus et al were merely content, say, to voice their view that gay people are "intrisincally disordered" or that all abortions are morally evil, no one would be that exercized. But Neuhaus actually wanted to amend the constitution to make gay inferiority part of the meaning of America in its foundational document. And the theocons want to use the full power of the state to enforce their views on abortion – regardless of anyone else’s views. Ross’ apparent unawareness of the obvious distinction between Neuhaus’s position and pluralist, political liberalism/conservatism is – how to out this nicely? – unconvincing.

It is, moreover, remarkable to me that in America, it has been conservatism that has recently been captive to dogma, fundamentalism, moral absolutism, and the belief that politics can and must change the world. Just as Rawls was finally conceding the deepest conservative point about the limits of politics and human thought, the "conservatives" were abandoning it for utopianism, theological politics, and "ending tyranny on earth." Yes, that is the core argument of my book. It’s an argument that others seem more receptive to than they were last fall. Pity Ross appears to be stuck with the meddling certainty of the theocons.

Quote for the Day

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer," – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

It’s A Civil War

Glenn Reynolds is surely right that what is going on in the Palestinian territories is a civil war. What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t therefore support invading the place and occupying it indefinitely to curb the Islamist threat. I mean: al Qaeda and Islamists are gaining ground in Gaza and the West Bank. What are we waiting for?

The Unseriousness of the “Pro-War” Right

Is this truly the consensus on the Bush-Cheney right? Money quote:

Most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport.

How to unpack this? First off, it is not clear that we are in fact fighting all the head-loppers and head-drillers in Iraq. Many of the head-drillers are allies of the government we are supporting. Both the head-loppers and head-drillers have been empowered, not stymied, by our clueless occupation – and they have multiplied in numbers. And there are plenty of extremely unpleasant characters among the Sunni tribes we are now supporting to defeat a different strand of head-loppers in Anbar. Then one has to ask: is Hanson actually saying that the Shiite death squads and Qaeda wannabes in the Caribbean are part of the same movement? In the past, successful wars were often conducted under the aegis of "divide and conquer." The Bush policy, guided by the genius of strategists like Hanson, seems to be "unite a splintering enemy and lose to them."

Then there’s this rubbish: "Do even worse" than what’s happening in Iraq at Fort Dix and JFK? Is Hanson serious? Or has defending the indefensible finally forced him off the deep end?

If the risible, unformed, half-baked plots to "storm" a military base (with a handful of religious nutcases) or dream about blowing up JFK (while having the capacity to do nothing of the kind) are "even worse" than the genocidal Shiite death squads and Sunni cells of Iraq, then we really are in a pickle. I can’t belief VDH believes this, unless there is some massive amount of evidence about Fort Dix and JFK that he is privy to and the rest of us aren’t. So what’s the point here? To conflate both sides in the Iraq civil war as being indistinguishable from Caribbean losers and 9/11? To reduce every conflict in a welter of conflicting fundamentalist claims to a single meme, "Islamist terrorism" and to urge that it be "fought" with the same finesse that we have brought to Iraq? Or to scare us into not thinking at all? Hewitt sums up the moronic convergence here:

A great deal of Campaign 2008 will be fought over this ground, with the GOP’s nominee arguing that Afghanistan and Iraq are connected to Iranian nukes, Gaza and Fort Dix and terrorism in London, Madrid, Beslan and across the globe, and Democrats arguing that the world’s problems come from a 140,000 Americans waging a campaign against Islamists in Iraq.

Those are the choices? Is it not possible to make, you know, empirical distinctions between various threats? To see that Islamism does indeed fuel Sunni and Shia violence, but that these forces are also fundamentally at war with one another? To see a distinction between Ahmadinejad’s Shiite apocalyptics and Bin Laden’s Wahhabist caliphate – a distinction any halfway competent war strategy would exploit, not deny?

When you see how evidence-resistant a propagandist like Hewitt can be, you begin to realize how important it is to keep these people away from power. They are much less interested in defeating al Qaeda than they are in using al Qaeda to defeat Democrats. This is what Hewitt really cares about: the GOP. Look what damage his ilk have done to the West’s security since 9/11 because of their pathological partisanship. Look at how their refusal or inability to see any nuance, complexity or variety in the many threats we face makes our defeat more likely. We just cannot afford to tolerate these Republican propagandists any longer. There is a war on. And they simply aren’t serious about fighting it.

Clinton, Obama, Negatives

Hers are a staggering 45 percent! Obama’s only 21. Only Mr Reason is as loathed as Hillary – but not as much. As Isaac Chotiner observes:

Even if everyone who learns about Obama from this point forward grows to hate him (and we are talking about 30 percent of the country), his ratings will still be no worse than hers.

As another critic notes:

Hillary’s history of prevarication, rigidity and quasi-divine sense of election is profoundly unsettling.

An understatement. If the Dems want to throw this auspicious moment away, they know what to do.