Month: April 2009

George Packer reviews Wendell Steavenson's new book on Iraq. It focuses on former Saddam loyalists not taking responsibility for the crimes committed on their watch:

I interviewed many former Baathists and military officers in Iraq, and not a single one of them ever acknowledged any personal moral responsibility. Denunciations of Saddam came easily, but so did the kind of rationalisations that Steavenson heard again and again: they did what they did because they had to, out of fear, to protect their family, to eat and survive. When I asked about the gassing of Kurdish villagers, it was common to hear flat denials that it had ever happened.

This mental atmosphere of evasion and excuse was made worse by the fact that these same former officials and officers were now living under American power, which gave them an easy way to change the subject from committing old crimes to having new ones committed against them. They had been victims under Saddam, and now they were victims under the Americans: this was the extent of moral consciousness among most of the former ruling class in post-Saddam Iraq. The occupation and insurgency forestalled any chance for Iraqis to begin to reckon with their individual and collective roles as accomplices, as well as victims, during Saddam’s reign of terror. This is why the writer Kanan Makiya’s project for a memorial museum and archive in the centre of Baghdad, where the crossed swords of Saddam’s Victory Monument stand, had little chance of being established so soon after the fall of the regime, and indeed seemed to infuriate most Iraqis who knew about it.

Rob Horning is nearly giddy:

I would have thought that the end of voice mail would be celebrated by everyone, and its disappearance would go altogether unlamented. The article sets up a time frame that partially explains where it’s coming from—in the 1980s voice mail was an innovation that must have seemed liberating; it ended the tyranny of presence. It made makeshift solutions to communications overload, like call waiting (an invention that never should have been), obsolete. But email should have ended the tyranny of the spoken word several years ago—and I can’t wait until all incidental mobile-phone communication is conducted through texts. No more frivolous speech acts!

I check my voice mail once a week. Just so you know.

The Dish is helping to build a 21st century economy:

[The University of Melbourne] found that Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) improves productivity by giving internet-centric workers a chance to refocus their minds between tasks. The increase is startling; workers who spend as much as 20 percent of their office time leisure browsing actually get more work done than workers who don’t.

Mike Innes critiques Andrew Exum’s article on safe havens:

…physical space can be organized in many different ways, and different kinds of organizations have differing requirements. Guerrilla field armies need controllable territory to go about their business, but transnational networks made of up of linked individuals don’t. They need physical space, to be sure; that’s not the same thing as territory, in its political sense. So when Ex argues that the new White House policy “betrays an obsession with physical space at the expense of virtual space,” it’s a fair point, but it misses a more important one: destroy a guerrilla sanctuary, and you may soon have to contend with the networked kind – small, scattered, more of them, harder to find.

(Image by Promethean Penguin)

Jack Shafer and Wendy Barnaby don't buy it:

None of my skepticism should imply that I think everybody everywhere has all the clean, cheap water they need. Water, like all resources, is scarce, and I accept that scarcity can cause conflict. But before anyone starts frightening themselves about impending water wars, they might want to consider Barnaby's observation that in the last five decades there have been no "formal declarations of war over water."

Andy Kroll worries about the cost of education:

This crisis has been a long time coming, but bad times have brought it into clearer focus. In the past several decades, the cost of higher education has climbed at an astounding pace — faster than the Consumer Price Index, faster even than the cost of medical care. Over the past 30 years, the average annual cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100 percent, from $7,857 in 1977-78 to $15,665 in 2007-08 (in constant 2006-07 dollars). Median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18 percent over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of income.

Not always as easy as it sounds:

Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

Hitch can hope:

In many ways, this battle can be seen as the last stand of the Protestant evangelicals with whom I was mingling and debating. It's been a rather dismal time for them lately. In the last election they barely had a candidate after Mike Huckabee dropped out and, some would say, not much of one before that. Many Republicans now see them as more of a liability than an asset. As a proportion of the population they are shrinking, and in ethical terms they find themselves more and more in the wilderness of what some of them morosely called, in conversation with me, a "post-Christian society." Perhaps more than any one thing, the resounding courtroom defeat that they suffered in December 2005 in the conservative district of Dover, Pa., where the "intelligent design" plaintiffs were all but accused of fraud by a Republican judge, has placed them on the defensive.

Bainbridge and Arend are concerned about the reach of international prosecutions for torture and the liability of lawyers for the actions of their clients. If I believed that John Yoo came to a good faith reading of the law in response to a request to torture from his presidential client, I can see the latter point. But that's precisely the issue at hand here. That's why the internal Justice Department report on the professionalism of those memos is so critical – and why there is a scorched earth campaign to prevent DOJ from releasing a report judging them the work of incompetents or, worse, hacks. From where I've been sitting, Yoo acted not as a lawyer following the law, but as an apparatchik making a mockery of the law in order to accomplish clearly criminal ends. Lawyers, perhaps more than others, need to be held to account for breaking the law – especially the laws on such a fundamental issue as torture. 

Scott Horton also spells out why Spain – and other countries that take laws and treaties against torture seriously – doesn't have that much of a choice anyway:

Bainbridge concludes with the view that “The Bush policy on terror was a bad policy. But allowing Garzón to go forward is also a bad policy.” This perspective is very troubling to me.

The major fallback defensive position now adopted by the torture camp (which does not include either Bainbridge or Arend) is that this is all an honest difference about policy and that we really shouldn’t be criminalizing such differences. But in fact torture is criminal conduct, and has been understood as such for a long time. As Jeremy Waldron demonstrated in a recent article, only genocide and slavery share a similar basis of universal acceptance as criminal conduct, and of the three, the arguments for torture are the strongest.

The discussion is whether the prohibition against torture will be upheld or simply become a dead letter. If it can be overcome whenever a government can get its handpicked lawyers to issue opinions saying torture is okay, then the prohibition will be worthless, because–unfortunately for my profession–such lawyers have always been available for the asking. On the other hand, it may be that this approach can only be effectively thwarted if lawyers know they face criminal law accountability for giving a green light to torture.

Tim Montgomerie was upset by my post. He writes:

…don’t exaggerate the importance of David Cameron’s emphasis on green issues and his respect for same-sex partnerships. I happen to support the “decontamination” of the Conservative brand but, because it was first pursued at the expense of traditional Tory values rather than alongside them, it took the party perilously close to defeat in 2007. If Gordon Brown had called a General Election during his honeymoon period, he would have probably won. The Tories only avoided defeat by taking a decidedly right turn. The October 2007 promise to abolish inheritance tax for nearly all Britons was decisive in rescuing David Cameron’s leadership.

Tim doesn’t contradict anything I’ve been saying. A tougher line on taxing and spending than the left is vital. But accepting the reality of climate change and gay couples is still essential and it still hasn’t happened in the GOP. Those are particularly important threshhold debates for the next generation. But dogma – economic and religious – keeps getting in the way.