Month: February 2010

Daniel Luban argues that the Wieseltier affair shows "how deeply discussion of the Israel lobby has shifted."

The TNR liberals now insist that of course the Israel lobby is extremely powerful, and of course it exerts an influence on U.S. foreign policy that is frequently (or even generally) pernicious. To conceal the fact that they are conceding the truth of the basic Israel lobby thesis, they tend to contrast their views with some caricatured position that they attribute to Mearsheimer and Walt (the Israel lobby is the only interest group with any influence in Washington, The Jews call all the shots in U.S. foreign policy, or something to that effect).

Of course, only a few years ago many of the same parties alleged that it was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory even to claim that there is such a thing as an “Israel lobby” and that it exerts a powerful (although not all-powerful) influence on U.S. foreign policy. However, they seem to expect the public to forget all this.

In short, the Wieseltier-Sullivan affair demonstrates that things are changing in Washington. And, I might add, not a moment too soon.

I think Luban is onto something. This is not about me as such. It is about a deep shift in thinking about the US-Israel alliance, especially after Gaza and the Netanyahu government's refusal to cooperate with Obama in even minor ways that in no way affect its security. It is about the rapidly changing benefits and costs for both sides of such an alliance that is almost a fusion, and the furious but necessary debate about what the future should bring.

I believe, after the last year, that it is in the interests of the United States to use serious leverage to get Israel to get serious about ending settlement construction permanently and beginning the dismantling and removal of these impediments to any serious progress in the region.

This debate is also about who can and will police discourse on this subject in Washington, which is why AIPAC and even the Israeli ambassador are so intent on marginalizing J-Street, and why the old media guard, whose genuine and often admirable concern for Israel sometimes blinds them as to why so many younger thinkers and writers simply do not hold the same reflexive paranoid positions that they have come to regard as eternal truths, and do not see Israel's long-term interests served by the same old neocon intransigence on everything. The blogosphere has made this wider, more honest discourse possible – even as it has meant the usual charges of anti-Semitism being thrown about with such cheap abandon.

One thing I can assure Dish readers is that I will not be intimidated from having this discussion, of airing as many sides as I can, as fairly as I can, and while I will do my utmost not to knowingly offend anyone of any party, I will also refuse to quiver in fear of cheap and vulgar uses of the anti-Semite card.

Jonathan Bernstein’s suggestion:

The way out — the only way out that I can see — is to offer a full pardon to everyone involved, followed by a commission.  The president should make a statement that is as generous as possible to the motives of the previous administration, while as harsh as possible to the specific acts at issue.  I don’t think this is a difficult stretch at all.  In fact, I think it would be pretty popular; I suspect, whatever the polling shows, that Americans aren’t all that thrilled with the idea of “walling” people or devising ways to exploit their phobias, but they also don’t really want to confront the possibility that their government did these things for sadistic or political reasons.  Obama can claim (whatever the truth actually might be) that he believes that every act was motivated by a sincere and commendable desire to protect the American people, and that whatever mistakes were made were just understandable overreaction in the heat of battle.

Walling and phobias are the least of it: hypothermia, sleep deprivation up to 960 hours, waterboarding, brutal stress positions, sensory deprivation and isolation for years, mock executions, and confinement in upright coffins were all deployed and they are all forms of torture. The fundamental judge of torture, the International Red Cross, has called it torture; every other country in the world acknowledges that it was torture, the current president acknowledges that it was torture, and the record shows unequivocally that it was authorized and supervised directly from the president’s and vice-president’s office. My own hope was that president Bush would take the lead on this. But, alas, he hasn’t. I see the great political benefits of this approach – but the belligerence of the far right that refuses to acknowledge the plain facts in front of us would still lead to deep polarization.

But in some ways, given the experience of previous instances in countries where new governments have to confront the war crimes of their predecessors while continuing to govern, this is a very promising idea. It’s particularly promising because it prevents the Obama administration from becoming complicit, as we have seen already in the Binyam Mohamed case.

The perverse truth is that, in some ways, the Obama administration is in greater violation of Geneva than even the Bush-Cheney administration.

The Bush-Cheney administration denied – absurdly – that it ever conducted torture. President Obama has clearly stated on many occasions that it was torture. Geneva requires every government to investigate thoroughly and promptly all such acts of torture and bring the guilty to justice. Cheney could claim there was nothing to investigate – so he was in the clear. Obama, having conceded torture, has no such option.

The current refusal of the president to investigate the torture so prevalent in the previous administration may make sense from the narrow political perspective of Rahm Emanuel. It is not worthy of the seriousness and integrity of president Obama and it is not worthy of the United States of America. To my mind, exposing and ridding this cancer is more important than holding every single person criminally responsible. A deal in which a pardon would be followed by a rigorous truth commission, empowered to expose every single facet of what went on, would not be justice. But it would be some level of accountability.

(Images: a Khmer Rouge waterboarding technique from Cambodia’s Museum of Torture, showing exactly the CIA technique of pouring water over a cloth onto someone’s face to induce near-suffocation repeatedly. A stress posiition – one of the milder ones – at Abu Ghraib prison, along the lines of explicitly authorized stress positions approved by president Bush. An almost identical stress position used by the Peruvian Inquisition as presented in the Lima’s Museum of torture. And a stress position at Abu Ghraib again designed to create intense pain – without any visible marks – by twisting a person’s arms behind his back for long periods of time until he can take it no longer. The almost exact techniques approved by Cheney can be seen here in a Gestapo document here.)

Eugene Volokh doesn't understand the rationale of DADT with respect to lesbians:

[E]ven if we set aside antidiscrimination arguments and focus solely on military effectiveness (which may or may not be the right approach, but let’s use it here), it seems lesbians would tend to make better soldiers than straight women:

1. They are less likely to get pregnant.
2. They seem less likely to get sexually transmitted diseases.
3. If the stereotypes about lesbians tending to act in more masculine ways are generally accurate — hard to tell, for obvious measurement reasons, but that seems to be the conventional wisdom — then that cuts further in favor of lesbians as opposed to straight women. Many women may well make great soldiers, but if we’re speaking about generalities, and the military policy is generally defended using generalizations, I’m happy to at least tentatively assume (as I suspect would the military) that stereotypically masculine traits and attitudes tend to be more useful for soldiering than stereotypically feminine ones.

The record suggests that lesbians have been discharged at higher rates than gay men.

"If you want Obama for a second term, just make sure that Sarah Palin is the Republican nominee … She is not electable as president," – far right radio host Michael Savage.

DiA criticizes me for often "pigeonholing" political actors, but concedes:

[W]e all do this to some extent. Mr Wieseltier himself writes of "jihadists" with the same confident prejudicial strokes Mr Sullivan uses to talk about "the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing" (or, in other contexts, "Christianists"). In the same vein, he accuses Mr Sullivan of belonging to "the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt". […] Okay, to appropriate Mr Wieseltier's phrase: I was not aware that people (including myself) who broadly agree with Messrs Walt and Mearsheimer comprise a "party" or a "clique". But I know what Mr Wieseltier means, and if he wants to use a shorthand to refer to people who share these opinions, it's fine with me.

Sargent predicts:

Should [Palin] run, the terms of her interaction with the public and the media would shift dramatically — and it’s likely she’d only be seen as less qualified. Why do we assume she’d successfully manage the transition from celebrity/quasi-candidate to the real thing? Seems like the opposite is far more likely: She’d implode.

A slow morph into Palin.

Eli Lake wants to sunset extraordinary executive powers:

(Hat tip: Friedersdorf)

Matt Steinglass revisits one of the odder political realities:

The temptation to criticise one's political allies exists because criticism can help individuals derive personal advantage, either within the group or by forming temporary alliances outside the group. Refraining from criticising your allies is a strategy of deferring or sacrificing individual benefits for the good of the group. But Republicans are supposed to be individualists! Democrats are supposed to believe in collective action for the good of the group. And yet Democrats are perfectly awful at collective action. Democrats are constantly undercutting their presidents; liberals have been lukewarm and quick to turn on Carter, Clinton and Obama, and no Republican president has ever faced the kind of fury from his base that the left directed at LBJ.