STAYING THE COURSE

Two great columns today from David Brooks and Max Boot. I second both. I don’t think withdrawal of any troops is an option in the current presidential term (I think we need more troops, not fewer); and we need, as Max says, to do a far better job of securing the borders. But we have an absolute moral obligation to stand by those Iraqis who risked their lives to vote last January; and the president needs to do a far better job of being honest with the American people about the huge commitment still required for several years to make this a (by no means assured) success. His policy of Pollyannaish platitudes has failed. And if he doesn’t turn around American public opinion on this, we will lose.

RE-THINKING THE WAR

Ever since a key rationale for the war to depose Saddam – existing stockpiles of WMDs – was debunked, the interesting theoretical question is: if we’d known then what we know now, would we still have launched a war? In general, I agree with Bob Kagan. We too often forget the consequences of the alternative: hideously cruel and corrupt sanctions, the maintenance of Saddam’s barbarism, the entrenchment of despotism in the Arab world, the encouragement of Jihadists who could interpret inaction as weakness, and the fact that sanctions would eventually have collapsed and that Saddam could have gotten his WMDs in the near future anyway. It would be dishonest to say I’m not chastened by the inept post-war, Abu Ghraib, the abandonment of the ban on “cruel and inhumane treatment” of prisoners, the resilience of the insurgency, the ineffectiveness of reconstruction and the loss of 12,000 Iraqi lives while we were responsible for their security. But I still think that, even knowing what we know now, the war was worth it, if only for the potential for Arab democratization that has opened up; and the end of Saddam’s brutality. Nevertheless, Spencer Ackerman makes some good cointer-points here. I link; you mull it over.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I agree with you about Durbin. While ineloquently phrased, the sentiment is true. We don’t expect our troops to do the things we hear about them doing in Gitmo. Still, any politician shoud be smart enough to know that comparisons to Nazis, Stalin, Khmer Rouge, et. al. are not only inaccurate, but going to create a terrible shitstorm. Instead, I’d recommend the words of the most America loving author, and a true literary giant. Here’s what he had to say about the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine rebellion:

“We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world …” (Mark Twain, “On the Damned Human Race”).

I don’t think that even the far right is going to castigate Mr. Clemens for insufficient patriotism.”

THE AIR FORCE ACADEMY REPORT

It’s worth reading in full, although it gets repetitive at times. There’s no way to judge independently how fair or tough the report is. Its assessment that the academy is not “overtly discriminatory” against non-Christians has to be weighed against the following findings: the commandant of cadets sent an academy-wide email promoting the national day of prayer, created a “J for Jesus” hand signal, designed to get the “Rocks!” response, and used it on drills that included all cadets; an advertisement in the Academy Spirit, signed and paid for by key USAFA personnal, stated: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world”, and “there is salvation in no one else;” over 4,000 flyers were distributed on campus for “The Passion of the Christ;” the group of cadets that does not attend voluntary evening prayer services is known as the “Heathen Flight”; an atheist cadet who wanted to start a “free-thinkers” group was denied permission because the group was not “faith-based”; the head football coach put up a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room; one cadet complained that “freedom of religion does not exist if you are not a Christian;” calls to Bible study were made over the PA system. Some faculty were more emphatic about a climate of intolerance:

The non-Christian members of this group indicated that Senior Leadership, to a person, made them feel like ‘evil people’ if they were not one of the Christians. A few acknowledged that some of the leadership is ‘extraordinarily aggressive’ in the expression of their faith … The Christian faculty members of this group expressed their belief that Christianity is a ‘proselytizing religion’ and they have a right, even duty, to do so.

On the other side of the ledger, it’s clear that the leadership in the military takes its religiously neutral mission importantly, many of these incidents were dealt with at the time, and things seem to have improved over the past couple of years. The report wouldn’t exist if that were not the case.

THE WIDER ISSUE: Much of the problems come from the new passion of evangelicalism in America. Individual fundamentalists regard their faith as something that trumps everything, and cannot be curtailed for any principle, even military effectiveness. As one cadet said, “The Air Force I signed up for didn’t say I had to leave my religion at the door – it’s part of who I am.” The atmosphere – especially the anti-Semitism – comes as much from the cadets themselves as from any official policy. As one faculty member states, “The kids we are bringing in here no are not a reflection of America. Whether they realize it or not, people of religion are selecting kids of religion to fill USAFA.” One omission from the report are the anti-Semitic slurs from some cadets to others, which the report says have been handled between the individuals involved. One suspects that an offical report which cited cadets calling Jews “Christ-killers” would have made too many unsavory headlines. One can only guess at the rampant homophobia that must exist, especially since it is implicitly endorsed in official military policy. All in all, it seems to me that a decent start has been made to rectify the worst of the intolerance, but that the core issue is that recruits are more and more likely to be influenced by a resurgent Christianism before they arrive, come from backgrounds in which religious dissent or pluralism is simply unknown or suppressed, and don’t fully understand why that atmosphere might be inappropriate in a secular, national institution like the military. The Academy is obviously trying to do something, but they are fighting an uphill battle. We should all worry about a military that seems to be becoming the repository of one brand of Christianity. It’s deeply counter-productive in a war where we have to be extra careful not to look like crusaders and where we need all the good soldiers we can find, regardless of their personal faith or lack of one.

THE JOYS OF ENGLISH CUISINE

Roger Scruton describes, in part, how he tried to make the delicacy known in northern England as “black pudding”

Detaching and cleaning [the pig’s] small intestine was the easy part. Harder by far is turning sickly blood into savoury stuffing. The English way, of sopping it up in rusk or barley, loses both texture and flavour. The right way is to pour in masses of cream, which lightens the texture and prevents the blood from clotting, and then to add warm fat from the flank, onions melted in lard, salt, pepper and quatre epices. Sections of stuffed gut, tied at both ends and gently simmered, emerged from this ordeal looking exactly as Zola might have described them–le ventre de la famille, in which need and greed lay coiled together.

Mmmmm.

EMAIL OF THE DAY III

“Keep it up! You’ve got to keep giving it back to the Taranto’s of the world. Morally, the defense of torture is a form of relativism. Usually, defenses of moral relativism give pragmatic reasons. But these guys are so wrong pragmatically! It seems like they lack confidence in Western liberalism. I don’t mean just the ideological attractiveness of being free, at the level Bush is always talking about, but liberalism’s advantages for the long-term generation of state power.

Why is this relevant? OK, it’s well established that torture doesn’t work. All those “ticking bomb scenarios” assume a) that you’ve got the right guy and b) that he’s not just telling you what you want to hear until the bomb goes off. So, knowing that torture doesn’t work, a liberal pragmatist tries to find out what does: language skills, a detailed knowledge of individual weaknesses, the painstaking study of political conditions, strong alliances and cooperation among security forces, the cultivation of international moral prestige, and even the humane treatment of prisoners. The chauvinist rejects this pragmatism as a lack of moral clarity. But which approach defends us better?

These guys remind me of the people in the late forties and early fifties who thought that liberalism would never be able to remain true to itself and still defeat the USSR. Even on the economy, there were plenty of respectable forecasts showing the USSR passing the West in per capita income. They posed as the West’s staunchest defenders, yet at bottom they’d lost confidence in it. They didn’t believe Hayek when he concluded that central planning gives you not only serfdom, but economic decline. But they were wrong, and containment worked. That’s why it’s so important to fight this battle. Hayek in the realm of ideas is a marketplace of free, sincere criticism. The torture-defenders are already showing us the alternative: a descent into ineffective mendacity and, when the failure and lying become obvious, desperate chauvinism.”

All great points, in my book. Torture and abuse haven’t made us safer. Sending too few troops to Iraq hasn’t made us safer. Israeli interrogators do not kick the Koran or pee on it or throw it to the ground. They learn it word for word. They quote it back to their prisoners. They win their confidence and infiltrate their networks. They gain good intelligence by eschewing the goon-like antics of the Gitmo clowns. Fake menstrual blood? If it weren’t so disgusting, it would be risible. But it’s true. Remember that, whatever the Tarantos of this world want to deflect the conversation to. It’s true. It happened. In the end, reality will count.