The Republic of Dissent

Great politics and the war on terrorism

The beginning of Noah Feldman's must-read article on Obama's war on terrorism :

Killing terrorists with drones is great politics. To the question, “Is it legal?” a natural answer might well be, “Who cares?”

But the legal justifications in the war on terrorism do matter -- and not just to people who care about civil liberties. They end up structuring policy. As it turns out, targeted killing, now the hallmark of the Barack Obama administration’s war on terrorism, has its roots in rejection of the legal justifications once offered for waterboarding prisoners.

For some reason, this worries me more than Wall Street's greed and it isn't because I think that greed is good.

The Wall Street protests and the Man

The Economist's Democracy in America blog on the Wall Street protests  :

HERE's my two cents on the Occupy Wall Street protests: Woo!

Maybe that's one cent. Anyway, I am not by disposition a joiner, but I'm nevertheless inclined to smile upon attempts to stick it to the man, even if the attempt is quixotic or confused and the man in the end remains unstuck. The Burkean horror of social upheaval is fine in its place, but there is no apparent danger of upheaval. And who among us doubts that the man deserves a good sticking to? So why not try?

I don't find the whole Occupy Wall Street stick compelling for the simple reason that it seems to me that the idealists willing to come to New York to protest against corporate greed are the same who fell in love with Obama in 2008 and who, instead of holding him responsible for his actions, are looking elsewhere to  blame for the state of the American economy and society.

In short, the Occupy Wall Street movement represents a unsettling manifestation of identity politics for as in the Salem Witch Trials, the priority is to stick it to certain people while refusing to acknowledging the responsibility of the others who look/think/feel as the 'occupiers' but never take a definite stand by acting and fighting back.

Obama, the protector

Sugary excerpt of the day from David Bromwich:

Obama apparently has come to share with Bush the belief about Americans that (in Bush’s words) ‘we are good’. But the danger of the surveillance state has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of the American people or our unseen protectors. It has to do with the psychology of power, and what power does to life. That power tends to corrupt is a law of human nature that does not alter whether one favours the power to punish the guilty or to protect the innocent. Corruption goes nicely with the idea of enhancing the secret powers of the state, for benevolent and protective purposes, on behalf of a people who are supposed incapable of judging how to protect themselves. The presumption of the knowing protector could be read in the upright posture of George W. Bush as he announced the retaliatory launching of American troops into war after war. It can now be read in the imposing sobriety of Barack Obama as he speaks of ‘targeted assaults’ by special forces, or of American ‘kinetic activity’ in support of air strikes by America’s allies. The embrace of protection goes with an unconscious love of euphemism.

I'm surprised that people are surprised that Obama is following the Bush/Cheney policies to fight terrorism and 'protect' America. Such a course of action was all too predictable for Obama lacks the political courage to take a different course of action (he also knows that identity politics will always offer him the opportunity to get away with shameful and hypocritical acts), he is too smart and political savvy not to know what  terrorist attack would do to his legacy and lastly, as I always say, Obama is a 'typical' American president no matter how exotic and Michael Jordanesque some believed that he was.

Class, gender, and exhibitionism

Sugary of the day from Belle Waring slamming down Megan McArdle's arguments in favor of giving rich exhibitionists in hotels the benefit of the doubt:

She elides the fact that you, as a woman, know when you’re being flashed vs. when you accidentally walk in on someone who hasn’t heard your knock. Really. Big difference. A man showing you his penis on purpose has a certain way about him, let’s just say. Do I really have to go there? He is likely (thought not certain) to be visibly sexually aroused. And sauntering around looking at you weird, with his penis in his hand as often as not. This is not the behavior of the startled guest who shouts—”wait—don’t come in!” and begins pulling the sheets around himself in a fit of embarrassment. I honestly would have thought, here is a class of rich people whom not even Megan McArdle would defend! I begin to suspect the null set is involved.

I always find it fascinating that more often than not it is women making unbelievable arguments in sexual harassment and sex crime cases. To me, that fact show how icky and hard, it is to identify with the victim of a sex act no matter how believable she is because nobody wants to believe that not only shit happens, to put it bluntly, that it can be sexual and can place in the woman in a position where she is possessed/touched/harassed without having caused the situation.

In short, women are tougher on women victimized sexually because it is both empowering and reassuring.

Justification

No need for commentary after reading this:

Though the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces strikes those of us to the right of Noam Chomsky as an act of retributive justice, our collective certainty of his guilt and our longing to balance the moral scales cannot justifty the sovereignty-defying military raid and seeming execution ordered by Barack Obama. If the aim had been to try and punish Mr bin Laden for his enormities, it would have been imperative at least to attempt to take him alive. However, despite conflicting reports, the official position seems to be that capture was not on the agenda; death was the the order of the day. The justification for the killing must be that Mr bin Laden was not only an "enemy combatant", but a dangerous one.

Counter-overreaction

Christopher Hitchens on Noam Chomsky's reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' " Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.
In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

It's indicative of the despairing state of the social and political dialogue in America that Hitch and Chomsky live in two different planets and can neither communicate nor exchange ideas.

Bin Laden's death and Justice

I almost agree completely with this:

Bin Laden’s killing is very likely justified under the laws (such as they are) of war. But, as best as I understand them, these laws are not intended to conduct towards justice; instead they are intended to conduct towards a minimization of those regrettable little side-effects (massacres of prisoners; the deaths of multitudes of civilians &c) that tend to go together with military disputes. It may also possibly be justified in purely pragmatic terms – very possibly, many more people would have died over the longer run had he been captured rather than killed. But it cannot be justified in terms of the procedural requirements of justice as practiced by democracies, which usually do require trials, evidence, judgments that can be appealed and so on.

Bin Laden and the weak 'West'

Sugary excerpt of the day from Brendan O'Neill:

In the post-assassination commentary OBL is presented to us as the mighty figurehead of an organisation that posed a mortal threat to Western civilisation. In truth he was always an isolated actor, with little support, no army and few weapons, yet who benefited enormously from Western fears and confusion. It was Western society’s culture of fear that fed and nurtured him; he lived off it, vampire-style. The most powerful weapon in his armoury was not his access to cash or those crazy young guys willing to blow themselves up in his name, but rather the abject willingness of Western governments to change their way of life and panic their peoples in response to his threats and antics.
The impact of acts of terrorism is determined not only by the terrorists themselves, but also by how the target society chooses to respond to them. And Western nations, most notably America, Britain, France and Spain, reacted to al-Qaeda threats or attacks in such a way that they amplified them, allowing what were mostly sporadic assaults by tiny and isolated groups of men to have a deep and long-lasting impact across society. In instituting tough new security measures, liberty-allergic legislation and a general sense of panic and unease, Western governments not only did most of the terrorists’ dirty work for them – they also advertised their institutional vulnerability to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. They effectively sent to bin Laden the message: ‘We are weak. So weak that even you, one man in a cave, can have a massively disproportionate impact on our liberty and lives.’ The truly decisive factor in Islamic terrorism over the past 10 years, the thing that allowed this ragtag ‘army’ of wannabe martyrs to rattle half the world and encouraged them to continue doing so, was not the strength of al-Qaeda, but the loudly trumpeted weakness of the West.

Is it just me, but do some people have trouble understanding that Osama Bin Laden is an empty vessel in which most people  put what they want? The point isn't that OBL doesn't matter, but rather that he is just a symbol meaning that his death isn't about him, but about the people reacting to it.  To use O'Neill language, the  'West' isn't weak, the west is just normal.

Questionable Intervention

Sugary excerpt of the day from Rory Stewart on the 'use of force' in Libya:

If the crises of Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have consumed more than 100,000 lives, four trillion dollars and absorbed a million foreign soldiers from 60 countries, have not made us more prudent, they should at least have made us wiser. For two decades our policies in these countries have been described, explained and criticised by political philosophers, civil servants, human rights activists, journalists, development workers, film-makers and 10,000 consultants. Parliamentarians round the world refer confidently to ‘Chapter 7 resolutions’, ‘no-fly zones’, ‘the experience of the Kurds’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’. But the basic questions about intervention seem to remain as obvious as they are unhelpful. You do not need to be able to name four cities in Libya to have four arguments against or for what we are doing. You can simply deploy those which were used in 1960s Vietnam, 1920s Syria and 1860s Afghanistan.

Just one question: does the rightfulness of an intervention depends on or is tied to its success?

Being heroic and being bad

I agree with Chris Dillow on this taken from his great post on Julian Assange:

The fact is that it’s perfectly possible for men who are good, even heroic, in some respects to fall short in others.
The belief to the contrary seems to me to be a naïve form of the fundamental attribution error, a belief not only that character rather than environment determines actions, but also that there is a single, unified thing as “character” which is either “good” or “bad”.

I have always had a problem with the separation of good and evil and that is why my favorite quote is Eluard's "Le Bien et le mal doivent leur origine à l'abus de quelques erreurs." Human ignorance and imperfection make it, in my view, impossible for heroes not to be also people who can behave badly, awfully in different situations. I don't think that Assange is a hero and I don't think either that the fact that he may have committed a  'crime' means that he is incapable of doing anything noble or good.

Absolute justice

Frank Furedi on the latest's from Wikileaks:

This idea that the publication of private conversations and communications is in the public interest – whether it’s done by tabloids or by sanctimonious candidates for the next Pulitzer Prize – is a self-serving attempt to present voyeurism as an important public duty. It is not unlike the claims made by reality TV producers, who frequently argue that their tawdry offerings ‘raise awareness’ and serve the ‘public interest’.

I have to say that there is so much about this that makes me uncomfortable because I'm starting to realize that the Wikileaks 'folks' are true believers in absolute justice. That is unsettling for it may mean that they believe that any means is necessary to achieve their end (I still don't know what it is).  I don't have any definitive opinion for the story is still being written.

The means can derail the end

Eugene R. Fidell says all that has to be said in a few words about the trial of Ghailani and the uproar following its verdict:

(...) it is important not to lose sight of the root cause of the outcome: he was subjected to coercion during his interrogation. There's the problem.

Thus, the outrage over United States v. Ghailani has nothing to do with the rule of law, but everything to do with politics. It offers one more proof that the Obama administration is weak on this issue for it is constantly backtracking because it is scared of being blamed for not using any means necessary to protect America if the worst happens. In short, the Obama administration is afraid to stand behind the rule of law not really because of ideology, but fear and politics.  There is nothing sadder than seeing an administration that  pledged to be better different than its predecessor being Bushlike out of fear rather than because of principles.

The consequences of symbolic indulgence

I agree with David Bromwich on this:

The truth is that Obama exposed himself to the worst the Republicans can do by his conciliatory tone from the first days of his administration. He gave assurance when he entered office that he would not look exactingly into the conduct of the last administration. Bush and Cheney received from him a legal indulgence for any conceivable transgression, on the theory that after the bombings of September 2001, anything that public servants did was a hasty but honourable response to a dreadful emergency by well-meaning persons. To Obama at the time, this must have seemed a magnanimous deed as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle. Yet his decision to make justice begin today achieved a different end. It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him. It also robbed of reality all his talk of a profound commitment to justice – a justice which he had suggested went beyond considerations of bridge-building for the sake of domestic policy or national expedience. By broadening the claim of state secrets to prevent the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition, the Obama administration has lent credence to the original claim of Bush and Cheney that their actions were dictated by necessities of state. In doing so it has foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts.

I believe that in a way Obama gave himself very little choice but to support the statu quo ante when he became president because of the fact that he ran as the change candidate and that he never had it in him to die, politically that is, for what he ran on, which I don't think is what he believes.  To become Potus, Obama made himself more exotic than he really is, but because he is a great politician and a typical American, he realized that Americans only really likes the appearance and the symbols of change. Those symbols give American the complaisant impression that they don't have to pay and to work hard to improve/change their country.  In short, because Obama was never different than the people he riled against, he was always going to govern as most of presidents did before him by doing everything not to rock the boat and not appear to un-Americanize America by governing as the Change President.

It is sad to admit but out of all of the credible people who ran for president in 2008, the one who was always going to be the least able to 'change' America was Barack Obama. That fact is ironically one of the reasons he won because people thought that he was change.

Human rights in question

Sugary excerpt of the day from Andrew Brown's 'satire' on the existence of human rights :

We are told that the two qualities of human rights is that they are "self-evident" and "unassailable". This is like saying that the chief quality of porridge is its excellence as a material for building skyscrapers. The chief evidence for the existence of these unassailable and self-evident human rights is that we are told, by people who believe in them, that they are everywhere attacked and trampled. What difference does a right make if it doesn't change.(...)Everywhere that human rights have gone, terror and bloodshed have followed, from the French Revolution, which convulsed Europe in war for nearly thirty years, through to Stalin's Russia, where the constitution protected more rights than almost any other one has ever done, and now in the invasion of Iraq, where nearly people have died from our determination to impose rights and democracy. Of course the apologists will claim that these are perversions of the original idea. But why should we listen to the apologists, when they believe in something that doesn't even exist?

I have always found the term 'human rights' to be problematic because it was based on an assumption and because the word 'rights' cuts short an essential conservation about not its existence, its definition, and the problematic fact that it isn't accompanied by obligations. That said the fact that when reading Andrew Brown's piece, one questions its nature as a satire shows that 'human rights' have come to mean all things and nothing; they are solely a notion used to stop an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous dialogue on morality.

Women and rape victims

Fascinating point from Merav Michaeli on the case that made international headlines about a case of rape by deception in Israel  which turned out to be false by an 'Arab' of an 'Israeli Jewish' woman:

We women are educated from the beginning not to listen to ourselves, not to believe ourselves and certainly not to believe women who say they have been raped.(...) we should know better. After all, every woman knows on the deepest level that there is no such thing as going up on the roof of a construction site in the middle of the day with a man you just met for wild sex and then lodging a complaint against him.
We must no longer fall into these places. Our only way to protect ourselves from men closing ranks in cases of sexual assault and harassment by accusing the victim of "consent" and vindictiveness is to believe in each other. Always to believe in each other. For each of us to remember the reality of our lives and to know that we are all real victims.
We must have faith in each other that is beyond the shadow of a doubt. That is the true meaning of believing in ourselves.

Injustice not race

I agree with John Holbo on this:

what made Jim Crow ‘special’ was not that it had, particularly, to do with race, but that it had especially to do with injustice.

Americans have become so obsessed with race that they no longer focus on social justice or rather on injustice especially if it occurs within the racial or racially charged context.

Robin Hood as an anti-tax Reaganite

Interesting take from Alex Massie on Robin Hood:

Robin really is an anti-tax warrior inspired by oppressive levels of taxation that have enslaved and impoverished the people, leaving them with barely enough for themselves.
He doesn't "steal" from the rich, he confiscates money from the state (and its officers) to return it to the taxpayers. In other words, philosophically and instinctively, he's a Reaganite and, frankly, one would not be surprised to see Robin explain, over a haunch of venison, that if only the state listened to reason it might appreciate that the levels of taxation it imposes upon the peasantry are at Laffer Curve* levels and that productivity, revenues and happiness might all increase if taxes were lowered to a more reasonable, justifiable level.

I'm willing to buy Massie's assertion. I have never thought of Robin Hood as a socialist or a fervent believer in social justice, but rather as someone who believe fanatically that government wasn't entitled to take the people's money, that is to tax them.

Thus, in a weird way, Robin Hood has more in common with Ron Paul than with Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader.

Conditional American citizenship

I'm appalled by this line of argument from Peter Schuck:

Revoking citizenship merely for being a member of al Qaeda or giving it material support (both criminal acts) would present a harder question, as would rendering a person stateless. The Constitution rightly protects the citizenship of law-abiding and criminal citizens alike against a government that seeks to exile them. Although loyalty is basic to citizenship, we don't make native-born citizens affirm it. We do require affirmation of loyalty in the naturalization oath, but that is a different context. Requiring loyalty oaths otherwise may infringe First Amendment rights to dissent or to remain silent.
Drawing these lines will be difficult. Yet public fears of citizen-launched terrorism make this task inescapable and will test our conception of both citizenship and the Constitution.

Just suggesting that people who have acquired American citizenship can lose it if they are terrorists makes naturalized citizens second class citizens who always have to prove that they love America more than born Americans. The fact that the question of stripping the American citizens from born Americans when they do something that shames America or threatens its existence or the lives of its citizens is taken seriously by scholars as renowned as Schuck show that for too many people Americanness is not about nationality, but about some imaginary pure and stagnant identity. In short, Peter Schuck and the others who want to revoke the American citizens of Faisal Shahzad are legitimating the point of view of the birthers and the ones who believe that some people can never become real Americans despite of their citizenship or should away be looked with suspicion because they are potential threat to America.

Kenneth Anderson has another take on the issue so does Kevin Jon Heller.

Tyrannical treatment of American citizens

Quote from the morning from Glenn Greenwald:

There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment.  But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government's own population.  The ultimate check on any government is its own citizenry; vesting political leaders with oppressive domestic authority uniquely empowers them to avoid accountability and deter dissent.  It's one thing for a government to spy on other countries (as virtually every nation does); it's another thing entirely for them to direct its surveillance apparatus inward and spy on its own citizens.  Alarming assaults on basic rights become all the more alarming when the focus shifts to the domestic arena. 

Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski

Dominic Lawson denounces what he believes to be a double standard in the difference of treatment that the Pope receives and the one given to Roman Polanski:

The point is, I suspect, that whereas the Pope does understand that great wickedness has been perpetrated – systematically – by individuals within the Catholic priesthood, Polanski genuinely regards his own conduct as blameless. In fact, he sees himself, and not the 13-year-old girl he sodomised, as the victim.

Lawson isn't wrong. I am of the opinion that Polanski ought at least to be made to come to California not necessary to go to jail (I don't believe he will ever spend any time in prison, but even if he does, it will be shorter than it will shorter than the time he spent in a Swiss), but to face the court even if at the end, it is decided that jail isn't a suitable punishment. The key difference between this case and the one of the Catholic Church is that Benedict XVI is given the status of a semi-God in the sense that as the Pope, the head of powerful religious organization, it is assumed that he is closer to God than anybody. Just this fact makes it impossible to justify not really imperfections, but the refusal to follow the values of his church or at least to make a good faith attempt to. 

In any case, the fact that to defend the Benedict XVI, Lawson has to compare him to Roman Polanski is indicative of the moral decay of the Catholic Church and of its Pontiff.

Power and powerlessness

Amartya Sen on Power, powerless, and its effects on individual lives:

What about power – a concept that closely relates to the idea of freedom? To say that a person is powerless in reversing the kind of neglect that they have been experiencing can also be expressed in the language of capability: they are not capable of reversing the neglect from which they suffer. And yet there is some evocative strength and rhetorical force in the language of power, particularly in dealing with powerlessness, that the word capability, which is really a term of art, cannot really match. Analysing power and powerlessness can help to generate a better understanding of the divided world in which we live.

I have the feeling in so many ways the present state of the world has too much in common with the state of nature for people to worry about powerlessness rather than to have a single-minded focus on power.Social justice is becoming a forgotten concept because a diminishing number of people worry about those who cannot take advantage of individual freedoms for reasons, which they cannot change by just using will, courage, hard work, and determination.

Rehabilitating Child killers

I agree with Julian Baggini on this:

(...) when we ask how much we should try to rehabilitate child killers, for instance, it is wrong to think that forgiveness should be the key motivation. It is not for the legal system to forgive. Justice in such cases is rather about giving the right answers to four main questions. First, were the killers sufficiently responsible for their actions for us to regard retribution as of primary importance? Second, would prioritising rehabilitation threaten public safety? Third, would prioritising rehabilitation weaken deterrence against similar future crimes? And four, would rehabilitation actually work?
The best reasons we have for thinking that the Norwegians dealt with their child killers better than we did with the Bulger killers is because the answers to these questions in most such cases is no, no, no and yes. It has nothing to do with forgiveness being a superior virtue. To prioritise the rehabilitation of violent criminals who knew what they had done and posed a danger to the public just because we thought it good to forgive them would be a terrible mistake. More than that: it would be unforgiveable.

Unfortunately, most societies, most notably, the United States aren't Norway and believe less in rehabilitation even for child killers than in punishment and retribution because they were born bad and that there is nothing that society can do except protect itself from them.

Public toilets as the final battleground in the sex wars

Quote of the mid-day from Sally Feldman :

How would you fancy peeing into a shiny brass tuba – or splashing into the face of Saddam Hussein? Well, you can in America, which boasts some of the world's most inventive toilets. And Europe is catching up fast. In the UK there's a urinal in the shape of a red-lipped open mouth, while in France there's one held in place by two invitingly splayed legs. In Germany you can find a bowl with a football pitch and goal, complete with a strategically placed ball to aid accurate aiming. In Italy, your water can be made sacred by a line of Virgins awaiting your relief. And just in case you girls were feeling left out, there's a treat waiting for you in Spain – washtaps in the shape of penises with testicles for tapheads.
It's sweet to find this homage to human waste manifested so creatively all over the world. But, sadly, it's very rare. Most people in most places simply won't be able to find a toilet when they need one. And for women, the lack of decent facilities is more than a problem. It's an emergency. Public conveniences are the final battleground in the sex wars, the ultimate declaration of discrimination.

America and sin

I don't agree with Stephen Kinzer on this:

Rather than embrace Mitt Romney's aggressively ignorant view of the world, Americans should try to accommodate themselves to history. That means accepting the reality that every nation, like every human being, has sinned. Nations have the moral authority to point fingers at others only if they also reflect on how their own policies have contributed to the suffering, rage and violence that is shaking the world. "We abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own," Montaigne wrote five centuries ago. Then he quoted one of his favorite Latin proverbs: Stercus cuique suum bene olet. Everyone's shit smells good to himself.

My problem is with Kinzer's use of the word "sin" which is too religious and too absolute and negates the reality that Nations, countries aren't godly. I prefer to use  the term "error" or "mistake" for one of the things that plagues our time is the religionization of history and politics, which leads too many to ask for apologies and to divide humans incessantly, cunningly, and spitefully between victims and sinners. America has never committed any sin. It has made mistakes, outrageous and reprehensible mistakes that apologies or atonement cannot erase, but which acknowledgment can enable it to uplift itself above the unnecessary guilt by enabling it to avoid to repeat them through responsibility and the acceptance of the obligation to do and to be better.

Greed, militarism, and guerrilla warfare

I found this quote from Zakes Mda about South Africa on point :

In this brave new world, accumulation of personal wealth is dressed up in militarism, as if capitalism is the continuation of the guerrilla warfare that was fought during apartheid.

Attacking the lawyers

Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have a op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, which I find despicable and demagogic. Sugary excerpt:

In the last several days, the debate has taken a detour about what some have called a "shameful attack" on the "noble attorneys" who have chosen to defend "unpopular people." A national security organization, Keep America Safe (of which Ms. Burlingame is a board member), used the phrase "Al Qaeda 7" in an Internet ad to describe seven unnamed Department of Justice political appointees who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists.
The purpose of the ad was to prod Attorney General Eric Holder to disclose to the public which detainee attorneys he has hired to work on behalf of the American people, and whether they are involved in the policy-making decisions that will affect the nation's safety and security while we are at war. He was asked for this information by several members of the U.S. Senate, and he was stonewalling.
The attorney general has the right to select whomever he chooses to work in his department, and to set policy as he sees fit. He does not, however, have the right to do it in the dark. The policies he advances must face the scrutiny of the American people, his No. 1 client.
The public has a right to know, for instance, that one of Mr. Holder's early political hires in the department's national security division was Jennifer Daskal, a former attorney for Human Rights Watch. Her work there centered on efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, shut down military commissions—which she calls "kangaroo courts"—and set detainees who cannot be tried in civilian courts free. She has written that freeing dangerous terrorists is an "assumption of risk" that we must take in order to cleanse the nation of Guantanamo's moral stain. This suggests that Ms. Daskal, who serves on the Justice Department's Detainee Policy Task Force, is entirely in sync with Mr. Holder and a White House whose chief counterterrorism official (John Brennan) considers a 20% detainee recidivism rate "not that bad."

I find those arguments not only troubling, and ideological, but more importantly unconvincing. They are are made in a vacuum and with the implicit assumption that it is un-american to defend alleged or known terrorists and that there are times when the rule of law should become the rule of men especially if means shutting up or killing the lawyers who dare to question the actions of their government. The central issue of this whole debate isn't about a few lawyers who can easily be scapegoated as defenders of Al Qaeda, but rather whether, even in times of crisis and of great uncertainties, America still believes in its own laws and will view as normal Americans, its citizen, who hold the rule of law as sacred, and who choose to defend that principle above all else when their government isn't, . It's always easy to blame the lawyers when the politics of terrorism have become almost so one-sided and Manichean and, that thus, only radicalism can help score political points.

The rule of law after torture

I almost agree fully with this:

Even in imagining the best possible outcome–a decision by the president to stop torture, close Guantánamo, get our soldiers out of Iraq, shift the trials of detainees to federal courts–the rule of law will not be restored until those officials who licensed torture are prosecuted. A country that tortures when it has a president who believes he is permitted to torture and then abstains from torture when it has a president who recognizes that torture is unconditionally prohibited continues to be a country living under the rule of men, rather than the rule of law; for it is allowing its moral fate to be determined by the personal beliefs of its rulers.
Righting a wrong is especially difficult if the wrong has been initiated by a president. Any occupant of the White House has tremendous charisma, and therefore a tremendous capacity to miseducate.

I agree that the assertion that when a country, which believes that it is a nation of laws not of men, has broken that principle by legitimating torture for egotistical reasons, the restoration of the rule of law must begin at the top and cannot mean sweeping the recent and disturbing past under the rug. The trouble comes from the fact that the past here hasn't passed and that Obama doesn't want to do what has to be done because he doesn't want to find himself with fewer choices than Bush if another terrorist attack happens on  American soil. My point is that most Americans are more grateful about the fact that 'nothing' followed 9/11 than they are outraged by the fact that the rule of law was superseded by the need to keep America safe by all means necessary and even if it meant sacrificing its values. My guess is that apologies and restoration will come after Obama and his successor when the ones responsible and most of us will be either too old to understand what's going on or dead.

Killing all lawyers

Quote of the morning from Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represented Gitmo detainees: 

(...) as the years went by, the right did learn one thing useful about Guantanamo detainees. The public can’t distinguish one from another. If imprisoned endlessly, the detainees will furnish an endless source of scaremongering — that rich mulch in which votes will grow.
And so Cheney and Grassley beaver away to Keep America Scared. Some Americans will see the rule of law as a threat, and lawyers as the enemy. Small men with loud voices will exploit their fears on cable television. Petty politicians will mine them for votes. It’s been this way since Shakespeare’s famous policymaker Dick the Butcher said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’’

Criticizing lawyers

Quote of the day from David Luban:

There is simply no parallel between criticizing lawyers for violating the law and assassinating their characters for representing the "wrong" clients.

Bob Geldof's blinders

Bob Geldof slams the BBC for its report suggesting that some of the money he raised through Live Aid/Band Aid was used by mercenaries to buy weapons in Ethiopia:

But this BBC story was neither about me nor Band Aid. By disingenuously posturing as "serious" reporting, it pretended the total failure and negligence of all the great humanitarian workers and their organisations in the worst famine in modern times, and how miraculously not one of them spotted that no one was getting food despite everyone supplying it!
It beggars belief that anyone would take that seriously. Where were all the dead people then? If no one was getting food, why was nobody dying? That would have been one of the first questions I'd have asked. But they weren't dying because they were getting help, and massive amounts of it. But of course no one did ask where the bodies were at the World Service. That and many, many, other unasked questions.No, this story here is of the total collapse of standards and systems at the World Service, which has a special and particular duty of care to the truth.

I have to say that I don't understand why Geldof is more enraged at the BBC than at the possibility that the money that he raised was used to do something than to the feed the hungry in Ethiopia. He doesn't even want to consider the possibility that it might be true, which tells that he doesn't know about Ethiopia or about African countries because otherwise, he would be singing a different tune about finding ways to make sure that when celebrities raise money, it gets to the right people.  For some people, Bob Geldof is obsessed with the image of what he created, he wants to remain a perfect, pure and totally selfless enterprise, which was also absolutely successfully. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way and more often than charitable funds because they go to places without civil societies, without accountable governments get mismanaged. That's reality. It may be a hard fact for Bob Geldof to accept, but he is going to have to accept and address it to show that his charitable acts are about more dealing with facts than perfect and commercialized images. Nobody is saying to Geldof not to dream grand dreams, but simply not forget that the real world is neither neverland nor celebrityland.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

Cynicism and the political instrumentalization of 'genocide'

I agree with Joshua Keating's conclusion to his post on the political intrumentalization of the Armenian genocide by American politicians:

All in all, the level of cynicism in Washington around this tragic historical event  is pretty disheartening. Like President Bush before him, President Obama was for using the word "genocide" as a candidate before he was against it as president. Former House Majority leader Dick Gephart, who supported recognition as a congressman, is now lobbying against it on the Turkish payroll.
Outside the Armenian-American community, whose grievance on this issue is understandable and shouldn't be dismissed, most Americans would probably prefer that the congress focus its efforts on preventing and ending current conflicts.

France passed a law recognizing the Armenian genocide in 2006 and it just gave politicians an occasion to grandstand or to argue that Turkey didn't have its place within the European Union for it was made much news since or has no impact neither in France or in Europe on the important questions. The argument is that genocide should be something politicians play football will and that only historians ought to write history.

Agathe Habyarimana, dirty hands, and responsibility

Philip Gourevicth on the arrest of the former first lady of Rwanda, Agathe Habyarimana and what it says about the new and improved relation between France and Rwanda

French statesmen are not in the habit of travelling to small African countries that they used to run as puppet regimes to eat fistfuls of crow. But that is precisely what Sarkozy did last week when he stood beside Kagame in Kigali and declared that France had made mistakes during the genocide, and had to reckon with them. Afterwards, commentators made much of the fact that Sarkozy had not issued a full apology. But in a country whose history is still bloodily contested, Sarkozy’s frank acknowledgment of the truth of his former antagonist’s reality sent an unmistakable message. Without France’s cover, the pretense that Rwanda’s genocide is an open question is stripped barer than ever. With this morning’s arrest, we can see that France’s change of attitude toward Rwanda was at least partly influenced by the facts presented in the case against Madame Habyarimana. In November of last year, a pair of French judges went to Kigali to study the evidence assembled by Rwanda’s Genocide Fugitives Tracking Unit. Meanwhile the French case against Kagame’s coterie appeared to be crumbling. Whether France will extradite Madame Agathe to Rwanda remains to be seen. She has already been released on bail. But such is the warm mood between the two governments that Rwanda’s prosecutor general, Martin Ngoga, declared today that he had every confidence in the French judiciary—a statement that was simply unimaginable from a Rwandan official six months ago.

I don't think that Madame Agathe will ever be extradited to Kigali. She is one of the few remaining relics of a stubborn an still alive past and she is the symbol of what used to the French Rwandan policy. Extraditing her is a risk that France cannot afford to take because it would force it to consider the responsibility of its own politicians and government officials. To me, the key question remains how far Kagame  is willing to go to prosecute of the members of the Habyarimana regime and those who played a role in the genocide and more importantly what price he is willing to pay to have them judged by a court of law. I may be wrong and it is surely too easy to say what I'm about to say far away from the situation, but I believe that an inflexible obsession with punishing all of those who have dirty hands as Sartre would say may hinder reconciliation for it is clear that the genocide happened because the majority of the population got their hands dirty or did nothing while people were being viciously slaughtered like animals. Thus, in short, the central issue is what does a country do when it becomes obvious that almost all of its citizens bear some responsible for the darkest hours of its history, what level of responsibility becomes forgivable or at the very least tolerable to move it forward?

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

The American penchant for at least the rhetoric of freedom and democracy morphed into the modern human rights movement after World War II under the leadership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. During the Cold War U.S. alignment with brutal authoritarians like Mobutu in Zaire, or the overthrow of even elected governments, as in Chile in 1973, or the supervision of torture in Latin America never destroyed the dream of America as moral beacon. In public we accepted the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. In the shadows we played the game about as tough as anyone else.
9/11 accentuated this duality, perhaps schizophrenia. George W. Bush said al-Qaeda hated us for who we were, our personal freedoms in thought, including religious thought, and our gender-blind democracy. They hated us because we rejected their deferential and patriarchal theocracy. But in secret we engaged in forced disappearances, torture, cruelties arguably just below that level of abuse, denial of reasonable dues process in places like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and military brigs in South Carolina. In defense of our moral greatness we engaged in policies that undercut that greatness. As Winston Churchill paradoxically noted in World War II, truth was so important it had to be defended with a  bodyguard of lies. So for us after 9/11, the rule of law and personal rights were so important they had to be defended by secret detention and torture.

What is troubling me more than anything is that Bushism is winning by default, without any attempt by Obama to offer an alternative that doesn't involve solely giving a speech, changing the facade while performing the same acts. It was because for this reason, because I sense within Obama, a reluctance to be bold when it comes to policy not campaigning that I had couldn't force myself to get behind Obama during the election. I  have always believed that because Obama was thought to embody change, to epitomize it because he was part black,  that he was going to have no incentive, no effective pressure to change America for the better.

Exceptionalism and Solitude

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly, under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special, new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to imprison as Terrorists (...) . 

I guess Obama really does believe in American exceptionalism after all. I just have the feeling that clashes are inevitable for how long can a president grandstand about being far superior than his predecessor while imitating him? May be the answer is forever for it is starting to occur to me that Obama might actually be the son of God.

A miscarriage may become a murder.... in Utah

Just one comment comes to me when I read this "Only in America":

A proposed Utah law that would open women who suffer a miscarriage to possible criminal prosecution and life imprisonment has enraged feminists and civil rights activists across the United States.
Adopted overwhelmingly by both sides of the state legislature in Salt Lake City earlier this month, the draft bill is now awaiting the signature of the state's Republican Governor, Gary Herbert. It is not clear if the growing national controversy surrounding the proposed law will slow or even stay his pen.
While the main thrust of the law is to enable prosecutors in the majority-Mormon state to pursue women who seek illegal, unsupervised forms of abortion, it includes a provision that could trigger murder charges against women found guilty of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act" that leads to a miscarriage. Some say this could include drinking one glass of wine too many, walking on an icy pavement or skiing.

The pompous sterility of state apologies

I agree with Paul Sagar when he makes this point about apologies done in the name of the state to argue that Gordon Brown should not apologized his country's past actions, that is its role in the child resettlement programs in Australia and elsewhere :

The idea that the government of the day merely represents – and speaks and acts for – a more powerful entity existing behind it, possessed of ultimate sovereignty which the Prime Minister of the day happens to wield but does not ultimately possess, comes from Hobbes. When Brown apologises to the deportees today, he apologises not for his own actions, but for that of the Mortal God, the Leviathan, which Brown presently speaks for.
That the apology will be widely welcomed, and that its bizarre logic will go largely unremarked, indicates the extent to which that artificial man called Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas) is now an integral part of all our lives. Again, how ironic that the central ideas of history’s greatest proponent of absolutism should come to have shaped the intellectual framework that we who call ourselves democrats, liberals, republicans or libertarians think within.

I agree with Sagar for two main reasons. The first is that I think that it is a religious idea that we are all guilty for the actions of those who came before us, that is the inhumane idea behind the one of the original sin and it can make people guilty and have to apologize for generations if it remains prevalent. The second is that apologies are worthless and simply propaganda tools that change neither the past, the present and the future because they simply feed a certain crowd's appetite for public shaming without addressing real issues and new realities. At some point, we mus accept that the past no matter how painful it is to do so is dead and that guilt isn't transferable although responsibility might be. That difference is critical for accepting responsibility doesn't mean having to apologize, it means acknowledging and taking some fruitful acts when it is necessary.

The Others

No comment necessary to discuss this "it is US against Them" mindset illustrated by Marty Peretz's comments except a brief one to wonder about its policy implications and its usefulness, well maybe those are just foolish/wimpish considerations:

Why are so many liberal Democrats reluctant to concede that there is an intricate international network of ideological gangsters who recognize each other as ikhwan? These brothers do not define themselves by nation. They define themselves by religion, although there are many hundreds of millions of Muslims who are defined out--and define themselves out--of the bloody fraternity of the faithful. Sometimes, they too are stigmatized as enemies, which means they are also targets. And, of course, there are the boundaries of sect, in which Sunnis commit mass murder of Shi’a at prayer (and vice versa).
Then there are the other designated victims: outsiders … us. Not just Westerners and certainly not just Americans. Or Jews, for that matter, although they have a very special place in the demonology of Islam, and particularly in the armed demonology of Islam. Jihad.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

Mugabe at 86

Mugabe is or is going to be 86 years old. Bob Marley, if he can watch what is happening nowadays, wishes surely that he could rewrite his famous song, which celebrated proudly the hard fought independence, which Zimbabweans seized from Britain by warning them against providential men who believe that they are the state and their country cannot survive without them.
What do you wish a dictator who was once a national hero and an example for other leaders on the continent and who has become just a vulgar racist, narcissist, and autocrat on his Eighty-sixth birthday? : to die the mouth open in his sleep as soon as possible so that there is no bloody coup or political revolution and so that his people can at last start to build their country without living in the past and hanging on to old resentments.

Official high priests of intelligence and American presidents

Sugary excerpt from Jurek Martin's review of Garry Wills's Bomb Power:The Modern Presidency and the National Security State in the Financial Times:

The cult of secrecy has afflicted every president since, not merely the paranoid, such as Richard Nixon. Even Jimmy Carter was not entirely immune – the abortive 1980 rescue mission to extricate the US hostages in Tehran was executed without advising even his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who resigned. Wills is particularly hard on the Kennedy brothers’ obsession with deposing Fidel Castro, a mindset so blinkered that it failed to acknowledge the reality that Cubans liked their president (ditto Salvador Allende in Chile, etc). That fits with Robert McNamara’s much later admission that the US knew nothing of Vietnamese culture even as it was losing nearly 60,000 troops in the war.

Presidents, Wills persuasively argues, have fallen into the trap of listening only to the official high priests of intelligence. Those without prized security clearance are somehow considered inferior, if not ignorant, even if proved right. That was the proposed sanction against Oppenheimer for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. To be in-the-know is to be omniscient. The Pentagon Papers, the in-house review of the Vietnam War published only after the Supreme Court so ordered, contained no state secrets. But they were highly classified and thus, for government, unfit for consumption by friend or foe.

But the organic growth of the national security state needed theoreticians and they comprise Wills’s large Hall of Infamy. It was the (ironically conservative) Reagan justice department, under attorney-general Edwin Meese, that developed the theory of the “unitary executive” – which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is. This produced a welter of “signing statements” in which a president says he can disregard, for whatever reason, any section of a duly passed congressional bill he has just, er, signed.

The ticking bomb scenario

I'm yet to see someone address the ticking bomb scenario used by too many to justify torture as well as Paul Sagar does here:

The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.

John Woo and others damaged severely (and I hope not irreparably) the moral compass of America and of all the others who believed that they were fighting "evil" by arguing shamelessly that they should apply situational ethics when their security is at risk  Sagar's points show that the goal of ethics is precisely to stop people who are making the argument that they are moral from using particularities either real or imagine to justify the abject.. 

Torture and other niceties

I agree fully with Adrian Hamilton on this: 

Torture isn't a matter of niceties. You can argue the circumstances in which you might feel it useful or even necessary. You can try and épater le bien-pensant by writing "A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor People in Britain from Being Endangered by Torturing Their Children and Their Mothers", only without Jonathan Swift's wit or intention to satirise.
You can sincerely believe it right to cripple the grannies and dismember the family pets in what you conceive of the greater community good. What you cannot do, as the Government is trying to, is get around the fact that Britain, along with most of the developed world, has decided to ban the practice.
And for good reason. After centuries of abuse, torture has been found to be neither productive nor containable. It rarely provides accurate intelligence. It produces fantasy and misleading information born out of the desperation of the victim. For all the discussion of the "ticking time bomb" and the films of Dirty Harry and Spooks, there is no reported case where an explosion has been prevented because of the use of torture.
What its proponents never like to answer is the question of just who would decide who should be tortured. The answer, of course, is the "state". And once you add that to the equation you are on a straight line to General Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and all those other characters whom successive British governments were wont to support in their heyday.

Institutional anti-racism

It's been a long time since I've heard arguments about institutional anti-racism as pertinent the ones that Rod Liddle are making:

By ‘institutional anti-racism’ I do not mean people not being racist — that, we might all agree, is a good thing. I mean the state of mind which connives in wickedness, which is in a perpetual state of denial, which turns the other way, which does all this stuff because of the terror, the career-ending calumny, the shame of being accused of being ‘racist’.
(....)You can see institutional anti-racism pretty much wherever you look; as I mentioned last week, it is there in the closing down of any debate which touches upon race, unless it is to prove a charge of racism. It is there in the ludicrous sackings of people who are not remotely racist but who dare to speak their minds about issues concerning race; from the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford back in the 1980s, to the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer — who, it should be remembered, was booted off the opposition front bench for suggesting that it was not unheard of for some sub-standard black soldiers in the army to use race as a weapon when challenged as to their poor performance. What a shocking thing to allege; who could believe it, etc.
And institutional anti-racism is there in a subtle but no less corrupting way in your office, right now, or maybe on your TV screen; the suspicion that someone has been given promotion, or preference, or leeway, because they are not white and that as a consequence someone else has been done down. It is there in what sometimes seems to be an over-representation of non-white people on the news programmes, or in drama productions and that in both cases these people are treated a little differently because of their supposedly defining non-whiteness. And sometimes all of this is a misperception, and then again, sometimes it isn’t. Who knows? Either way, it springs from the same source.

Institutional anti-racism cannot be distinguished form institutional racism with institutional racism for it poses the same questions about meritocracy, societal ethics and the use of unkosher categories and criteria to promote or to punish individuals. The trouble is that it is an issue more difficult and less sexy to address than the racism/anti-racism of people because it is harder to shame, to guilt, and to silence institutions into a political correct behavior or into an accommodating silence than powerful institutions. As I get older and I hope wiser, I have the feeling that the issue of racism/anti-racism is not even close from being the issue of our times, it is one too potent and too flashily empty who blinds people from more pertinent ones such as equity and social justice. Of course, the reality is that in heterogeneous societies everywhere, people talk about racism/anti-racism really to question the distribution of power in order to avoid developing more substantive and universal (and in my view more convincing) arguments to delegimate/legitimate a power structure and the powerful.

A Dark continent

Provocative words from Leo Igwe:

Part of the reason why Africans are deeply religious, spiritual and supernatural in outlook is because the people have given up hope of achieving justice and happiness in this life and in this world. (...)Justice is light and injustice is darkness. Eradicating injustice is an enlightening and illuminating process. So tackling unjust systems is critical to the growth and development of humanism in Africa. Today Africa is a dark continent not because there is something fundamentally wrong or lacking or extraordinary with the regional geography and weather conditions. Africa is a dark continent because of so many acts of injustice that reign supreme in the region. Africa is mired in darkness because of the reign of anomie, the terror of barbarism, the ubiquity of impunity, criminality and savage acts.
Unfortunately, Africans always point accusing fingers on colonialism and imperialism for injustices on the continent. As if there were no unjust acts or systems in Africa before its contact and ‘corruption’ by the outside world. When it comes to analyzing and addressing Africa’s problems and predicament, colonialism is always a cop-out or an alibi. Imperialism is a reason or an excuse Africans always tender to avoid responsibility- accepting or taking responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Africans always comfortably prefer blaming the West and the whites for their woes and troubles. Surely, injustices predate and post date colonialism in Africa. Unjust acts have been going on in Africa for ages.

The trouble is not that Igwe is right, but that he isn't wrong.

The neverending culpability of the West

What is wrong with Karen Armstrong? When she writes about her experience at a conference in Cairo, I have to wonder in what she lives:

(...)if the professors felt so enraged, what on earth could it be like on the streets of Cairo, where this level of frustration, aggravated by economic and political discontent, could make many people easy targets for extremist propaganda?
But the mood of our conference changed. During the last session an American theologian managed, with some difficulty, to take the floor and spoke on behalf of us all. We had, he said, been deeply impressed by the pain in the room; we knew that "the eight horrible years of George W Bush" had inflicted grave damage on the region, and would do everything in our power to work with Al-Azhar for a better future. Immediately, one of the most vitriolic of our assailants responded with generosity and the conference was finally able to issue a firm and positive joint resolution.
So far, Obama has not given the concrete sign that we felt was essential. But the Chilcot inquiry has also raised hopes. If there is any hint of whitewash or cover-up, the consequent disillusion will only exacerbate an already inflamed situation. In Cairo, we discovered that a frank acknowledgment of culpability could turn things around. In our dangerously polarised world, we may not get such an opportunity again.

Wow....I think that for one Karen Armstrong is way to religious to understand the Camusian difference between culpability and responsibility, and she fails to get the fact the problem here isn't for the west to acknowledge some type of culpability to turn things around in the streets of Cairo or Islamabad, but rather to live by its own ideals while stopping to treat the poor as victims and as incapable of taking control of their own destiny.  Karen Armstrong has a Mother Theresa like view of international affairs for she believes in guilt, in atonement and in all the disturbing sentiments, which always to Imperialism, paternalism, and just wars, which are later found to be unwinnable. The point here is that the "West" which doesn't exist except in the mind of those who love to divide the world into archaic categories doesn't have to bear a cross for the fact that shit happens and that more often that not, it strays away from the least unjust path because it is too complex and because it believes that national interests justify the use of any means. Thus, the question here is solely one of responsibility and of the continuation of Hobbes's state of nature in spite of progress and modernity. To put things simply: should we just accept that we are all barbarians and be done with ethics and accept that might makes right.
The goal of the Chilcot inquiring shouldn't be the same as those Witch trials in Salem that is to burn the guilty to appease angry mobs. The aim should be to make those who had power to assume responsibility of their mistakes in judgment and more importantly to force the electorate to realize that democracies only function when they realize that  they shouldn't be waiting for "the one" but rather should force the imperfect leaders that they have to live by the principles that make their country what it is.

Legalism and the definition of just wars

Brendan O'Neill has a thought provoking article on Elizabeth Wilmshurst and her arguments for the illegality of the Iraq war:

There are three irritating things about this strictly legalistic opposition to the attack on Iraq. First, it is delusional. It is based on the massive self-deception that international law and its brave defenders and practitioners – lawyers – kept the world in tip-top shape until that cowboy George W Bush and his heel-snapping poodle Tony Blair came along and ruined everything.
(...) The second irritating thing about the legalistic opposition to the war in Iraq is that it is deeply dishonest, duplicitous even. Many of those who moan about the illegality of Iraq were fervent supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Yet that futile and fatal intervention also did not win the support of the UN Security Council, and thus was ‘illegal’. A Guardian writer penned the 10 Days to War drama, and the Guardian has been singing the praises of Wilmshurst’s performance at Chilcot over the past week. This is the same Guardian which in 1999 slated those who said Bill Clinton and Tony Blair should wait for UN backing before bombing Yugoslavia. The UN is not ‘the only legitimate law-giver’, the Guardian insisted. Indeed, the UN constitution is a ‘recipe for inaction’, and ‘its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international action to right an obvious wrong’.
The third and most irritating thing is that the legalistic-not-political critique of war (well, of certain wars) is inhumane. Judgements about military interventions are made, not from the basis of what is good for humanity, or from any analysis of what terrible consequences the war might have for those on the receiving end and for international peace more broadly, but rather from the lawyerly approach of making sure that all the boxes are ticked and all the right procedures were followed. Legal niceties are elevated over people’s lives, over questions of democracy, sovereignty, stability, equality.

I agree with O'Neill on his main point that the law isn't the main tool to define just or rather unjust wars, that other factors have to be taken into considerations, and those who fail to at least, accept that the complexity of the concept of "just war" are ideologues and hypocrites. I think that even if the Iraq war could have been justified (my feeling is that it couldn't have been, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that I'm wrong) under the international law principles established by Wilmshurst and others, it would have still been an unjust and I'm making this statement, of course, with the help of hindsight. The main reason is that it was both unwinnable,  unnecessary, and too expensive since its most touted accomplishment is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. International Law is a tool among many other indispensable to determine the justifiability of a war. If the French without the backing of the UN had intervened and had stopped the genocide, what would be the argument of legal scholars today who wouldn't have a crystal ball to know that that unlawful intervention had stopped the dead of hundred of thousands innocent people. The point is that even as a lawyer, I'm forced to accept the despairing realities that laws are minimal, but essential tools to address grave societal problems and that more often than not it doesn't provide an acceptable solution to issues, which politicians and the people should have the guts to confront directly.

Decorum

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

(...) the behavior of Justice Alito at last night's State of the Union address -- visibly shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" when Obama warned of the dangers of the Court's Citizens United ruling -- was a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the Court.  It has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with the Court's ability to adhere to its intended function.

Guinea and its dangerous manly man

I would find this video outrageously funny if it wasn't about the fate of a poor, small, and martyred African nation, Guinea, in desperate need of leadership taken hostage by a dangerous and manly idiot who believes that God made him king. Even by the worst or the most generous of standards, Captain Dadis Camara is a clown who should have never been allowed to rule Guinea. He is convinced that to be Guinean, African, and finally a statesman means to be just as Harvey Mansfield would say manly that is to scream when he can neither reason nor convince and to crush the people who contest his authority. It's heartbreaking to say, but the fact that an African country can have such an idiot as its head of state shows that its future generations, because they were lied to by a previous group of political leaders, which was more or less polished and "western," will in the hope for change (here those two hypnotizing words again) be tempted to follow manly fools who will try to convince them that to be authentically African (whatever that means) is to defy reason and civilization.

Tragedy

Good point from Christopher Hitchens on the media and what it considers to be tragic:

The media now say tragedy when they mean that bad things have happened to good or—even worse—famous people. But the types of tragedy that really deserve the name are of two main kinds, the Hegelian and the Greek. Hegel thought it was tragic when two rights came into conflict. The Greeks thought it tragic when a great man was undone by a fatal flaw.