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.

Seriousness, facts and terror plots

Glenn Greenwald on the 'Iranian terrorist plot" to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US:

[...] why would Iran possibly wake up one day and decide that it wanted to engage in a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil when it could much more easily kill Saudi officials elsewhere? and if Iran and its Quds forces are really behind this inept, hapless, laughable plot, then nothing negates the claim that Iran is some Grave Threat like this does [...]

I, for one, am waiting for something more conclusive and convincing than assertions by Holder and co. about what the facts show for I have learned in the Bush and the Obama years not to take claims about terrorism and national security threats at face value for they have become too influenced by ideology and politics.

Skepticism is required for it cools down things to make the issue facts rather than fears and beliefs.  In short, I'm waiting for the Obama to show me the money instead of trying to scare me by appealing to my conviction that Iran is a country with a dangerous government!

On American democracy

Sugary excerpt from David Cole on this Columbus Day

As American citizens we have a right to know when our own government believes it may execute us without a trial. In a democracy the state’s power to take the lives of its own citizens must be subject to democratic deliberation and debate. War of course necessarily involves killing, but it is essential that at a minimum, the lines defining the state’s power to kill its own are clearly stated, and public—particularly when the definition of the enemy and the lines demarcating war and peace are as murky as they are in the current conflict. Leaked accounts to The New York Times are no substitute for legal or democratic process. As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent—and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos—can we really claim that we live in a democracy?

The issue is that the Obama administration is solely focused on protecting Americans by any means necessary for it knows that what would be said if another terrorist attack happens on American soil. It is sad to say but the fact that Obama is a democrat and has been made into an exotic creature by the media, his own supporters and himself condemns him to be dumbly Cheneyan when it comes to national security.

Obama is too good of a politician not to realize that the minute after America is hit on his watch, he will become the other and that notion would become threatening and frightening even to liberals who love to embrace the illusory exoticism of apparent difference.

The genius of America's political culture and the means

Glenn Greenwald on the death of the American Born Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki by American drones (Kenneth Anderson must feel that he is winning the argument on the necessity and effectiveness of drones):

Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed. 

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture.  It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

I'm going to munch on Greenwald's words, but it is pretty clear that in the so-called war on terror (I have to come to hate that term because it implies that war is the only way to fight terrorism), the end justifies the means and as a long time Camusian that fact bothers me.

The corruption of the American character

 

 

Interesting conversation as always between John McWhorter and  Glenn Loury. I just have one question or rather two. What is American character?  Does it exist?

I might be trying to suggest with these questions that there isn't such an American identity, that Americans are what they do and that America is an ideal, a noble idea that alas cannot remain good in itself because of Americans aren't always able to live up  to it.

Horror is horror

Sugary excerpt of the day from Glenn Greenwald:

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed.  In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

Stout simplicities

The conclusion of Christopher Hitchens's article on the upcoming anniversary of 9/11:

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any "simple" solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Hitchens states the obvious (which may be virtuous, but more often than not unproductive when the goal is to refuse that even stout simplicities lead to uneasy complexities) in an ideological manner. He does it to avoid posing the tough questions, and be on his high horse when he refuses to acknowledge that in life, politics or in any aspect of life being on the right side, fighting 'evil' doesn't make things simpler, but more complicated because it means that there is a duty to act as if  only the final result matters for the other side is evil.

Hitchens fails to understand the question is never in the characterization of evil as evil, but in the uncomfortable notion that stating it doesn't solve anything and does make things simple. 

In short, 9/11 did make life, the world easier, it make it more complex because the 'evil' of the act was so obvious that reflexion and the morality of political acts mattered more tha ever before.

Losing...

Mohsin Hamid, the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, on the US's involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

For Hamid, by launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and funding the highly compromised Pakistani security forces – he calls them the “insecurity forces” – America has fallen into bin Laden’s trap. The fatal mistake, he says, was to take seriously the notion that al-Qaeda could somehow establish a “caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia”. That was always a chimera. By launching the unwinnable “war on terror”, Washington has curbed the civil liberties of its own people, stretched its finances to breaking point and helped radicalise the Middle East. In other words, it has done exactly what bin Laden wanted.

“He was one crazed mass murderer. His was not a coherent political, economic, social ideology and certainly not a particularly attractive one to most people between Morocco and Indonesia, or even a significant minority of them.” Bin Laden must have been surprised at how fully America rose to the bait, he says. “You’re sitting in your cave thinking, ‘You know, I’d really like to change how things in America work, I’d kind of like to create this new rift.’ And to get halfway there, or whatever, is an incredible success.

The indication that Obama, no matter how well he pronounces Pakistan, and is curious about the world around him, is like Bush on this issue is the fact he is obsessing about winning or rather about not losing any ground even if it means sacrificing the long term for the short-term.  My argument isn't that neither Obama nor Bush understood the issue, but rather that they were too afraid of taking punches in the short term to make the right decisions.

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.

Appropriatenesss

Scott McLemee on the celebrations in some corners of America following the announcement of OBL's death:

As someone living near enough to the White House to take the mission of the Flight 93 hijackers rather personally, I did not wish Osama bin Laden well. But celebrating his execution as a rite of closure seems both barbarous and bad magic; the spirit of revenge, once summoned, is hard to control. If the people in the subway car don’t start giving each other high-fives, that’s because some are already preparing themselves for the worst.

 

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.

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.

Convenient lies

Only one word comes to mind after reading these words from Alexander Cockburn:

(...) Obama only had one bloodied feather in his cap when he gave one of the most morally repellent speeches I have ever heard delivered from the White House. Bush at least had the crude brio of a semi-literate jock when he vaunted America's prowess. Obama's "we nailed him" paragraphs of mendacity concluded with Dickensian Heepishness: "Tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history." Alas, the actual story of the "our history" is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America's superior moral worth.

Cockburn isn't right, but it is difficult to say that he is  totally wrong (even though he can't help being over the top and needlessly mean about his truth) and that is the problem  for anybody who loves american as much as I do.

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.

Crickets!

Well it's Obama day on this blog. I will meditate and remain dignified.

Via hhurr (hat tip: Juan cole)

The death of the debate on terrorism

I almost totally agree with Greenwald when he makes the folloing assertion:

Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies.  At least during the Bush years, we had one party which steadfastly supported them but one party which claimed (albeit not very persuasively) to vehemently oppose them.  At least there was a pretense of vigorous debate over their legality, morality, efficacy, and compatibility with our national values. Those debates are no more.

It isn't just Obama who eliminated all mainstream debate, the Democrats and the America public are at fault too for the focus has been on the rresults and thus the consensus is that America can be protected at nay cost even the one of its Americanness. That said Greenwald is right, Obama has completed on the terror side the Cheneyisation of America.

The impossibility of moving forward without looking back

I agree with David Cole on this:

It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy. Until we own up to and provide a reckoning for the moral and criminal wrongs committed by officials at the very highest levels of the former administration, the fact that we tortured will continue to fester—and cause problems for its successor. The prevailing view in Washington seems to be that we should move on, but such wrongs cannot be forgotten. Try as we might to ignore it, the fact that we tortured and did nothing about it will periodically raise its head—in a failed prosecution, a foreign court judgment, or a terrorist incident inspired by images from Abu Ghraib. And even when it does not manifest itself so dramatically, the fact that the president of the United States was able to order torture, boast about it in a best-selling book, and walk way scot-free will fuel a deep vein of worldwide resentment. Torture and its after-effects will be with us until we are willing to confront them head-on.

In short, even the 'One' or rather especially the 'One' cannot redeem America's moral failings without doing more than simply saying that a page has been turned and that the past has passed. Obama has more than a torture problem, he has a moral one for he was elected to save America, to cleanse its soul; it is thus more difficult for him than for anyone else to argue that he is change if his point because that his sole election put Humpty Dumpty together again and makes clear that a lot was happened before him happened before him and therefore no longer matters.

Jesus cannot be Pontius Pilate.

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 significance of Gitmo

Pertinent words from Tim Black:

(...)the thorny significance of Guantanamo Bay, its provision of orange jump-suited grist to the anti-war mill, has little to do with the Coalition of the Willing’s ineptitude. That is, it’s not because security services and intelligence agencies have proved rubbish at keeping things hidden that the treatment of so-called enemy combatants has become such an issue. Nor is it a product of the often-repeated cross-government mantra of openness, transparency and so on. Rather, the unrelenting focus on Guantanamo Bay, with its steady stream of detainees-cum-plaintiffs, testifies to something else: the West’s inability to execute the ‘war on terror’.

Again, this is not due to incompetence. It is to do with the incoherence of a war that many, certainly in liberal elite circles, have come to see as insupportable. It is just not seen as legitimate. (...)The ‘war on terror’, however, has proved an angst-ridden, mission-doubting affair. And, as a result, the treatment of those detained in its name has lacked anything resembling justification. This is why rather than appearing as enemies, as terrorists intent on destroying Western civilisation - despite the best efforts of TV series 24 - the detainees have come to appear as victims of US-led, UK-backed barbarism.

Wars are not effective ways to fight terrorism

I agree with Juan Cole on this with one essential caveat, there is a huge difference between gullibility and faith-based or narrow-minded based blindness:

The point of 9/11 for Bin Laden was to drag the US into Middle Eastern quagmires. Not everyone is as gullible as George W. Bush and fringe terrorist groups should be dealt with quietly and effectively, not with big multi-trillion dollar wars.

Gitmo and Obama forever

The quote of the day is from Glenn Greenwald:

Guantanamo -- the closing of which was one of Obama's central campaign promises -- will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law. None of this is news to anyone even casually watching what's been going on, but there are several aspects of this article which are so noteworthy for illustrating how this administration works.  Let's begin with this:  Obama officials -- cowardly hiding behind anonymity as usual -- raise the typical excuse which they and their defenders perpetually invoke for their "failures" to fulfill their campaign positions:  it's all Congress' fault ("They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame," Savage writes)

Not Ok for Bush, Ok for Obama

Quote of the midday is from Bella Gerens:

Not that I ever expected him to be, but Obama is surely not the saviour he tried to make us all believe he was. And I absolutely do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to read our emails but it’s fine for Obama to authorise the assassination of an American citizen. I do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to deny foreign terrorism suspects their rights but it’s fine for Obama to do the same to American citizens on American soil. I do not understand why it was good that Obama was going to try Kalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civil court in Manhattan (where he would never get a fair trial), and now it’s also good that Obama’s not going to try American terrorism suspects in civil courts (where they might just have had a chance at a fair trial). I do not understand how American Congressmen can even propose this sort of thing during the administration of a constitutional lawyer, when the merest idiot can see that it’s plainly unconstitutional. There are no exceptions for terrorism in the Bill of Rights.

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. 

The irrational sacrifice of liberty in the name of security

The statement of the day is from Chris Dillow:

The uncertainty created by the threat of terrorism leads us to sacrifice liberty even though this doesn’t necessarily improve our security.

Cheap and infectious terror

Quote of the day from David Betz:

A few guys really committed guys with the level of infantry training you could get in a good reserve unit, equipped with stuff you can purchase from Tesco for a few hundred pounds, and weapons available to anyone with cash and criminal connections can cause a colossal amount of damage. Of course an interesting question is whether the two trend lines–self-start Jihadist ineptitude, increasing non-state death commando sophistication–are actually connected. Do they form part of a coherent strategy or are they independent phenomena? For that matter is the latter truly non-state? At any rate it seems to me that the question of resilience is highly germane. Let’s not ramp up fear without reason. But then again don’t fool yourself. Times Square is a point on a trend line. Mumbai is a point on a trend line. What’s next?

Trampling the Constitution to gain a temporary advantage

Stephen Bainbridge on the fact that some are calling for Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing, to be tortured or even to be stripped of his American citizenship(Joe Lieberman):

This despite the fact that the SOB is an American citizen arrested in the United States. Oddly, moreover, I don't recall the Journal or others on the right expressing the same concerns about Timothy McVeigh or those militia nuts that got arrested a few weeks ago.
I'm more than a little appalled about how readily some on the right are to toss out the window centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence to win temporary advantage.

It's always telling and alarming to realize that the rule of law to some is conditional and that the ends justify the means when it comes to security.

Drones, paradigms and international law

The sugary excerpt of  the day is from Kenneth Anderson on the implications of what one views of the Obama administration's decision to use drones as essential weapons to fight its war on terror:

If you talk about international crimes being committed by the CIA, each and every time it carries out a strike, those are words with consequences. It is hard to talk about merely “correcting” state practices to conform to international law in some general sense of the government of the United States, when the paradigm is that there are individuals who under principles of international criminal law, should not be undertaking a course correction by the administration. If that’s what you mean — and, please to observe, I don’t think this is the case at all — but if that’s what you mean, well, It should be indictment, arrest, and prosecution. For murder and extrajudicial execution and assassination. That’s what you mean if you invoke about international crimes; the whole paradigm is designed, by its nature, to reach to individuals and not simply “sides” in international law and politics

Fighting and Dying for a mistake

I agree with Tom Engelhardt on this:

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously?  Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England?  It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey.  Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.

I am reminded when I think of Afghanistan of John Kerry and of what he asked during his days as an anti-Vietnam activist "how do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Remaining in Afghanistan is a mistake not because it is Vietnam for all wars are different, but because the war is not winnable. It takes political courage to admit it and to realize that not every single battle against terrorism has to become an armed conflict. Whatever NATO does in Afghanistan there will always be Talibans  and Al Qaeda. It cannot change that essential fact because what is happening on the ground isn't changing that reality is feeding the hatred against 'foreigners' because they cannot transform Afghanistan into Japan.

The war on terror and its pervasive effects on gender

Quote of the morning from Gita Sahgal:

Torture was seen as something that primarily applies to men and not to the more routine ways in which women experience harm. Thus, the 'war on terror' has had a very profound effect on women’s rights. Yet there is really very little analysis of what has happened. So much commentary has concentrated simply on what Bush or Blair said about women’s rights at one time or another to further their own instrumental agenda, that we have simply ignored the areas where advances in women’s rights have been undermined - either because of a fundamentalist backlash to enforce what they consider their cultural and religious rights, or by human rights professionals who, as they see it, are trying to protect the purity of the human rights framework.

Setting a bad example on how to fight terrorism

Essential questions from Robert Wright on the assassination of suspected terrorists and drone policies of the Obama adminsitration:

If Harold Koh — the state department lawyer assigned the job of justifying Obama’s strategy — carries the day, America will be telling the world that it’s O.K. to lob missiles into countries that haven’t attacked you, as long as you think a terrorist may live there. Do we really want to send that message to, for example, Russia and China, both of which have terrorism problems? Or India or Pakistan?
And are we sure we want to say that, actually, due process of law isn’t really guaranteed all American citizens so long as there’s a war on terrorism — which, remember, is a war that may continue for eternity?

The answer to Wright's questions is of course no. That doesn't matter because the US or rather the Obama administration has found what it believes to be a cheap and effective way to fight terrorism everywhere. It is going to keep using it until the blowback.

Kill not to detain

Sugary excerpt of the day from Asim Qureshi lamenting that the Obama doctrine in the war on terror is more deadly than Bush doctrine since it is choosing to kill even US citizens suspected of terrorism rather to detain them:

The US would like us to believe that we should simply trust that they have the relevant evidence and information to justify such a killing, without bringing the individual to account before a court.
The assumption that trust should be extended to a government that has involved itself in innumerable unlawful and unconscionable practices since the start of the war on terror is too much to ask. Whatever goodwill the US government had after 9/11 was destroyed by the way in which it prosecuted its wars. Further, the hope that came with the election of Barack Obama has faded as his policies have indicated nothing more than a reconfiguration of the basic tenet of the Bush Doctrine – that the US's national security interests supersede any consideration of due process or the rule of law. The only difference – witness the rising civilian body count from drone attacks – being that Obama's doctrine is even more deadly.

He's our despot

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

George Bush's decision merely to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or to detain without due process Americans such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense complaints from Democrats and progressives.  All of that was disparaged as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of Law.  Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed with no oversight and no due process of any kind.  And the reaction among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent, (...)

This double standard just shows that for too many 'principled' 'liberals and democrats the trouble with George Bush wasn't what he was doing, but who they believed he was: not one of them or rather the enemy. Obama gets the benefit of the doubt, because he is one of them and therefore they assume that he is protecting their interests. It's just another troubling variation of identity politics, one where transgressions matter less than the identity of the transgressor. Obama is proving that the US is a nation of men not one of laws. In short, Nixon was almost right, for most Americans  if they love the president, whatever he does is for their own and legal just like any good parent father.

The futility of suicide attacks

Interesting stuff from Max Boot on the effectiveness of suicide attacks:

There is no doubt that suicide attacks can be deadly -- and terrifying. But are they effective in furthering the larger goals of the attackers? Osama bin Laden & Co. would like us to think so. Jihadists crow that they "love death" while the West "loves life," giving them an insuperable advantage that no conventional army can overcome. Some Western analysts have added to the hype by arguing, in essence, that suicide attacks are a "poor man's smart bomb" and a tactic against which democratic states have only one recourse: giving in to the bombers' demands.
Actually, the most comprehensive database of post-1980 suicide attacks -- compiled by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago -- suggests a very different conclusion. Terrifying as it is, suicide bombing is a tactic with a very low rate of return. (...)The futility of suicide attacks should not be surprising given that they are the last resort of the weak and desperate. The Japanese did not make use of kamikazes until it was apparent they would lose World War II. Their attacks inflicted considerable damage on U.S. warships but also redoubled the American determination to defeat Japan.

My only question is whether the point of suicide attacks is to change policy or just to terrify.

Non-policy changing terrorism

Provocative point by Julia Ioffe on the Moscow bombings, provocative, but I'm wondering whether she's right, I suspect that she is

(...)when taken in the broader context of Russia and the slow-motion conflict in the Northern Caucasus -- the 2004 explosion in the market in the southern Russian city of Samara (10 dead, 60 wounded), the two Russian passenger planes that simultaneously fell from the sky that same year (89 dead), the suicide bombing that nearly killed the Ingush president in June -- the blasts in the Moscow subway by two female jihadis were just another parry, and not a very damaging one at that.

The bigger point is that there always come a time when terrorism stops to matter in the sense that it no longer has a significant affect either on politics or politics because it has happened before on a bigger scale and that people, more importantly politicians have integrated within normalcy.  One only has to hear Putin speak to realize that the Moscow bombings neither changed his mindset nor his politics.

Terror and retaliation

Quote of the mid-day from a Muscovite touched by the Moscow metro suicide attacks:

To be honest I don't know anything about Chechnya. I just know they are dangerous people. They should all be kicked out of Moscow.

Chechnya and suicide bombings

Informative conclusion to an Op-ed in the New York Times written by Robert O Pape, Lindsey O'Rourke, and Jenna McDermit on the Moscow metro bombings and what it says about Chechnya suicide terrorism

(...) the picture is clear: Chechen suicide terrorism is strongly motivated by both direct military occupation by Russia and by indirect military occupation by pro-Russia Chechen security forces. Building on the more moderate policies of 2005 to 2007 might not end every attack, but it could well reduce violence to a level both sides can live with.
Because the new wave of Chechen separatists see President Kadyrov as a puppet of the Kremlin, any realistic solution must improve the legitimacy of Chechnya’s core social institutions. An initial step would be holding free and fair elections. Others would include adopting internationally accepted standards of humane conduct among the security forces and equally distributing the region’s oil revenues so that Chechnya’s Muslims benefit from their own resources.
No political solution would resolve every issue. But the subway attacks should make clear to Russia that quelling the rebellion with diplomacy is in its security interests. As long as Chechens feel themselves under occupation — either directly by Russian troops or by their proxies — the cycle of violence will continue wreaking havoc across Russia.

It's troubling to admit, but it don't think that reason matters here for the Russians are going to retaliate. They live in a world where not doing so would be a form of capitulation and a sign of weakness. Unfortunately, when it comes to fighting terrorism manliness is the way to go..

The dangers of historical amnesia

Quote of the mid-day from Michael Bérubé's worth-reading on the Chomsky and Krugman lefts:

No one on the American left believes that the United States was a happy land of benevolence and ponies prior to 9/11. But I believe that the theory of the unitary executive, the practice of indefinite detention, and the justifications of torture mounted after 9/11 are, in fact, qualitatively different from the policies of the American government before 9/11 and that no good purpose is served by blurring the distinction.
Perhaps there are some historical amnesiacs out there somewhere who need to be reminded of the bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of Allende, and the funding of death squads in Central America lest they lapse into the belief that the United States “lost its innocence” (yet again!) when the towers fell. But if you are calling for an investigation into the crimes of the Bush Administration, as Krugman was, then it is absolutely critical to understand—and to persuade your fellow citizens—why those crimes specifically are worth investigating, why they are not just the same old same old on a different day.

Russia against terrorism

James Sherr poses some excellent questions about the Moscow Metro attacks, which suggest that they might lead to a radicalization of its war on terror:

In recent years, Russia has been no stranger to gruesome attacks, including several on the Moscow metro itself. In the weeks ahead, it will be tempting to conclude that the situation is no worse than it has been up to now.
But the 29 March attack raises at least two ominous questions: is it coincidental that an attack on a metro station adjacent to the once notorious headquarters of the security services has followed the November 2009 attack on the prestigious Nevsky Express, which is widely utilised by members of the business and political elite? Those behind Monday's attack might well wish to demonstrate that the Russian state is not only powerless to defend ordinary citizens but also 'its own' and itself.The second question is whether such attacks will be intensified ahead of the 2012 presidential elections. Further attacks on symbols of state power could erode the prestige of those who rode to power in 1999 on the back of equally traumatic outrages and have staked everything on the restoration of Russia's integrity and strength.

I'm just wondering if a war on terror is going to fix Russia's Chechen problem for it seems that it is creating more terrorists willing to kill barbarically innocent people. Russia won't back down and Chechen's extremists won't either. More innocent are thus going to die, which is stomach turning.

Obama's America as a permanent War state

I don't agree with John Pilger on the following,but what he writes shows how attractive war can become for a country such like the United States when there is a widespread fear of being attack or of losing power:

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein.

What I wonder if why people who share Pilger's view believed stupidly that Obama would change that reality when their hero makes people feel better just by looking like change and thus in fact almost killing the need to push for actual change. Obama has no incentive in being different, to the contrary, he just needs to be a normal president, pass some legislation and people would that as the greatest achievement for they still believe that race is a basis for identity.

Obama and the redefinition of the war on terror

Interesting point from Noah Feldman on Obama and 'the war on terror':

Beyond the technical legal issues, this debate is about the fundamental question of whom we are at war with. (...) The two problems most plaguing Obama in the war on terrorism are trials for terrorists and taking the fight beyond Afghanistan to places like Pakistan and Yemen. This issue of whom we are at war with defines both of them.

The issue is that as the Bush administration, the Obama team has realized that it will crippled by a terrorist attack. It has therefore chosen to take all the power that it can get to fight terrorism or rather to keep the ones that Bush got even it means renouncing to some important principles. Obama knows that given all the hysteria (ideological for the most) around his americanness/postamericanness, his race, and his toughness, one attack is enough to kill his presidency.

Pakistan, Drone attacks, and the Obama administration

For more on the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere by the Obama administration and its implications, read Professor Anderson's excellent article on the subject, Predators over Pakistan. Harold Koh gave a speech defending the Obama administration and its positions on international law. Kevin Heller offers a convincing rebuttal to Koh's arguments.

Islamism and Irony

TF Lane argues that Islamists are 'ironists':

Irony tends to be used in one of two ways: as an ideology or a tool. Used as a tool, it is possessive of a deeply affirmative power: that individual refusal to be coerced or to submit to tyranny – what WH Auden calls the “Ironic points of light / [that] Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages”.
Islamists believe this is the way they employ irony. The car bombs and beheadings, the audiotapes and jihadist websites, the curers who kill and the vocal opponents of free speech – all of them are “points of light”. Each is a message from the Just, piercing the obscure lies of liberalism.(...)
Many secular commentators talk of Islamism as a radical ideology. But jihadists believe there is nothing idea-listic about it: to them, there is a moral map beneath their feet as ordered and patterned as a well-spun rug. It is a code written down more than a thousand years ago, the unchangeable words of God, and a glimpse into a higher realm. What we engage with as reality, they view as an elaborate fiction.

The only question that I have is whether the use of irony here isn't common to all religious fundamentalist groups, which want to merge the religious with the political and needs enemies in this militant conquest. Are Islamists a particular breed of fundamentalists? I don't think that they are, but I could be wrong.

Terrorism and wimpish politics

I agree with Sean Collins on this:

But this ‘Republicans strong, Democrats weak’ discussion obscures a more fundamental consensus between the two parties. Both establish anti-terror polices on the premise that the country is vulnerable and at risk. And both therefore overplay the threat posed by possible terror attacks.
The common assumption is that the American people are afraid, worried about the next explosion, and therefore in need of heavy state protection. And since, therefore, all it takes to traumatise the masses is an isolated bomb, it is taken as a given that any party in office at the time of an attack would be severely damaged in political terms. In this, both parties have agreed to allow the terrorists to define success, and have collaborated in reorganising US life around tiny groups.
When American politicians talk about getting ‘tough’ on terrorism, about pursuing a ‘war’ on it, they are actually using code-words for saying ‘we are scared shitless’. And in that respect, both parties are wimps; in fact, if anything, the noisier Republicans are the biggest wimps of all.

The frightening thing is that the question is never asked whether tough talk on terrorism followed by bad policies is effective because it is assumed that it is better to talk tough and to fail rather than to talk softly and to success. In short, tough talk sells because it is flashy and wimpish politics is prevalent because the worst fear of an American politician is our age is to perceived as girly and therefore unwilling and unable to protect Americans.

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

The global war on crime

I agree with this:

America must recognise that not all the terror its suffers from abroad is the work of terrorists. Since the destruction of the twin towers in 2001, the West has been so consumed by terrorism that it has focused insufficiently on criminality. Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions,North Korea, Albania, the Balkans — these and other failed or failing states demand at least as much of our attention. If oil-rich but tottering Nigeria, for instance, were to tumble, the impact on both Africa and the world would be catastrophic.
These are not necessarily terrorist havens, but their actions can have terrifying consequences for the West none the less. It is time the war on terror was matched more rigorously by a global war on crime.

I think that the single-minded focus on terrorism has been to the detriment of the fight against so many crimes, which have also dangerous consequences. The point is that single-mindedness is never an effective way to ensure security and political stability in a world that is too integrated, too complicated, too interdependent for its ills to be solved solely by the 'war on terror.'

Waterboarding Jesus

I'm have to admit that I'm speechless after reading's Garry Wills's post on torture and Jesus:

Our recent torture techniques seem directly linked to the treatment Jesus received. Our prisoners were stripped, subjected to head bangings and face slappings. This was not torture, according to torturologist John Yoo. It may have been painful but it did not inflict permanent damage—except to human dignity. And making prisoners wear women’s underwear on their faces, or smearing them with what they were told was menstrual blood, was breaking down their deepest ideas of worth in their own culture and their own pride. It was a derisive “crowning.”
I do not know what went through the minds of secular or non-Christian torturers. But Christian torturers might have reason to have tortured consciences themselves when or if they remember what Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew (25.31ff). Asked who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who comforted him in prison. Asked who will be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who would not comfort him in prison. His listeners ask, “When were you in prison, that we came to you or did not?” He answers: “Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest (elackistoi), you did to me.” Christians should face this sobering fact: in their treatment of the lowliest of men, they were torturing Jesus, renewing what the Roman soldiers did to him.

This is why I've always be bothered by the religiosity of American politics and about the fact that too many American politicians and policy makers seem to wonder "what would Jesus do" when facing important dilemmas. The trouble is that it is a stupid question to ask for Jesus, assuming that he existed, wasn't about governing and policy and more importantly it is a petty tentative to place the responsibility for their actions on a force/being in order not face their conscience and to answer tough questions about the consequences of their decisions.

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.

Missed opportunity for American-led multipolirty

I would like to agree with Nikolas Gvosdev on this:

The attacks of Sept. 11 created a second opportunity. In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the destruction at the Pentagon, governments around the world were stunned -- the fruits of globalization, which had so advanced the cause of prosperity, could also be utilized by those who would seek to bring down the state. What's more, all governments were vulnerable -- democracies and non-democracies, developed and developing states alike. The shock to supply chains around the world in the attacks' aftermath, when interruptions in air travel and new security procedures impeded the flow of goods and services, made many realize how vulnerable the international system really was. And because the rising and resurgent powers had harnessed their chariots to the horses of global economic growth, they were amenable to finding common ground.
As a result, the anti-terrorist coalition could have become the basis for a new concert of powers. But the give-and-take of the classic concert system, in which a series of quid pro quos set the basis for collective decisions, was a mindset largely alien to both the Bush administration and Congress. With a new concert not in the making, and with the U.S. making clear it would act unilaterally in order to secure its own interests, other states began to find ways not to openly challenge the United States (...)

Hum, I'm reluctant to buy Nikolas Gvosdev's arguments because I'm wondering if power can really be shared when it hasn't be earned based on feel-good principles and charity. I'm starting to believe that the biggest failure for a hegemon is to use power in circumstances when it cannot help it and will therefore weaken it. Moreover, recent developments in international affairs have led me to question the concept of multipolarity. I don't think that the world can't ever be multipolar for it is always the powerful who make the decision not really in unison, but through real political bargaining, which reflects the reality of the day. Thus, the biggest mistake of the Bush administration wasn't really unilateralism, but ideology, incompetence, and a blindness to reality. It was so inflexibly ideological that in too many cases, it never took the steps that were required to win and to achieve its objectives because it as decided that reality didn't matter and was almost never going to get in the way of its ideology.When you are a Hegemon, failed demonstrations of strength will weaken you every time.

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.