The Republic of Dissent

Politically correct approach to counter-terror

Foreseeable crap from Eugene Kontorovich:

Russia only succeeded in suprresing the Chechen Islamists with extremely brutal tactics that would never find support in the U.S – essentially leveling the Chechen capital. Yet dealing with such a threat would also be impossible with a politically correct approach to counter-terror that, for example, turns away from talking frankly about the terrorists profiles and motives.

Yeah let's transform America into Russia, it won't be too difficult for Obama has at least one thing in common with Putin.

Is it possible to wait to now more facts before advocating ideological measures in the name of security?

Extensive, perpetual, and cheap wars

I agree with David Cole's comment on the now infamous US Justice Department's Drone White paper :

Drone technology has made it possible to use lethal force in many situations where we could not or would not have even considered it in the past. Unlike conventional military operations, drone attacks require no “boots on the ground,” and therefore do not pose a risk to American lives. Unlike bombings, they have pinpoint accuracy; they therefore reduce the collateral costs of killing and may be easier to disavow. Because drones can effectively travel the world while being controlled remotely from home, they permit the “war” to move far beyond the battlefield. And drones have made it possible for the US government to do something that was unthinkable before, and should be unthinkable still—to kill its own citizens in secret. In short, drones radically reduce the disincentives to killing. And that may well make a nation prone to use military force before it is truly a last resort. That certainly seems to be what has happened here.

Kenneth Anderson has a interesting take on the subject.

 

Détruire n'est pas créer

I agree with Tim Black on this:

Under Cameron’s gaze, the problems in Mali are simply collapsed into a grand narrative in which good people fight bad people, just as Blair, alongside President George W Bush, proceeded to view world affairs through the prism of the ‘war on terror’.

The narcissism of this essentially Blairite approach to foreign policy is as incredible as it is reckless. In each case, they really do think this conflict is about them. Arbitrarily chosen, far-flung trouble spots act as ad hoc stages on which a Western leader can show the people back at home just what a good person he is. For Cameron, it was Libya and now neighbouring African states. For Blair, it was the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq.

It was a grisly irony, then, that while Blair spoke of the necessity of intervention in north Africa, of trying to do the right thing, the stage of his most infamous display of doing the right thing – Iraq – appeared once more on the fringes of the world’s news bulletins: a suicide bomber, aided by several others, had attacked a police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed and 105 were injured.

At some point, there has to be the recognition that as Camus would say détruire n'est pas créer and that destroying monsters ( which is more often than not about seeking them desperately) isn't the same as fixing problems that are so complex that they require something more than the use of force.

That said power, faith and money have pierced Blair's eyes and ears, which explains why he isn't just irrelevant, but the epitome of what political success can do to the people who are more ambitious and self-righteous than anything else.

Mali, Niger, France, US, Whac-A-Mole

From the great Stephen W. Smith:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

THIS can't end well!

Still Hubris and incompetence

From Brendan O'Neill:

What the current instability in north Africa really reveals is not that Islamists are taking over the world, but rather that Western governments are utterly incapable of acting in their own interests on the international stage these days. The chasm that now separates what is in the West’s interests and what the West actually does in global politics is enormous. So determined were the British and French to score some PR points by bombing Libya in 2011 that they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the potential consequences – and now the French military, backed by Britain, is getting stuck into the Libyan fallout in Mali, and both governments are panicked by what is happening in Algeria. The true danger on the world stage today is not a global Islamist conspiracy to demolish Western values, but rather the fact that international affairs is now overseen by immature, narcissistic showboaters who know nothing of realpolitik, nothing of diplomacy, nothing of blowback, and nothing of history.

The trouble with hubris and incompetence is that they lead to a stubborn blindness that makes results inconsequential for the emphasis is placed on feeling good rather than on doing what works.

Conceptual boxes

From Daniel Drezner:

Foreign policy pundits are just like the rest of the monkey-brain population -- we like to put things in clear conceptual boxes -- particularly when we lack specific knowledge of the particulars, as is the case with Mali.  It will be easy, in the coming days, to put Mali into the "Afghanistan" box (bad) or the "Libya" box (good or bad depending on your partisan affiliation) or what have you.  Given that France and the West African countries are willing to shoulder the primary military burden of this engagement, however, it would seem that the U.S. could ramp up some humanitartian assistance for the affected areas.

Ah haven't we seen all of 'THIS' before and has fixing it ever worked?

Not yet

This from Gregory Mann is worrisome:

Mali differs from Afghanistan in important ways.

Mali is not (yet) a deeply militarized society — although in the months since Tuareg fighters returned from Qadaffi’s Libya that is changing rapidly.

Mali is not (yet) a narco-state. Northern Mali has become a lucrative zone for drug smuggling, which finances al Qaeda franchises worldwide. Yet none of those drugs are produced in Mali, where Afghanistan’s poppy growers have no parallel. Faced with stiffer surveillance and interdiction, smugglers will go elsewhere.

Finally, Mali is not (yet) a failed state. True, it is grievously weakened, and its army is in disarray. But the government continues to function in the territory it holds. Children go to school, civil servants go to work, and people go about their business.

 I have the sinking feeling that most people are guessing when it comes to Mali just as they were about Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and that more often than not their guesses are not even educated, but based on hubris and wishful thinking.

Owning Mali

From Robert Fox:

Once more we are hearing of the need to combat an international threat from global Islamist extremism. No one dares use the term ‘war against terror' any longer, but the West faces many of the same questions as in the campaigns launched by President George W Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq.

France is in danger of finding that it owns the Mali problem, so weak is the Mali government and its forces. A long and uncertain ground campaign awaits them.

It's always dangerous to own a country one doesn't understand, isn't willing to allow to grow up and to thus make its own decisions.

Predictable unknowns

Pertinent stuff from James Blitz:

In May 2011, many believed the global jihadist movement had been dealt a decisive blow with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Now, jihadist threats have emerged on two new and significant fronts. Whether AQIM in Mali and Jabhat al Nusra in Syria turn out to be movements with broad ambitions and which challenge western interests remains to be seen. What cannot be doubted, however, is that the toppling of Gaddafi, who was ultimately the west’s ally in the fight against regional jihadist groups, is a factor in their rise to prominence.

Unfortunately thoughtfulness and patience are not essential qualities in the elaboration and enactment of foreign policy of countries too worried about their power to focus on results instead of actions and reactions.

A quagmire in the desert

Art Goldhammer on the French intervention in Mali:

I don't know if it is possible to have a quagmire in a desert, but Mali may offer an example.

The problem is that wars nowadays are won on TV especially when the victims are more than likely going to be people with no media access and to whom most, especially journalists, will have a hard time relating to!

The Hollywoodization of torture

Quote of the early morning from Karen J. Greenberg:

Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy.  If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?

Hollywood has never really been about liberalism as much as it has always been about triumphalism. It embraces torture through Zero Dark Thirty because it has no memory (it gets in the way of good and fluffy stories and of the romanticization of history) and believes that everything did indeed changed after 9/11 including what is permissible and forbidden. 

Rien ne change

Obviously, I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

t is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus.

Quelle surprise!

Moral distance

I agree with professor Bainbridge on this:

After all, the moral distance between Bush and Obama has gotten quite narrow.

Mali as Afghanistan in 1996

The dumbest statement I have read this week so far from Francois Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research via the Washington Post:

This is like Afghanistan 1996. This is like when Bin Laden found a place that was larger than France in which he could organize training camps, in which he could provide stable preparations for organizing far-flung terror attacks. 

Comparaison n'est pas raison. Comparing Mali to Afghanistan is as smart and as appropriate as comparing Cap-Vert to Monaco. Wrong similes and metaphors in international politics are always signs of impending doom.

It's still Bush's world

Best comment on last night's debate from Gregor Peter Schmitz over at Spiegel:

Romney and Obama exchanged carefully prepared platitudes as though they were trapped in a world order created for them by White House predecessor George W. Bush.(...) Indeed, it appears as though Stevens' death in election year 2012 has been enough to overshadow the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other top terrorists from al-Qaida and other networks. It has been enough to keep America fixated on the war on terror and preoccupied with the Middle East.

The paradox of this fixation shown by both candidates is that neither Obama nor Romney have shown a real interest in the Muslim world. Despite overtures early in his term, the president did little thereafter to ensure that progress was made. The only regional issue that appears to be high on his priority list is Iran's nuclear program. Romney's plan for the region appears to consist almost entirely of unconditional support for Israel. Both candidates want to continue using drones unhindered.

There is so much cause for concern and the scariest thing is the paralysis of the American media.

Protracted wars

From Glenn Greenwald:

One of the primary reasons war - especially protracted war - is so destructive is not merely that it kills the populations at whom it is aimed, but it also radically degrades the character of the citizenry that wages it. That's what enables one of America's most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash or even paying lip service to the heinous tragedy of that, and have it be barely noticed. Joe Klein is the face not only of the Obama legacy, but also mainstream US political culture.

I'm not sure this is just an American 'thing' for it has to do with power and the  complacency that comes with a sense of entitlement.

Drones and the final debate

I agree totally with Tony Junod on this:

We have been told, many times, that each killing carried out by the administration is accompanied by vigorous and even agonized debate about its legality, advisability, efficacy, and morality. That debate, however has remained staunchly internal — has remained secret — and it has become clear that the only way to find out what our two presidential candidates think about the implications of the Lethal Presidency is to ask them, tonight, at the debate in Florida. President Obama has limited his comments to all but the most self-serving circumstance, and Governor Romney has spoken only through inference and through the often confounding comments of his foreign-policy surrogates. Bob Schieffer should know that if he does not ask a question about targeted killing tonight, he is — we are — unlikely to get another chance.

Unfortunately,the main concern of most journalists and of most Americans is to protect America by whichever means necessary. Thus, until Americans feel secure, they are going to be willing to let the president do whatever it takes to keep them safe even if they sense that the means used are wrong and will mean apologizing and regretting them in the future. 

The Benghazi political grenade

From Blake Hounshell on Hillary Clinton taking responsibility for the increasingly Benghazi political hot potato:

(...)Clinton's comments are obviously going to get wide play and will of course be instantly politicized -- regardless of whether she's merely doing the right thing, or whether she's actually just shielding Obama from scrutiny ahead of Tuesday night's debate, as some are already suggesting, or whether, as the conspiracy-minded would have it, she's pulling some Machiavellian maneuver to appear like she's taking responsibility only to make the president look bad and set herself up for 2016. (Clinton may have unintentionally set Obama up to be more directly attacked, by the way: Three Repubublican senators already have issued a press release saying that the president himself needs to take responsibility.)

I never  thought that the way the Obama administration handled the 9/11 Benghazi attack was a political issue until it started reacting too defensively against Republicans' attacks as if it didn't have the excuse of known unknowns and unknown knows as Rumsfeld would said.  That said, Clinton's latest statement now makes it a symbolic political issue at least in one way (which may be insignificant for more people than not may be happy to see her political wounded): how are Clintonites going to react if Obama doesn't at the very come to her bed side now that she has fallen on her sword? How much does Bill still enthusiastically help the One? 

The age of hurt feelings

I agree wholeheartedly with Alex Massie on this:

Perhaps it wasn’t sufficiently appreciated at the time but Rushdie was the victim of a terrorist campaign. Not just Rushdie either. Anyone associated with The Satanic Verses was a target too. That meant publishers, translators, even bookshops and libraries. All these were targeted and people were murdered.

Rushdie was a test. In the west, your claim to be a decent liberal in a decent liberal society was at stake. In the east, the stakes were very much higher. Those people who pusillanimously suggested Rushdie must carry some responsibility for violence for which he bore no responsibility at all betrayed would-be modernisers in the Arab world and those Imams and other muslim “community leaders” who had the courage to say Iranian politics should reach no further than the Straits of Hormuz. Some of those people were murdered too.

All this, however, was the beginning of a time in which taking offence would be elevated to an art form. Not all such faux-outraged, manipulated, foolishness would be as consequential or as violent as the Rushdie affair but, viewed retrospectively, I think you can see The Satanic Verses as the unhappy opening to The Age of Hurt Feelings.

I am amazed that I live in an age when people can do whatever they want and can get away with unreason, stupidity and violence by asserting that their feelings are hurt as if being hurt means being right.

 

La fin justifie les moyens...

Two quotes on Obama's kill list and assassination powers.

The first from Glenn Greenwald:

In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that. (...)to summarize the Obama campaign’s apparent argument: it’s absolutely vital that we know all about the GOP nominee’s tax shelters and financial transactions over the last decade (and indeed, we should know about that), but we need not bother ourselves with how the Democratic nominee is deciding which Americans should die, his claimed legal authority for ordering those hits, the alleged evidence for believing the target deserves to be executed, or the criteria used to target them. So low are one’s expectations for an American Election Year that there are very few spectacles so absurd as to be painful to behold, but the Obama campaign’s waving of the transparency flag definitely qualifies.

The second from Joseph Lelyveld:

Just how is a president supposed to take on terrorists thousands of miles away whom he believes to be targeting the country he’s sworn to protect in a constitutional manner? Should he file an extradition request with the government in Islamabad or, as Bill Clinton did before September 11 but after the attacks on the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa, lob cruise missiles from the Arabian Sea and hope for the best?

To settle this debate, we only have to quote Karl Marx or rather to use a Marx's quote used by Camus in the Rebel:

An end which requires unjustified means is no justifiable end.

 

The appearance of toughness

Former National Intelligence director Dennis Blair on the use of drones by the Obama administration:

It is the politically advantageous thing to do--low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.

 Boy did Obama punk the Norwegian Committee which gave him the Novel Peace Prize believing that he would be a worldly American president because he asserted that he was a citizen of the world!

Racist France

Sugary excerpt from Adrian Hamilton with whom I disagree obviously and strongly (h/t Gilles Klein):

For all the public statements over the past few days on the need for national unity, France remains a deeply racist country. The threat of Muslim terror has allowed the French to transfer their resentments away from the Jewish population to the Arab one, and to feel the better for it. But the sentiments are exactly the same and made only the worse by rising unemployment and slowing growth.

I disagree with Hamilton because his assertion is as easy as it is stupid. It is always dumb to characterize a country as racist based on the traits of some of its citizens because that would make it possible to argue that Britain is anti-French and that America is an ignorant country. The point is that Hamilton makes critical mistakes because he doesn't know the context and  is emboldened to make grand, empty, and mistaken statements by his complex of superiority undoubtedly created by his certainty to be right ad to come from a better/purer country; that might just be called racism for people who are Hamilton is eager to condemn with knowledge and too much self-sastisfying zeal.

Occupation and fiasco

Juan Cole on the latest troubling 'incident' in Afghanistan:

An Afghanistan expert asked me, “How was an armed soldier able to leave a well-defended US military base at 3 in the morning without being challenged?” “There is more,” he said darkly, “to this than meets the eye.” Another troubling question is whether it was wise to send this man on 3 Iraq rotations and one Afghan one. Wouldn’t that warp a person, that intensity of years-long combat?

The fairness or unfairness of the contextless collage below is irrelevant to its emotional impact on Afghans whose sense of national sovereignty is being injured by the more-than-a-decade US occupation of their country. Going into homes where there are unveiled women, and exposing them to the gaze of 18 year old strange American men, is always going to anger Afghans. I’ve had US government people almost shout at me that such considerations cannot be allowed to come into play when you are doing counter-terrorism, that the chief thing is to find the weapons caches. But this kind of thing is why the Iraqi parliament voted the US troops right out of their country as soon as they could, and if the Afghan parliament had any real power, it would, too (some parliamentarians have already called for a jihad against the US over the Qur’an burning fiasco).

The disturbing thing is that it is possible to know how that the war in Afghanistan will end and the sole issue is how much the US will lose getting to the end because it cannot admit that it can't win.

Bush is still here

One more person, or rather Nathalie Rothschild in this case, has seen the light:

The revelations that the NYPD routinely infiltrates places like schools, dollar stores and Halal restaurants in the name of rooting out terrorism shows – yet again – that civil-rights assaults were not a Bush-era anomaly, but continue under, and are literally sponsored by, the Obama administration.

The trouble with identity politics is that it makes policy and actions secondary and even unimportant for the focus is placed on the persona of the doer and  on whether he is 'one of us.'

In short, the main issue that many liberals/democrats had with Bush was that he wasn't one of them. His policies were never really the problem for they were seen as the proof of his otherness, of his stupidity and unculture. Obama is seen as smart and cultured so there is no way for too many people that his policies can be barbaric and simply dumb!

Le salaire de la peur

I agree with Frank Furedi on this although I would phrase the same point differently and for in my opinion there isn't such a thing as 'Western culture':

In fact, the way that society responds to acts of individual terror represents a far greater threat than the destruction caused by the lone wolf himself. The inflation of the threat empowers the lone wolf, who may conclude that relatively modest acts of terrorism are likely to achieve a disproportionate impact. The best example of this was the Washington sniper in the summer of 2002, who literally managed to terrorise the capital city of the most powerful nation on Earth for some considerable time. Constant live television coverage and political discussion of the shootings unconsciously fuelled a palpable sense of fear and anxiety, and served as an invitation to be terrorised - they empowered the shooter, making him into a mighty threat to the capital of the United States.

From time to time – fortunately very rarely – the lone wolf succeeds in causing great physical damage. But it is not the scale of this damage that endows the lone wolf with such significance. They are not simply a physical but also a cultural threat. They serve as symbols of a society that is not quite at ease with itself, one that feels culturally fragmented and atomised. In the end the lone wolf works as a metaphor, with the emphasis on the sensibility of being isolated and alone. The image of a socially disconnected young man sitting in front of a screen, lost in the world of online confusion, is one with which society is all too familiar. Disconnected from us but not immune to the virus of radicalisation, they become people whose behaviour can easily become unrestrained and uncontained by social norms. That is the threat they pose. It is the insecurity that surrounds Western culture that has encouraged officialdom’s dangerous dramatisation of the lone wolf.

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.