The Republic of Dissent

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.

Wars of choice and patriotism

I agree with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Supporting wars of choice where no vital national interests are at stake is not a very good litmus test of one's patriotism.

Even though I agree with Bainbridge, I wonder whether it is possible to be a dove even in cases of wars of necessity and to be a patriot. Does patriotism has anything or rather everything to do with wars or rather with supporting them? I have the feeling the answer is much more complicated that suggested above, but at least Professor Bainbridge begins to denounce the simplistic and vile notion that in wars,  there are only two sides the patriotic and the unpatriotic ones.

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.

'Europe' failed the Libyan test

On point analysis from Charlemagne:

It is not just the fate of Libyans that is in the balance in the war against Muammar Qaddafi, but the commitment of Europeans to maintain - and, when necessary, deploy - serious military forces. Responsibility to protect requires, first and foremost, the means to protect.

The Europeans failed the Libyan test because they didn't give themselves the means to succeed; they were obsessed with the fear that Libya might become their 'Iraq' or 'Afghanistan.' In short, one of the EU's major problems is that it knows that it has a parent, the US, who may have many children and who may sometimes be irritated by it, but who feels closest to it, most of the time(that closeness will change with time).

Humanitarian intervention, Syria, and legitimacy

Oh no, not again:

Humanitarian intervention in Syria, under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine so often mentioned in the halls of the United Nations, would send a powerful message to Syrians and the Middle East. The people would feel validated, their plight recognized. Simply put: it would instill hope in a part of the world in dire need of it.

What we are learning from Libya and from the past is that humanitarian interventions remain wars that have to be fought and won. Good intentions, legitimating  righteous uprisings and even fighting bad regimes are never enough to make humanitarian interventions work in a world where images are everything and where wars are fought on the cheap to put it bluntly!

NATO's identity crisis

 I agree with Mick Hume on this:

Today, over Libya, NATO stands exposed as an empty shell, an alliance in name alone. The US no longer exercises global leadership through NATO. Instead it has effectively withdrawn from the Libyan conflict and pushed NATO forwards in its stead. Yet no other NATO member has the wherewithal or the will to take the lead. For all their pretensions to playing an independent role, even the French government is now reduced to complaining that the Americans should do more.
When the US, French and British leaders published their joint call to arms on Libya earlier this month, it looked less like a collective show of strength than an exercise in buck-passing, each trying to hide behind one another and the paper shield of NATO. It was striking that no NATO members responded to the request to send more warplanes to bomb the Gaddafi regime – not even US president Barack Obama. Lacking leadership and direction, the NATO states are now like longstanding members of a club who still begrudgingly pay their dues, but take little active part in its activities, while grumbling about one another’s habits and especially about the self-aggrandising committee members.

Just one question, no two : why does NATO still exist? And why did Sarkozy thought it was a brilliant idea for France to reintegrate NATO''s military command? The answer to one of these questions is pretty obvious.

BHL, Germany and Libya

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Germany's stand on the Libyan intervention (it abstained on the UN security council's vote of  resolution 1973 establishing a No fly zone):

We lost a great deal of time because of the Germans, which is a disaster, mainly for the Libyans, but also for the Germans, who will pay bitterly for abstaining. What happened here will leave a lasting impression in Europe. And Germany will run into problems in its legitimate effort to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel jettisoned all principles of German foreign policy since the end of World War II: There was the principle that something like National Socialism should never happen again. Never again crimes against humanity. Merkel and (German Foreign Minister Guido) Westerwelle violated this pact. This is a serious incident, not a minor detail. (...) Angela Merkel has the worst foreign minister Germany has had in a long time. Guido Westerwelle is a disaster. Immediately after the German abstention, he told your magazine: "Gadhafi has to go." It's really Westerwelle who ought to go, but he doesn't even seem to be ashamed of his decision, of this valley of shame.

I have stopped taking BHL seriously on those matters (it took me a long time because often I agree with his conclusions, but never with his argumentation)  because even when he is right, he can't get out of his own way and resist the temptation of self-righteousness.  The fact that he was so involved on Sarkozy's decision to take the lead in Libya worries me not because BHL is an unsavory and unserious character, but because he doesn't understand foreign policy when it becomes about more than postures, grand gestures, and cinematographic heroism.

Obama, Libya and American exceptionalism

Long sugary excerpt of the day from Glenn Greenwald on Obama, Libya and American exceptionalism:

The fact remains that declaring yourself special, superior and/or exceptional -- and believing that to be true, and, especially, acting on that belief -- has serious consequences. It can (and usually does) mean that the same standards of judgment aren't applied to your acts as are applied to everyone else's (when you do X, it's justified, but when they do, it isn't). It means that you're entitled (or obligated) to do things that nobody else is entitled or obligated to do (does anyone doubt that the self-perceived superiority and self-arrogated entitlements of Wall Street tycoons is what lead them to believe they can act without constraints?). It means that no matter how many bad things you do in the world, it doesn't ever reflect on who you are, because you're inherently exceptional and thus driven by good motives. And it probably means -- at least as it expresses itself in the American form -- that you'll find yourself in a posture of endless war, because your "unique power, responsibilities, and moral obligations" will always find causes and justifications for new conflicts.
It's a nice political point on the President's behalf to insist that he has proven his belief in American exceptionalism. That insulates him from a political vulnerability (i.e., from the perception that he rejects a widely held view), which is nice if politically defending the President is an important goal for you. But the harder -- and far more important -- question is whether this American exceptionalism that you attribute to him is actually true, whether it's well-grounded, and whether it should serve as a premise for our actions in the world.

I have never had a problem with American exceptionalism, maybe that's because I believe in it almost as much as believe in the exception française or that le Cameroun c'est le Cameroun. I think that the trouble comes when one defines exceptionalism as having rights and not as many responsibilities. The question isn't about Obama's belief in American exceptionalism for all American presidents come to believe in it at some point especially when it gives them a justification to do what they want to do,. The issue is about whether American exceptionalism will ever make Obama do something that  requires something more than idealism and is expensive not only to him, but to its short term goals.   America exceptionalism becomes a problem, when it becomes  an excuse not to justify the problematic  because then it becomes about faith and not much else.

In short, the issue isn't hat Obama says or believes, but again what he does, how well he does and how he reacts to failure and to adversity.

Women and wusses

This sugary excerpt from Gideon Rachman is the best remedy to the headache I feel after a short weekend :

There has been a certain amount of sniggering about the fact that it was Obama’s female advisers who were most prominent in pressing for military intervention in Libya, while the men hung back. Amongst the interventionists were the evocatively-named pair of Power and Slaughter – that is Samantha Power on the National Security Council and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently stepped down as head of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department and tweeted effectively from her new perch at Princeton. And then there was Susan Rice, the US ambassador at the UN and, finally (and decisively), Hillary Clinton.
The implication of all this is that it was the women who turned out to be the real men – prepared to get tough – while the men were wusses, who hung back. In this account, Obama is cast as the hesitant king, with Hillary as Lady Macbeth, hissing – “Infirm of purpose, hand me the dagger.”

Ahhh I wish I could take all of this seriously, but I cannot because we are in 2011 and that I am over gender. That said I think the bigger point of Rachman's point is about Obama and about the fact that America needs its commander in chief to be firm and to look in command when it is 'at war.'  Obama  doesn't look in command because it is obvious that he knows that the Libyan intervention os problematic for America because it increases the  uncertainty  and the instability in a region key to its strategic interest.

 

Elusive vindication

I disagree strongly with the following assertion by Norman Geras:

Whatever you may think about it, similar to and/or different from the intervention in Iraq, the Libyan action is a vindication of sorts for Tony Blair and his doctrine of liberal intervention.

What!? Why by the same token isn't it a vindication of the crusades or simply of war in general? Geras's assertion is as true as saying as the financial collapse of 2008 is a vindication of Marxism.

It isn't all about the concept, the context does matter so do actions and their consequences.  I'm sure that if people look hard enough they can find events to vindicate all the wrongs in history and those who made fanatically, in spite of evidence, the conscious decision to do the knowing full well that smart people like Geras will always find reasons in the future to clean their dirty hands. Juan Cole has a persuasive post, which explains why Libya 2010 isn't Iraq 2003.

Questionable Intervention

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

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

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

Moralist like Tony Blair

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Barber's review of George W. Bush's memoirs Decision Points:

Like Tony Blair, painted in the book as a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, Bush is a moralist. Like Blair, Bush insists all the major intelligence agencies thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the threat of WMD falling into terrorist hands was too great to bear. Like Blair, he cannot understand why more people still do not accept the moral argument for removing Saddam. “I didn’t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced human rights,” he writes.

I'm tempted to accept this excerpt with  a quote from John Steinbeck: only fools do not learn fro experience. However, neither Blair no Bush are fools, they are just complaisant moralists who believe that God made them kings because it/s/he knew they could make the right decision based on faith, on what it/s/he wanted them to do. What is the difference between Bush, Blair, other political leaders who believe religiously that God is on their side and  Ahmadinejad?

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.

'Women's rights' as a pitiful justification for wars

Johann Hari on the use of 'Women's rights' (I hate the expression by the way because it implies that women are so particular that Human rights aren't for them) to justify the Afghan war:

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

I'm always annoyed or amused depending on the eloquence of the ones making the argument when people argue with a straight face that a war is fought to liberate women when all one has to do is to look at the fact that women's bodies are still the subject of a vicious ideological battle in the US for example to see that 'men' are never going to fight for the rights of 'foreign' women to have the same rights that they have when they aren't willing to do the same in their own backyard.

Surgical strikes, the new warfare and video games

I agree with Tom Engelhardt on this:

Whether in the skies or patrolling on the ground, Americans know next to nothing of the worlds they are passing above or through.  This is, of course, even more true of the “pilots” who fly our latest wonder weapons, the Predators, Reapers, and other unmanned drones over American battle zones, while sitting at consoles somewhere in the United States.  They are clearly engaged in the most literal of video-game wars, while living the most prosaic of god-like lives.  A sign at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada warns such a drone pilot to "drive carefully" on leaving the base after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq.  This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day."
(...)Here’s the fact of the matter: in the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands.  Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious.  Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan as part of his counterinsurgency war, has proven remarkably incapable of changing the nature of our style of warfare.  Curtail air strikes, rein in Special Operations night attacks -- none of it will, in the long run, matter.  Put in a nutshell: If you arrive from the heavens, they will die.

What irks me is that this new form of American warfare can become popular and attractive not only with American presidents, but also with the American public because although it increases civilian deaths, 'collateral damage' it reduces greatly the number of American casualties. Unfortunately, the more American and modern warfare become like video games, the more likely it is that the world will experience more of them because war will become a 'clean,' effective and inexpensive solution for too many conflicts and issues instead of being used as the last resort.

The damage of Rambo

Telling Story from Jacques Roubaud (h/t: Lee Rourke) demonstrating that war movies and the media which glorify violence by making it seem as wars or violent acts were part of a video game can damage our understanding of history:

I met Primo Levi once. He was a friend of Italo Calvino, who was a member of the Oulipo. We were both at a meeting in Torino after Calvino’s early death; it was a few months before he himself died. He was a very nice man, very soft-spoken. At dinner he recounted a terrible experience he had just had. He had been invited to a high school in Rome to speak about his experience during the war, and he said that the students could not understand why he and his friends had not taken the Nazis’ guns and killed them. They knew only the Rambo movies. He could not make them understand that it had been impossible to resist. A few months later, I heard that he had committed suicide.

The return of the imperial presidency

This statement from Julian Ku worries me because it's true:

There was a time when the debate over the use of force by the U.S. government focused almost exclusively on a domestic separation of powers conversation. U.S. legal scholars and elites would engage in debates about when and whether Congressional authorization is required before the President can use military force against U.S. enemies.  I think that this debate is basically over, thanks to the Obama Administration.

Exporting elections

Simon Jenkins on the exportation of democracy to others countries:

The west's proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to "nation-build" these states and hence "defeat terror". When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: "It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote."

I'm wondering if it is possible to argue with a straight that Afghanistan and Iraq are sustainable democracies, meaning that their citizens have as many political choices as Americans for example.

Afghanistan, Karzai, and collateral damage

I agree with this:

By accusing NATO and the UN of conspiring to commit the fraud he himself practiced in last summer's elections, and then threatening to spearhead opposition by local clan elders to a NATO offensive later this year or even to join the Taliban himself, Mr Karzai is making NATO's huge investment of force to prop up his corrupt, incompetent government appear buffoonish. Where the killing of civilians by NATO forces might be seen as a tragic accident in a necessary war, they instead symbolise the possibility that the entire effort has been nothing but a meaningless exercise of misguided violence. Mr Karzai's behaviour makes it seem that civilian victims of NATO violence died for nothing.

What will the judgment of history be on those who refused to accept reality, but supported the Afghan surge a few years from now, when it will become impossible to deny that the US/NATO cannot to win in Afghanistan even though it might be in their interest to do so?

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..

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.

The Hurt Locker's American-centrism

Astute observation from Chris Bertram about The Hurt Locker:

Purely as a piece of cinema, The Hurt Locker is probably the better film [better than the Green Zone], but politically it is nowhere, and indeed it suffers from the same syndrome as many Hollywood Vietnam pictures – they are all about Americans and how they feel, and the poor natives appear as mere ciphers.

Manufactured realism

Quote of the mid-day from Aaron Bady who continues to make great points on The Hurt Locker:

(...) the problem with The Hurt Locker is that it poses as realism, that it pretends to portray what happens over there. But it doesn’t; like all realism, it’s a subjective fantasy clothed in the appearance of objectivity. But while The Hurt Locker performs the very same techno-philic detachment which enables a man in a humvee to run over a child, making the entire country into a bomb to be defused makes it seem as if the problem starts and originates there. They set the bombs, you see, and they are the ones who would put a child in harm’s way. And while the movie has the courage to admit that the war hasn’t gone well, this is akin to the brave honesty of admitting that the Titanic’s prospects look dim after hitting the iceberg.

Politics and American foreign policy

Matthew Yglesias on the role that politics has played within American foreign policy in the Post-cold war era:

In the post-Cold War era where politics drives foreign policy rather than the other way around, this seems to be a fairly stable equilibrium. Presidents will pursue an activist course, with the nature of the activism determined by their own predilections, but the public must not be asked to bear any burden. The question is how long can this be sustained. During the Cold War, objective considerations of international relations constrained American options, even as relatively small oscillations around the mainstream view were the subject of contentious argument. Today, no country can even remotely match American military might, and none is likely to do so for decades.

I wonder whether Yglesias's view isn't too American-centric to see the big picture, as a matter I know that he  is for he doesn't seem to be able to realize what are the essential and international consequences of his hypothesis. The issue within American foreign policy has never been that it is driven by politics, but rather that it is made and formulated badly for the simple reason that Americans only understand foreign policy when it relates to domestic policy and is said to affect them. The distinction that I'm making here is that all foreign policy reflect domestic politics, but some of them are made more effectively and with the acknowledgment that foreign policy requires some expertise and some knowledge of foreign countries, In short, I don't think that the United States has the foreign policy that it deserves  because as Yglesias, it doesn't realize that results have as much to do with power (military, hard, soft, diplomatic or otherwise) than with knowledge and a non-ideological awareness of different realities.

Winning wars while apologizing

I agree with Allan Richarz on this:

Therein lies the first problem with the US military’s media strategy: It is impossible to win a war if one spends half the time apologizing. Compounding this, pledges to avoid civilian deaths, short of a stop to all military operations, are unfeasible. What the military ends up with is a public relations disaster and essentially “wins the battle, but loses the war.”

However, I don't think that public relations can replace effective war strategies, which take into account of the realities of the ground and placed the emphasis on what is doable rather than on what looks good on TV and sells politically. The trouble with the Afghan surge is that it is based on the idea that lightening will strike and nothing will go wrong when in wars, whatever can go wrong, usually does.

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.'

Killing all lawyers

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

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

Authorizing torture

I agree with David Cole on this:

Responsibility for the illegal brutality inflicted on CIA and Guantánamo detainees cannot be limited to Yoo and Bybee. It extends to all those who approved the tactics—even those so eager later to condemn Yoo’s reasoning. And unless we as citizens demand that these lawyers be held to answer for the wrongs done in our name, responsibility extends to all of us, too. We must continue to insist on accountability—whether in congressional hearings, citizens’ commissions, civil lawsuits, or the marketplace of ideas. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options—even when a lawyer is willing to write an opinion blessing illegality.

It is too easy to put the blame on Lawyers and to ignore the ones who approve the opinions by framing the issue in such a way that they got the advice that they wanted to receive and that gave them so political covers. As much as I dislike John Yoo's lawyering, I recognize that he was the tool of an administration who needed ideological lawyers to justify a serious break with international law in order to avoid having another 9/11 on their watch. After all, the fact that the Obama administration is still unable to break completely with the Yoo-Cheney tactics to fight 'the war on terror', tells us all we need to know about where one should look to ask for some accountability.

The Hurt Locker, America, and the need to have it both ways

Aaron Bady has a great and must read review of the Hurt Locker at the Valve, which strikes me as being on point

I don’t think it’s a great film, first of all; its characters are fairly tired war-movie clichés (another cowboy who gets results? really?), its ticking time-bomb scenarios are suspenseful in almost the cheapest way possible—a literal ticking time-bomb—and the dialogue ranges from the bathetic to the banal (the line “I’m too old for this shit” badly needs to be retired). (,,,)
But more than that, the movie can’t seem to decide what kind of a hero or anti-hero it wants its main character to be; is he the awesome cowboy who gets results because he breaks the rules? Or is he a supreme asshole who puts the satisfaction of awesome bomb turning-off over the well being of his buddies and success of the mission? Manifestly, he is both, and the movie can’t decide if the young soldier’s eventual “fuck you” to him is where it wants to place its narrative emphasis (...)
Like America, I think, this movie needs to have it both ways, which the penultimate man vs. woman narrative turn lets it do: it wipes the slate clean by making a movie that has been about men fighting with each other (the exact same Kirk-Spock dilemma, in fact, mediating the same Bush-Obama problem) into a narrative about a beset man’s melodrama of escape from the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” of a particular feminine and domestic influence. The former story would bring up uncomfortable problems; the latter solves them in a comfortably Dodge-Charger-American-Man sort of way.

First, I have to say that I liked the Hurt Locker because it was a different American film about war, one which didn't have too many special effects to make the audience forget that that it is about people and destruction. Nevertheless, I felt that it was limited precisely because Kathryn Bigelow refused to make definite points and chose to be safe in order to please everybody and not to be attacked for having made an anti-American movie or just a patriotic movie that ignores the costs of war. That said, I think it was smart of Bigelow to limit her focus and not to try to answer questions that she knew answering would crippled her film, but forcing it to take a stand or a side on the Iraq war.I see the Hurt Locker as incomplete enterprise, as the beginning of something else within America if somebody has the courage to grab a camera and to say actually " Shit, this is what war is all about and does to people."

The Hurt Locker and the realities of the Iraq war

Tom Streithorst argues that the Hurt Locker shouldn't have won the Oscar for best picture because it doesn't portray accurately the war in Iraq:

Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base, and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops. But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and misunderstanding.
Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.
I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with those of the Iraqis.

The problem with Streithorst's arguments is that he makes two key and false assumptions. The first is that the most important quality of a movie whether it is about war or anything else is its accuracy, the fact that it portrays what it is meant to portray as it is. One has only to pick a few random movies of the last decade which were deemed to be serious and wonderful to watch to realize that in Hollywood and elsewhere the most important quality is the entertainment value. The second assumption, which renders Streithorst's arguments moot is that he thinks that the Academy, the people voting for the Oscars care about reality, about accuracy and that they are not motivated by other factors, which they consider to be more essential such as politics, commercialism and glamour. The point is that I doubt seriously that the people who voted about the Hurt Locker cared or will care about its inaccuracies and would be shocked to know that reality in Iraq is very different for all that mattered was that the movie felt real to them.

Yep, feelings trump reality!

The Dutch, Afghanistan, and Srebrenica

Ian Buruma on the reasons for the Dutch retreat from Afghanistan:

Pacifism, however, does not really explain what happened in the Netherlands. The reason the Dutch are wary of carrying on in Afghanistan is not the trauma of World War II, but of a small town in Bosnia called Srebrenica. In the mid-1990’s, the Dutch volunteered to protect Srebrenica from General Ratko Mladic’s Serbian forces. Under United Nations rules, the Dutch, bearing only sidearms, could fight only in self-defense.
Air support, although promised, never came. Dutch hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The world then watched as the hapless Dutch allowed Mladic’s heavily armed Serbs to massacre about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

It seems to me that the key iss5z is also that American presidentskand their administration tend to view wars solely from an American viewpoint or rather through the prism of American politics even when they need Allies to win them. In short, what I'm trying to say for all the assertions that the Obama administration was going to do more listening and going to be more multilateral, it  behaved in Bushlike manner on the Afghan surge without not so much finding a way to address the concern of its allies, but simply acknowledging them.

The impossibility to return to America after a war

Quote of the day from Brian Turner's op-ed in the New York Times on the Hurt Locker, wars, soldiers, and the impossible return back to America:

The last image of “The Hurt Locker” expresses a theme I’ve often tried to articulate. In the film, the main character cannot completely return to America, to the norm of a life back home. In a sense, he’s in Iraq whether he’s physically in a supermarket in the States, or in a bomb suit walking into the hurt locker.
That image rings true to me, but I’d take it a step further: I’d say that we, as a nation, now contain this explosive ordnance within us. Within our national psyche. We have generations of combat veterans and military family members woven throughout the fabric of our entire culture. Some of us have to walk down those dusty streets. We have to approach that which might tear us apart. We have to try to defuse what is explosive within.

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

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

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

The Afghan Time paradox

Dexter Filkins on Afghanistan, the Obama's surge and the essential question of time:

The trouble with Obama’s deadline is that, in crucial ways, it appears to be at war with itself. If the intent of the president’s message was to convey to the American people that the end was in sight, then it was almost certainly untrue. In all likelihood, the end of America’s involvement in Afghanistan is not in sight. (...)The Afghan version of the surge was announced by Obama last December. And for all the talk of counterinsurgency, the real hope, clearly, is that the fresh infusion of troops will be able to bleed the Taliban enough to force them to consider some sort of political settlement. This is really the heart of the matter. But how likely is it? (...) But there is the time paradox again. With an eighteen-month deadline looming, what incentive does the Taliban have to make a deal? If you read the movement’s regular Internet communiqués, you will see that their morale is not that of an army on the brink of defeat. “With their own hands the Americans made the people of Helmand stand with the holy warriors, and all of them have entered the trenches of resistance to seek vengeance and jihad,” a recent Taliban missive proclaimed. “This will bear no fruit except the enemy’s defeat, Allah willing.” It appears the Taliban wholly expect the Americans to run out of will.

I'm willing to bet my left leg that America will still be in Afghanistan by the time of the 2012 presidential election. Obama will justify this decision by making the argument that although progress has been made, there is still work to be done, which is essential to America's security and national interests. The only reason for an American president to support a military surge is to find reasons not to leave and to make an omelet without breaking any egg by having it both ways: by making the point that you want desperately to leave to have on your corner those who believe that the war is not winnable and by demonstrating strength to those who believe that you don't have the stomach to use military might by saying that you do whatever it takes for a limited period of time.
I'm afraid that the Afghan Time paradox leads inevitably to a dead end because in wars, it is impossible to have it both ways and to please everybody.

Afghanistan, the Dutch, and the last illusions

Julian Lindley-French and Kurt Volker on the Dutch's scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan and its consequences:

The departure of the Dutch will doubtless reinforce a belief both in the Afghan Government and key elements of the international community, such as the United Nations and leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that only the Americans (and to some extent the British) are reliable partners. This will likely affect the willingness of the Kabul government to work with Europeans and further undermine the influence of Europeans over the government and mission.
The departure of the Dutch will take place just as the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) is being inaugurated, further undermining what is a very fragile process towards European security self-determination.
However, the greatest impact will be on NATO and with it the wider transatlantic relationship. The Dutch departure is scheduled for the eve of NATO’s new strategic concept, in effect NATO’s ten year plan for dealing with a dangerous and complex world in which stabilization and reconstruction missions will be front and center. Should the Americans and British be forced to fill the Uruzghan space with little or no help from allies in the north and west of Afghanistan, then to the heavily-burdened Americans and British the message will be clear: the solidarity implicit in the strategic concept will be as empty as the Helmand desert.

The biggest consequence of the Dutch's withdrawal is that it eradicates the illusion in Europe, at the very least, that Afghanistan is a war that can be fought endlessly without popular support and more importantly without concise and time sensible objectives.

Europe and Nation-building

Christopher Chivvis argues that Europeans are bad at Nation-building when it ought to do its best to be good at it to make a necessary contribute to wars which America is fighting most alone in the name of the "West" since it is so unwilling to fight in them:

Civilian work is now widely recognized as an essential ingredient in addressing security challenges around the world. Weak states need people who know how to investigate a murder, run a prison system, collect customs and other taxes, and generally keep a state bureaucracy up and running. There is little point in pacifying a country militarily if its infrastructure, courts, fiscal controls, and health systems are so feeble that chaos returns the moment the troops leave.
Europe seems particularly well-suited for this kind of work. Not only is the European Union the gravitational center of Europe's foreign economic power, Europe is home to some of the most skilled legal, administrative, and law enforcement experts in the world.
Unfortunately, the European Union is failing to live up to its potential. Unless it expands its efforts by taking on more ambitious projects, with larger staff and bigger budgets, the age-old dream of transforming the EU into a civilian power will falter, just as its military prowess continues to decline. NATO -- and the mission in Afghanistan -- will suffer along with it. In its first five years of existence, the EU sent civilian experts to 13 war-torn countries. This sounds impressive, but the vast majority of these missions had fewer than 80 staff members, and most lasted less than a year. Some had little or no impact on the ground.

Is it just me or does Europe seem like the perfect scapegoat for the lack of a viable military strategy in Afghanistan and elsewhere that would lead to victory? What Chivvis does is too easy and in a way cheap because it blames Europeans for been bad at something that it is hard to be good at especially when their countries have an history of being colonizers. I guess one gets historical amnesia when one is looking for culprits.

Afghanistan and the concept of just war

I agree in part with this, however I believe that it is impossible not only for Afghanistan to remain a just war, but also to be simply a winnable one because the losses will always outnumber the victories:

Every time civilians die in the conflict, the Taleban win a propaganda victory, which they exploit with some skill. General McChrystal’s strategy is to protect the Afghan people, to help to build a functioning Afghan state and to make as many friends as possible in order to isolate the extremists. That is why airstrikes have been drastically cut back — because indiscriminate, uncontrollable strikes on civilians destroy not only the lives of those victims and their families; they destroy the justice of the whole cause.
The cause in Afghanistan is one that we continue to support. But when mistakes are made, it is vital to acknowledge them and to shoulder responsibility for them. In order to defeat our enemies we must be seen to be better than them.

The Wire and Ideology

For some reason, I missed The Wire while is on Television, I ike to believe that law school is the sole culprit of that outrageous omission. However, I have started watching it recently and I have been surprised about how addictive it is and how it manages to use stereotypes without being offensive. Thus, it is also because I'm both a new and late fan of the Wire that I enjoyed reading Andrew Seal's post on The Wire comparing it to the Hurt Locker (which was a good movie) and offering some explanations for the reason of its popularity, Sugary excerpt:

But I also think we can view The Wire as a multi-protagonist version of this genre, although it is certainly more canny about the possibilities of truly sinking beneath ideology. It has also been seen as a sort of “post-” or “non-ideological” text, and one of the remarkable things about it is how readily anyone can find their own ideology validated in it—conservatives see indictments of welfare policies as surely as liberals see indictments of the drug war. (Liberals are more right, but that’s not the point.) To return full-circle, I think it is very possible to read The Wire as the survival story par excellence of our time, and to see fraternity as its greatest ideal—again, a broken ideal, but nevertheless, the ideal and central theme of the show. And it too features a very extreme distinction between foot-soldiers and commanders, and some of its central plots are about the impossibility of moving from one position to the other. And, although, as I said, it is never innocent of the pervasiveness of ideology, one of its most straightforward points is that the “higher-ups” in the police force, the government, or the newspaper are more ideological, more given to justifying their actions through abstractions. Bullshit, in words more appropriate to the subject, always rises.
Obviously it is no great scandal to talk about the unparalleled success of The Wire in achieving its vision; I think it is also very reasonable to suggest that its success is part of a broader turn toward this particular strategy of using survival as a figure for a sub-ideological space in narrative, a margin between a non-resistance to ideology and an ultimate refusal of nihilism. I see this particular paradigm as culturally dominant in contemporary depictions of conflict and violence, and likely to become more so.

The destruction of Mogadishu and the Somalization of the world

Tristan McConnell on Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and its permanent state of war away from the camera and thus from the gaze of the world that is destroying what used to be a beautiful city:

The current round of fighting is just the latest in Somalia's decades-old war. Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militia that recently confirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda, is battling the Transitional Federal Government for control of the country. The TFG gets diplomatic support and money from the UN, soldiers from the African Union and military hardware from the US; take any one of these away and it would collapse like every other administration in the past 19 years. In 1991, the country's last functioning government - itself a venal dictatorship - was defeated by an alliance of clan militias. The warlords then turned on each other, fighting for economic and political control. Somalia has been a maelstrom of violence ever since.
There have been moments of respite. In 2006, the militias were defeated by the Islamic Courts Union - a political group of which al-Shabaab was the armed wing. But within months the union had been chased from power by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion.Now, al-Shabaab is back - stronger and more radical - and holds sway over much of Somalia. Mogadishu is a city of ruins, bearing testimony to the years of destruction. Roads are broken; buildings are shattered, concertinaed to the ground or lacking outer walls, like giant honeycombs.

When reading McConnell's description of the chaos in Mogadishu, I'm reminded of André Glucksmann's prediction that the world is going to be somalized, meaning that we would be seen more cities been destroyed and torn apart without much international concern and especially without any coverage in the media.Unfortunately, I fear that most of those dark holes will happen on the African continent for we know that it is easier to succumb to fatality, resignation and to  the grotesque idea that Africa is cursed  when the inconceivable and the unacceptable is happening within its countries.

The Others

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

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

The depth of a trap

I agree with Patrick Cockburn on this:

In Afghanistan incidents like the bombing of civilians in Uruzgan will inevitably be highly publicised, not least because the government of President Hamid Karzai is seeking to burnish its nationalist credentials by protesting volubly against the loss of civilian lives. This is in sharp contrast with Iraq where, at the height of the fighting between 2004 and 2007, the Iraqi government would happily confirm that civilian dead were insurgent fighters.
The fact that these airstrikes took place in Uruzgan, from which the 2,000-strong Dutch contingent is being withdrawn, shows that no Nato power contributing forces can keep itself politically and militarily on the margins of the escalating conflict.

The impossibility to avoid "collateral damage" who are killed in a violent and indecent manner shows that the Afghan war is unwinnable for both the US and its allies. The crux of the problem is that they need to fight the war ruthlessly for a long period while seeking to win the hearts and the minds of the Afghans. The not too far past shows that occupation forces cannot be welcomes in a country where it kills a large number of civilians even if its excuse is that it is fighting a greater evil and that in those cases, excuse my French, shit is bound to happen.

Ayn Rand's demons

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

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

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

Building sand castles

Quote of the day from Juan Cole on the surge and other recent development in Afghanistan:

Obama's Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at high tide.

Official high priests of intelligence and American presidents

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

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

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

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

Internet, atrocity footage and the need to watch the sufferings of others

I agree wholeheartedly with Nicholas Sautin on this:

In short, the proliferation of atrocity footage on the Internet has complicated the ethical and aesthetic landscape of how and why we watch the suffering of others. If technology grants every war a dominant representational medium (consider the role of television during the Vietnam War), the digital aesthetic associated with Internet video perhaps most closely inhabits our contemporary anxiety about the wars fought in our name—our ability to see and not see, and our desire both to know and not know. The Internet passively collects the visual dregs of a world where anything and everything can be captured on film. (...) The problem with voyeurism and the Internet, though, is that the idea of “the right to look” may have become obsolete. Atrocity footage has been taken out of the hands of those who would previously have held such moral responsibility—governments, journalists, censors, teachers, etc. The images are simply there for anyone who wishes to look. We imagine their existence, haunted by glimpses of what we have actually seen, and often choose not to look further.
At their core, such images remain visible traces of what has happened, even if they seem incomprehensible. In their democratic lack of artifice and ornamentation, they suggest the closest approximation we have to reality; this makes them intolerable.

I have the feeling that atrocity footage of wars, violence or any other barbarity is the way of the future not just because modern society has accepted a legitimized a certain form of voyeurism, but also because we like in an age where as Agassi would have said 20 years ago, image is everything. Furthermore, "modern wars" (that's an oxymoron) are becoming so gadgetized and sterilized that people will want/need to experiment sensations, which brings them as close as possible to the experience of war because we live in the video-game era where anything real, brutal, and more importantly illicit is irresistible especially when it can be found on the internet and more also because we have become so desensitized to violence that only shocking images of the suffering of others can make us believe in its realness. It is the same feeling that explain for example why the media coverage of the earthquake of Haiti needed to be so gruesome and spectacular to provoke an outpouring of charitable feelings.

Motherly warriors

Two questions come to my mind when I read these arguments from Mary Eberstadt against the inclusion of mothers in combat, are we really in 2010? Do women really still have to live for their children as soon as they become mothers::

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: The argument that “women, including mothers, have served in the military, therefore women, including mothers, should serve in the military,” remains a blatant non sequitur. Of course women have, and can, and will serve bravely in all walks of life — including in combat and other violent situations if necessary. As news stories emphasized, for example, the murderous rampage by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, also in November 2009, was interrupted by the courageous intervention of a female soldier — Sergeant Kimberly Munley, who charged him at point-blank range and fired her weapon till eventually he went down. Sgt. Munley, incidentally, is also a mother. Where was it ever written that men have a monopoly on courage, and if it has been, who knows so little as to believe it? The history of humanity and its literature and art abound with examples of extraordinary valor exercised by mothers in particular — typically, on behalf of their children.
In fact, for that very reason, the ideological fervor over the years by feminists demanding women in the military betrays a bizarre kind of anxiety on the part of those exhibiting it. The literature advocating for female soldiers is shot through with breathless, romanticized insistence that women can indeed behave like men — changing truck tires, crawling through mud, urinating standing up, and killing and wounding as necessary. It is a pattern of protestation that raises questions of its own about the convictions of just such advocates. Did feminists and their allies think somewhere deep inside that women couldn’t do these very things — and more?
Yet again, however, this question of whether certain people can tote guns and endure physical discipline and die for their country too is not the same as asking whether they ought to. Many children and teenagers, for example, could work competently through the workday doing menial labor — as many did throughout the centuries leading to relatively recent laws protecting them from child labor. But most people today would not champion that fact to invalidate the laws against child labor or truancy. And for those who might object that this analogy conflates women with children, consider a few more examples of activities that American law puts the brakes on, even though all involve potentially consenting adults: drugs, prostitution, gambling, suicide, assisted suicide, selling oneself into slavery, having sex in public. In all kinds of ways, the law imposes limits on what consenting adults can do.

Afghan war strategies

Mick Hume on the Afghanistan war and the total absence of a coherent and permanent military strategy :

From the first, the West’s latest adventure in Afghanistan has been a war without a clear casus belli, launched after 9/11 and sustained without a central strategic purpose – Anti-terrorism? Democracy? Women’s rights? Anti-drugs? – against enemy or enemies uncertain (...). It has long looked like a war fought as an end in itself, the only real aim of which is to reassert the authority of America and its allies and provide them with an ersatz sense of mission. Inevitably, it has done the opposite, exposing the absence of any coherent worldview or clue as to what they are doing in Washington or Whitehall.
Now the self-defeating mission-free military occupation of Afghanistan is reaching new depths of absurdity. First US president Obama announced a fresh ‘surge’ of American forces into the battle-zone – at the same time as floating plans for a withdrawal from 2011. Hence NATO simultaneously appeared to declare war and admit defeat (...). Now NATO has fanfared its largest Afghan offensive since 2001 – a campaign, according to reports, ‘to impose government control on rebel areas before US forces start to withdraw by [President Obama’s] self-imposed 2011 deadline’. So, it’s total war! Until, er, next year, then we’re off. In the meantime we have given the rebels fair warning we were coming, and a timetable to go away and think about….
Who needs the Taliban anyway when the West is evidently so capable of outwitting and defeating itself? We are left, not for the first time, facing the worst of all worlds – an occupation without purpose, a dangerous military offensive without goals, a war without causes but plenty of casualties.

The problem with the Afghan war for the US and NATO has always been that its only goal can only be nation building and that it is next to impossible to build a state as occupying powers in a country that has a history of resisting to the death occupation. i don't even think that Obama believes that in twenty years, there will be an Afghan that will be an ally of the United States where there will no longer terrorist threats. On the contrary, he is focused on the short-term and what the "defeatism" and weak image that he would give to Americans if he chooses to withdraw from two wars (Iraq included) by declaring that they are unwinnable, even though experience on the ground shows that they are more than likely or that decades of American blood and treasure to fight to even entertain of the possibility of victory, which seems to be a hollow term in this context.