Fisk on Democracy Now

Less than two days after the massacre at Qana, as Israel prepares to expand their military offensive into Lebanon, now calling fifteen-thousand additional reserves into active duty, we would do well to consider the moral calculations of war. In an interview by Amy Goodman over at Democracy Now, Robert Fisk considers one of the many facets of the question of proportionality. As Fisk notes, though the Israeli government has apologized for the civilian casualties, they persist in defending the actual attack, justifying the targeting of the houses on the basis of their being within a three-hundred meter range of a purported site of Hizbollah rocket launches, and a possible storage area for Hizbollah munitions. They've gone so far as to suggest that the collapse of the house was caused by munitions inside, rather than, say, the 2,000-pound guided bombs dropped from above. And, of course, they had told civilians to leave the area beforehand. For every act, a rationale. This, as the ratio of civilian casualties in Lebanon to civilian casualties in Israel climbs to around 16 to 1.

AIPAC greets Al-Maliki

For anyone doubting the general lack of political insight of our current congressional leaders, take a look at this nice item detailing the response of AIPAC *Democrats* to the new Iraqi PM's recent trip to Washington. Nuri al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa party, which itself has a rather checkered past. That anyone in Washington would expect a chief representative of Dawa to condemn Hizbullah shows either a contemptuous arrogance or a profound lack of historical awareness--which is not to say that some combination of the two isn't possible. In fact, these traits are probably mutually reinforcing....

Bananaphone, the Return

If you're in need of some therapeutic laughter, let me recommend this strange little number over at kontraband.com. Turn on all your spyware protection, then go here! It's delightfully absurd.

Robert Fisk on the Lebanon Crisis

For anyone looking for reality-based information on the current fiasco in Lebanon, I've found two consistently reliable sources. Robert Fisk, at The Independent, has provided much good material.

Over at his site, Informed Comment, Juan Cole has also been keeping a detailed running commentary that's not seeking to obscure either the players or their motivations.

Infighting on _Frontline_

Last night I happened upon a late night airing of a recent episode of Frontline which detailed, to a startling degree, the bureaucratic infighting surrounding the administration's Iraq policy in the wake of 9/11. The episode, aptly titled "The Dark Side," basically provides a map of the aggregation of power around the Office of the Vice President, and outlines not only Cheney's deep distrust of the CIA, but the resultant fighting between the Pentagon and the State Department.

The episode illustrates, without quite explaining, the conversion of George Tenet from his early skepticism about any Iraq connection to Al Queda to an administration cheer leader who personally vouched for the presentation that Powell would wind up giving the UN. As we now know, and as the episode chronicles, each of the three main pillars of the casus belli was fatally flawed. The information about mobile weapons labs was from a discredited drunk (Curveball) to whom our intelligence apparatus only had second-hand access through Germany's intelligence agency, who distrusted him. The information about Iraqi provision of weapons and training to Al-Queda was gathered from the tortured interrogations (in Egypt) of a high-level Queda operative (Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi) captured in Tora Bora, who later recanted. The yellowcake connection had already been discredited by Joseph Wilson, among others.

The Frontline website also has a very good collection of links to published reports surrounding these events.

None of this information is particularly new or surprising, but it bears frequent repeating.

Posner on (Murphy on) Douglas

Perusing Leiter Reports, I came across this remarkable piece by the prolific federal circuit judge, Richard Posner. It's a review of Bruce Murphy's biography (15 years in the making) of William O. Douglas, one of the more colorful Supreme Court justices who reached the height of his judicial career during the tumultuous Warren era. The man was, apparently, something of a sociopath. Fascinating little piece. A sample:

Murphy is right to separate the personal from the judicial. One can be a bad person and a good judge, just as one can be a good person and a bad judge. With biography and reportage becoming ever more candid and penetrating, we now know that a high percentage of successful and creative people are psychologically warped and morally challenged; and anyway, as Machiavelli recognized long ago, personal morality and political morality are not the same thing. Douglas was not a good judge (I will come back to this point), but this was not because he was a woman-chaser, a heavy drinker, a liar, and so on. It was because he did not like the job. In part he did not like it because he wanted another job badly, a job for which he was indeed better suited. Roosevelt may have made a mistake in preferring Truman as his running mate in 1944. Not a political mistake: Douglas had never run for elective office, and the Democratic Party bosses, whose enthusiastic support FDR thought essential to his re-election, were passionate for Truman. If passing over Douglas was an error (which we shall never know), it was an error of statesmanship. With his intelligence, his toughness, his ambition, his leadership skills, his wide acquaintanceship in official Washington, his combination of Western homespun (a favorite trick was lighting a cigarette by striking a match on the seat of his pants) and Eastern sophistication, and his charisma, Douglas might have been a fine Cold War president.
At least a Douglas administration would not have been afflicted by the cronyism that so undermined Truman's presidency. Douglas had his own cronies, many with character flaws similar to his own, like Lyndon Johnson and Abe Fortas, but they were abler and less manifestly corrupt than Truman's cronies. And unlike Henry Wallace, the vice president whom FDR providentially dropped at the end of his third term in favor of Truman, Douglas was not soft on communism. I do not think that he was ideological at all; he was merely ambitious. I doubt even that he was, despite his later judicial record, a genuine liberal. Douglas was just ornery and rebellious and publicity-seeking: "always fame was the spur," as Ronald Dworkin, one of Douglas's liberal critics, put it.
Thus Douglas's hostility to Frankfurter seems to have been based on professional jealousy rather than on political or jurisprudential disagreement. Come the 1950s and the dimming of his presidential prospects, Douglas gave his rebellious instincts full rein and reveled in the role of the iconoclast, the outsider; he became the judicial Thoreau. Later, when he himself had become an icon of the left, he claimed that had he been president he would not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and would have recognized Red China, and so forth; but these claims cannot be taken very seriously, especially given his complete lack of respect for truthfulness.

Support Your Local Bombing Campaign

Three cheers for neutrality! The Bush administration has expedited the shipment of some nifty laser-guided bombs to Israel, presumably for use as the new stationary of choice among the pre-teen set. These kiddies were reportedly asked to write such sweet nothings as "From Israel, With Love" on these bombs. Talk about your mixed messages. There's nothing like coopting children into the politics of war.

Save the Middle East, Support Marriage!

In case you missed it, one of our shining beacons of democrary from Georgia has finally established the missing link between banning gay marriage and winning the war on terror [sic]:

The Democrats accused Republicans of raising the issue even as they ignored what the Democrats said were more pressing problems, including the war in Iraq, an expanding conflict in the Middle East, high gasoline prices and North Korean missile tests.But Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said the marriage issue was “just as important and a top-tier issue as any of those.”Another Georgia Republican, Representative Phil Gingrey, said support for traditional marriage “is perhaps the best message we can give to the Middle East and all the trouble they’re having over there right now.”

Exceptionalism--Civilians, etc.

A few posts ago, I introduced the topic of exceptionalism, and promised to follow up with examples. If there were any case to be made for American exceptionalism, it would surely be on the basis of a few of our supposed principles. A principle that we've paid quite a bit of lip service to is the rule of law.

One case that's come up lately that has crippled (at least the perception of) our allegiance to this principle is the no-law-zone at Guantanamo Bay. Those who have been paying attention can surely see many of the administration's prisoner policies as cases of exceptionalism. Here, it has a purely negative sense. The rule of law works by sorting agents and acts into different categories, and then applying the relevant rules to their respective categories, after having made (hopefully) impartial findings of fact. As the Supreme Court duly noted in its rebuke of administration arguments, the newly-coined "enemy combatant" designation functioned primarily to circumvent protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention as well as our own Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See opinion here.)

This is a case of exceptionalism because it marks out a new category of actor in the context of a policy that is itself, legally speaking, restrained by the precedent of the Geneva Conventions and the UCMJ. The policy attempts, that is, to carve out a new class of war conduct over which those prior laws have no jurisdiction.

As I mentioned, these policies can often seem legitimate. In this case, the appearnce of legitimacy hung on the extent to which the court was willing to countenance the administration's argument that military tribunals and their peculiar extra-judiciary status was a legitimate exercise of constitutionally granted executive war powers. Of course, to accept this argument is to give the president a ready tool to avoid compliance with any given bit of law, domestic or international. So this gives us, if you will, a case of double-exceptionalism--the recognization of an exception to our governing laws and treatites in the case of the tribunals and their "enemy combatants," brought about by the prior exception of the executive from the class of those legislative and judicial actors constrained by those laws and treaties, and negatively, the exception of the enemy combatants from the standards of POW rights and remedies afforded to our enemies. The relevant (and absurd) domestic parallel would be to create a class of crime such that if committed, the accused would automatically cede, say, her right to a fair trial; absurd here, as in the case of enemy combatants, mainly because it is usually taken for granted that certain standards of due process are necessary to make any reliable factual determinations about the previous actions, and only later guilt or innocence, of the parties involved. It should go without saying that these niceties were precisely what the administration was hoping to avoid.

With the failure of this policy comes a renewed attempt to stratify our war-time categories. This time, in response to the fact that Lebanon's civilian death toll far outnumbers that of Israel, we find Alan Dershowitz arguing against the cogency of the traditional military/civilian contrast. (See this for useful commentary.)

We should, as a basic moral primer, ask ourselves whether his comments about civilian Lebanese fighters are any less applicable to our own side, lest we forget that the largest concentrated mercenary force assembled on the planet right now is employed by the Pentagon in Iraq. We should not need to be reminded that the majority of our mercenaries have families that are rather far-removed from the current fighting.

Paul Craig Roberts on Shame--American Style

Paul Craig Roberts has some apt words about the current middle eastern conflict. Most of the coverage has, of course, been almost as shameless as the deed.

Missing Piece

Notice that Israeli airstrikes are cutting a path toward Syria? This, of course, has nothing to do with with the new Russian naval base going in at Tartus.

Election Strategy Redux?

In the wake of two U.S. election victories wrought from trumped up fear, could it now be time for a third?

Update: It appears that the puppeteer-in-chief is now rolling out the newly-minted 2006 stragegy. See this for details.

Exceptionalism

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to doctrines of exceptionalism, which I'll provisionally describe as the notion that some one or set of differences-- in historical origin, ideology, or creed of an individual, group, or institution--justifies distinct treatment of that individual, group or institution.

The big headliner of late has been the doctrine of American exceptionalism--which is usually presented as a fact claim about America's unique status in the world, but is more commonly used as the supposed (justifying) antecedent for America's ability to exercise some right or authority on the world stage that we would not willingly grant to any other nation state.

A number of the features of the many doctrines of exceptionalism intrigue me, but what I find most striking is their ubiquity. Claims to exceptionalism are problematic not least because they tend to rest on either false or distorted fact claims; they also tend to be used mainly in the attempt to justify actions or policies that are blatantly unfair.

But they also bear, like most such stories, some resemblance to reality, which is part of what makes them so seductive. I'll try in successive posts to pick out a few cases of exceptionalism for more detailed treatment.