Gaza

Christine at iMinister has a much more thoughtful piece up about being a bystander to a conflict that goes against ones values. It's much more diplomatic than my post, and it avoids the word "annihilationist", so please read her post if you think that this one will be unsavory.

My thoughts on Gaza have been scattered in many places across the Internet this week. In an exercise of demonstrating exactly what twitter isn't for, a friend and I have had banter going back and forth all week in 140 character increments. Snappy, but not the space for thoughts to become thoughtful. It was an especially weird conversation because my friend was advocating on behalf of Israel, and I was advocating on behalf of Gazans. My role in that conversation was to distinguish the terrorists from the innocents, and his role was to find the innocents complicit. In the abstract, it was a fascinating thought experiment. In reality, it was among the most unpleasant experiences of political discourse I have engaged in. The stakes in conversation about this are high, and the ability of one to convince another of the rightness of their opinion is very low. Following my advice, I wouldn't have this conversation.

The problem with a conversation treated as a war is that it lingers. It's not a pleasant place to dwell, but like all optimistic Generals, it's easy to look at a fixed row of trenches, aim for a weak spot, and make a push to remove the stalemate. It doesn't work for two reasons. One: while it is incredibly hard for one side to 'win' a conversation like this, it is really easy for someone acting in opposition to restore it to stalemate status. Two: conversations aren't battles, discussion topics aren't wars, and while the metaphors are at times handy, treating this as a tooth-and-nail battle to fight isn't helping.

My discussion on twitter swung in interesting directions in the attempt to break through. My central conceit, which made discussion possible, was that while Israel was justified in the right of response. their response was both unjust and disproportionate. Disproportionate is an interesting word here. In a letter to the editor in Albuquerque's Weekly Alibi, political scientist Brandon Curtis argues that the term itself is meaningless and a cheap shot from people who don't understand the issue. I respectfully disagree, but I think it's easy to understand why the word seems inappropriate.

In October 2001, NATO went to war in Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack by a group that country hosted. In 2003, the American public (and, more importantly, it's elected officials) felt it was appropriate to overthrow and destroy the government of Iraq based on the possibility that it might be fostering future terrorists, or giving them weapons, or was itself a terrorististic state. Recent memory serves that no degree of force is too little to adequately protect a nation from terrorism. We forget, then, other responses. In October 2000, in response to the bombing of the USS Cole by terrorists, Clinton sent out legal experts to track down and arrest the specific culprits. In October* 1983, the US marine barracks (which also housed French troops) was bombed in Beirut. The response was a small punitive bombing of alleged terrorists by France, followed by a quiet retreat of US forces in February. And, as popularized in the film Munich, it is assumed that Israel responded to the kidnapping and murder of it's Olympic Athletes by hunting down people assumed to be connected.

All these responses, at the time, have been justified as proportionate. Since that list includes everything from abandonment to assassination, and from legal action to pre-emptive war, the field of declaring proportionality is wide open. So, while I think that Israel has a right to respond to attacks against its citizens, I don't think that the method of response (bombing, followed by a ground invasion) is proportionate. Israel is responding to terrorism by treating it as a war, and that greatly complicates the issue.

If this is a war, one has to assume that Hamas itself, as the government of Gaza, is marshaling the terrorists as a formal army. While I'm more toward ambivalent about Hamas belligerance in this conflict, I am inclined to suspect that they have little choice besides acting in control or being seen as even more powerless than they are. In conversation with my friend, I argued disproportionality because, while the terrorists targeted civilians, the correct response of a government is to target terrorists. Yes, this is holding Israel to a higher standard. They are a western democracy, and that means we are allowed to expect better of them. But suppose that Hamas itself is directing the attacks, is responsible for them, feels no qualms over the death of it's own citizens, and that they are fighting this war in the same way that European nations fought WWI. In that case, it makes more sense that Israel is responding with a war of annihilation - it's unjust as all hell, but at the very least it makes sense.

Because if Israel isn't fighting a war of annihilation against another nation that would do the same, they are certainly acting like it. In my conversation over twitter, I argued with the friend that the majority of Gazans are in fact innocents, and not complicit in the attacks. He responded by claiming that if they were not in complicit in the attacks, why weren't they doing anything to stop them. I think they don't have the resources necessary to stop the attacks, and I'm inclined to think that all the former Gazans with resources have left. People with means tend not to remain in ghettoized nations. Hamas, whether or not it actively encouraged the terrorists who started this conflict, has very little choice but to support them now. They are, after all, the ones with the weapons, and despite the relatively calm two-year ceasefire, Hamas is well aware that no Israeli operation in the area would be complete without an attempt to remove Hamas from power. Hamas has had to very quickly move itself into the role of fighting against Israel, because the only thing worse than a government that fails to prevent war is a government that fails to effectively fight it.

And this, here, is the tragedy. Before the conflict broke out, Hamas wanted a new ceasefire. Hamas is an organization whose main appeal is their unequivocal call for the eradication of Israel, and yet by advocating for a new ceasefire they had shown that they were willing to accept the two state solution, at least temporarily. Skeptics can throw this off as an attempt to keep things calm before the war itself broke out, but they are missing the potential inherent in that ceasefire. Hamas wanted, at least temporarily, a ceasefire. This is a militant party that came to power democratically, and whose future as a party of rule depends upon public opinion. Most war-mongering parties in history go to war as soon as they are elected, else the public change its mind and elect others. Hamas didn't want this, and I cannot fathom why the opportunity to forge a slightly less imperfect peace was not seized upon, especially if it is Israel's goal to prevent Palestinian terrorism, rather than to wipe Gaza out.

There are two broad categories of eliminating terrorism, and they are the same broad categories categories people use to deal with crime. One: kill/capture/disable all those who would commit terrorism. Two: make sure other options exist for people who would otherwise turn to terrorism. The first response is the one that militaries can do, to some extent. It was fortunate for the US in the early stages of its operations in Afghanistan that many al Qaeda fighters were willing to straightforwardly fight against the US - that makes the work much, much easier. In Iraq, of course, the terrorists didn't emerge until after the war, and being terrorists, they weren't interested in fighting set-piece battles. Instead, they formed militias (for defensive purposes) and acted anonymously amidst the population when attacking US troops. Iraq is large - with ~ 170,000 square miles and a population of 29 million, it is easy for people to hide and it is hard to kill them all. Gaza, on the other hand, is tiny - 139 square miles, and 1.5 million people in that little area. For a more relevant size comparison, the city of Albuquerque is 181 square miles, and about a third the population of Gaza. Gaza is a place where approach one, kill everyone who might be terrorists, could work.

To even have that on the table is ridiculous. And yet, Israel seeks punitive attacks with overwhelming force against terrorists operating within the area. Not that some attacks wouldn't work, and not that some retaliation doesn't make sense, but the scale and the manner of the tactics, if they aren't annihilationist, are beyond excessive, and if they are annihilationist, then they are patently immoral.

Option two for fighting terrorism is the one that I think has the most promise for Gaza, and had it been adopted as part of a renewed ceasefire, I think it would have eventually had the effect that Israel's attack aims to achieve. When Gazans (and Palestinians more generally) know that they are safe in Palestine, that their rights are respected, and that Israeli invasion is a distant (if not non-existent) possibility, they will be able to concentrate on issues other than injustices visited upon them by Israel.

But I don't think that's what the response to this attack will be, and the time for wishful thinking about ceasefires has passed and is not yet at hand again. Instead, I predict that the same will always happen in Gaza as has tended to happen - punitive strikes by Israel, followed by calm, followed by stagnation and oppression in Gaza, followed by terrorist attacks originating in Gaza, followed by punitive attacks on behalf of Israel, rinse, repeat.

There are two ways out of this mess, out of this most vicious and petty of cycles. The first, the annihilationist war, is patently immoral, and I don't imagine that Israel will actually do it. The second, the long slow development of Gaza into a safe and stable place, with terms negotiated over years that slowly grant better and better conditions for Palestine, is the option I'm holding out for. It's also an option that will take a willingness on behalf of Israel to keep working, even in the face of terrorist attacks. And it will take an effort reciprocated by Gazans, to go from an attitude that, though not complicit, is indifferent to terrorism, towards an attitude that condemns terrorism as much as it condemns injustice visited upon Palestinians. When the people have other options, they will use them. Bombing people into non-existence doesn't do that, and in fact is a very active way of removing options from people.

Our 43rd president intended to make his legacy one of fighting terrorism and of nation building. That's an entirely compatible goal set, but it's impossible to do in a flashy way - people remember wars. People don't remember long, gradual movements towards peace and stability. They just wake up one day and realize how happy they are that they haven't experienced a war in decades. That's the goal, and that's the possibility that existed in Hamas offer of extending the ceasefire. It's a possibility that remains, and its one well worth keeping in mind for the next time.



*Seriously, what is with October showing up so much. Did al qaeda watch Red October, and misinterpret that Americans were scared of October when they were really scared of Reds?

Editor's Note:The easy way to avoid this conversation is to say something like "these issues go back to biblical times, why discuss them?". My other big Internet conversation about this before my post was on facebook, and after someone replied with the 'biblical times' comment, I responded with this:

I think we're terribly mistaken to pass this off as going back to biblical times - the modern conflict isn't Jews versus Palestinians, it started Israelis versus Arabs; the Arabs in question have, post 1968, become Palestinian by virtue of abandonment of by the rest of the Arab world. Israel still sees Palestinian action as an attempt by Arab states to remove Israel from existence, while Palestine is largely on it's own, despite moves by Iran-affiliated Hezbollah in Lebanon and posturing on behalf of other Arab leaders. And now we're even past issues of Israel's right to exist - Hamas at least temporarily accepts a two-state solution. The trick is figuring out modern terms, and how Palestine will negotiate itself into a position less asymmetrical than the one it currently enjoys. The conflict has involved into a very modern form, and while historical legacy plays a role, it's much more recent history than millennial or even centuries old.

So, yeah, no this isn't an old issue. A much better way to avoid the conversation would be to say "lets ride bikes".

Rule of Law

This post is inspired by three separate occurrences, two of them fairly recent. They are: 1, the riots in Greece following the shooting of a 15 year old. 2, the questionable value of a life sentence for Texas inmate Son Tran. 3, the 11th hour move by the Bush Administration to allow doctors and other healthcare service providers the right to refuse health services (meaning birth control and abortion). These all strike me as diverse symptoms of a situation in which the rule of law is seen less as a desirable practice and more as a totalitarian imposition. To clarify for naysayers: I'm not in any way opposed to the rule of law; I take issue with laws that are unjust, and laws that work against the interest of most everyone involved. I think these are all examples of law falling into the later two categories.


1. I'll start with the latter. Bush's action will be debated constantly in the coming week (with bonus Baby-Jesus-themed comments), and will most likely be opposed and somewhat overturned by the incoming Obama administration. The move represents several things: a "thank you" to longstanding Bush supporters, another play in decades-old culture wars, and a decision made by an unaccountable elected official. For all of these reasons, despite public sentiment, it strikes me as a profoundly undemocratic move. My intellectual-sparring-partner JR will side with me on the specific issue of rights concerning access to birth control and abortion services, but he will argue against the constitutionality of Roe v Wade. Ignoring the actual impact of changing that decision as it concerns personal rights, there's a democratic sentiment behind it that is worth examining. The case of Roe v Wade is implicitly about abortion rights, but it is explicitly about privacy, and states rights. If there is no constitutional right to privacy, than abortion is an issue left to the states. States, when making the decision, varied much more widely than a simple "legal or illegal", and the decision was localized to small constituencies. Say what you will about the potential for denial of rights that this entails (and don't get me wrong - there is some serious loss of rights going on), it does allow for a more democratic decision to be made, and such decisions have a legitimacy that feels undermined by judicial fiat. The reaction we'll be seeing in the media, the blogosphere, and political action listservs is a very real sense of powerlessness, of an invalidity of the decision made, and a general disagreement with the new ordering of the law. And that's because this is not a change made with political legitimacy. It's worth noting, however, that the whole of the national abortion debate feels that way to many folk, and has produced an incredible wariness in the American public to accept such top-down detached legal rulings. Esteemed legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, when faced with the passage of similar culture-warsy Prop 8, says this

But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.

It's worth noting that a legal scholar, a man whose life has revolved around various interesting and new arenas for legal battles (code and other laws of cyberspace, copyright), is arguing against a straightforward legal solution and is instead pushing for a solution that has democratic legitimacy.

2. Charles Platt's piece on Son Tran is one I'm going to examine in more depth elsewhere (it is part of an in-process post about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). It's a fascinating story (in that weird, bleak way more common in dystopic fiction), and what stands out from all of it is that, no matter the actual crimes committed by the individual (or, indeed, if they were committed), the punishment seems to be something profoundly useless to society. Confounding this situation is the nature of the person who committed the crime - at the time he was sentenced, Son Tran was 17 years old. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling concerning minors sentenced to death, he was moved from death row to life imprisonment. Depending on where you fall with your perspective of redemption, rehabilitation, and the changeable nature of humans, the 40 years he is now serving will make perfect sense, seem too short, or strike you as a gross waste of a human life, to say nothing of human potential. Charles Platt is upset by both this individual waste, and by the intended value of deterrence that sentences like this are supposed to have. He writes:

Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. I’ll ignore the death penalty, since the Supreme Court has already eliminated it for people under 18. Thus, we are left with incarceration. Has any study ever proved that the prospect of forty years without parole is a better deterrent than, say, thirty years, or even twenty years? It seems utterly implausible to me that the actions of a teenager in an inner-city gang will be affected by such a distinction. In fact I don’t believe that deterrence is either the effect or the purpose of the long, mandatory sentences that have become endemic in the United States during the past two decades.

The facts laid out are very few in the favor of Son Tran: gang member, confessed to murder, received a reprieve because of a supreme court ruling, not new evidence in his trial. But the gross failure and abuse of the criminal justice system (especially in Texas) are enough to make one doubt the whole validity of criminal justice in the United States. Platt's post at this point descends into a fairly typical "Reagan + Fear + Power + Money + Scared White People = Gross Human Rights Abuses that Shame America" argument, and it says something that this argument can have a standard form. It also poses a very real challenge to the acceptance of the rule of law in America, and it hits upon it from an entirely different angle that the Bush decision. The Bush decision is very much another move in decisions removed from democratic consensus - Platt's argument is that Son Tran's imprisonment is no social good (as imprisonment weirdly is supposed to be) but is instead the result of a poorly-framed democratic consensus. People have been pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime for at least 20-30 years now; what people haven't realized is that as a consequence of this:

Among the adult population of the United States, 1 person out of every 100 is now behind bars. Thus the unweighted odds of going to jail are greater than the odds of being a crime victim.

One could write a separate essay on how the people pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime are different than the people who are more likely to be persecuted by vigilant police forces (white & wealthy versus the poor, nonwhite, and disenfranchised) - I'm not going to comment on it anymore here than to say that, for a worryingly large percentage of the US population, law is seen either as "something to protect myself imposed on other people" or "illegitimate decisions made beyond my own personal control that will get me anyway, and so have no bearing on how I act." That's a breakdown in the very purpose of the rule of law, and of a democratic construction of society - laws have to apply equally, and laws have to be understood as threatening not just "those people", but everyone - especially the people who advocate for the law to be passed.

3. Lastly, we come to the Greek Riots. Others more skilled and/or better paid than I will make their conclusions about such serious anti-police riots in the birthplace of the World's first great democracy. The riots started as anti-police, but as they have continued they have done what all great riots do - become chaotic, divisive attempts to reinvent a status quo. The rioters are unemployed, upset with corruption, and think that the police forces have gotten out of hand - to express this discontent, they have attacked police and alienated their countrymen by destroying the property and threatening the livelihood of many small shopkeepers and business owners. It has all the hints of simmering class war, and rather than doing the democratic thing and siding with small owners as an upset middle class, the rioters are very much in the classical (or is it archaic?) mode of students, working class, and the unemployed so upset with the higher-ups that they willingly endanger and alienate those less outraged than themselves. This is not so much an issue of the nature of the rule of law as an example of a remarkable collapse. And yet, law itself hasn't entirely collapsed - the police exist, are a visible presence in Greece, and the government still stands. But the police are hesitant to act - one of their own is being tried for murder while on duty (the counterclaim is that he was provoked and responded appropriately), and so we have the potential for the rule of law, the semblance of a rule of law, and either a government or a police force unwilling to impose that law on the citizens it exists to protect. As law collapses on the national level, it re-imposes itself interestingly.

The shooting prompted parents all over the country to examine the liberties they have been permitting their children.

“My 12-year-old daughter has been getting text messages inviting her to join demonstrations,” said Constantine Michalos, president of the Greek chamber of commerce. “One of the messages said, ‘Don’t go to school today. We need to show our power on the street.’ I had to lay down the law.”

The riots will not, as many fear, have the effect of the French riots two centuries prior or the Russian riots all of 90 years ago. What they will do, however, is allow for a reforming of society around the rule of law - laws to protect against some of what inspired the riots (police carelessness and political corruption; it's hard to get laws passed against the economy), as well as against the actions taken by the rioters. Chaos like this is curious for it's ability to reforge society - France's Fifth Republic arose as a center-right forced the imposition of the rule of law over both the military and striking students and workers. And violence like this polarizes - while prior to the riots, many were discontent with the status quo in Greece, the value of the rule of law comes to the fore as people gravitate away from the dangers of the chaos and back towards the assurances of stability, becoming increasingly more willing to overlook injustices inherent in that stability as long as it means they have property, livelihood, and are guaranteed some freedom from molotov cocktails. The trick with any society structured around the rule of law, and especially that of democracies, is to balance freedoms with controls.

Stratis Stratigis, former chairman of the Athens Olympics organising committee, suggested he might have an answer. “Our democracy is destroying itself because it misrepresented the right to liberty and equality,” says an e-mail circulating his friends. “It taught the citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.”

This is a quote from Socrates, the ancient philosopher who ended up being sentenced to death for voicing truths that nobody wanted to hear.

“It’s funny,” said Stratigis. “Those words have a ring about them today.”

Fictions

In discussion with Evan, and inspired by Nora, I've decided to do some alternate history short stories. Speculative fiction, historical imaginings, that sort of a thing. It doesn't fit the tone of this blog, so I'm putting them elsewhere.

My fiction blog is Battles of Isonzo. Besides always thinking that "Battles of Isonzo" is a pretty kick-ass band name, it's one of those incredibly pointless parts of history. Twelve battles were fought on the river in WWI, with between 500,000 and 700,000 soldiers dying there. It seems like an appropriate title for futile reminagings.

If you don't mind speculative fiction that concerns war, have yourself a look! And if you do, know that this blgo won't be changing any.

9/11/2008 - Political Elasticity

As is habit, here's an obligatory 9/11 blog post.

John Fleck has been blogging lately about elasticity, about how people are changing behaviors responding to the high price of gas. What's interesting is the range of successful options - biking is easy for short commutes (high elasticity). Public transportation is becoming more popular, meaning that the buses in Albuquerque are carrying more riders than ever, and that the demand is great than can currently be met (fairly high elasticity). People are looking at trains instead of flying for travel, and the rail system in this nation cannot possibly keep up for at least a year or two (low elasticity). Other people are looking at natural gas, given how cheap it is, and wondering why we don't have cars than can use it as fuel; others are just wondering why people aren't, all of a sudden, driving more fuel efficient cars. Specialized car production to meet this crisis is slow, lagging behind demand. For cars to adapt will take several years, and new fuels will take longer (low, very low elasticity). That's elasticity as it concerns travel and fuel costs among consumers in the US.

The elasticity that concerns 9/11 is with policy advisors. Condoleeza Rice is the latest in a long line of presidential cabinet members who grew up and academically came of age as Russia experts - the Cold War has produced professionals who are longer lived than their knowledge set. The best minds in US foreign policy for decades have been specialists on Russia.

Seven years after 9/11, I'm taking Arabic, History of Islam, and a class called "War on Terror". Those classes are bursting - they had to offer a new section of Arabic, and in a school that prides itself on small class size they cannot trim the numbers in these classrooms down below 25. Two years ago, when I took "Middle Eastern Culture and Civilization" at community college in New Mexico, the class was small, maybe 15 students. This sudden rush, this explosion of interest, is the political elasticity. Seven years after the fact we have responded to the crisis, and the crises that have emerged since then.

Here's hoping our knowledge is needed before this is all over.

Edit 9/11/2008: I've a more personal post about the day, and my reaction to it, up on livejournal.

Brinkmanship

Yesterday I finished reading "The Crisis of Islam" by Bernard Lewis. While I recommend a lot of books, I don't make the recommendations lightly, and that is especially true for this book. "Crisis of Islam" reads and feels like the best history and context for understanding the actions of Usama bin Laden (or as we know him, Osama), and the conflict he sees with the west. The book is a scant 169 pages, and it goes quickly, which is why I'm inclined to recommend it over every other book of the sort a person can find. This is a book that can be read, read easily, and will have a profound effect on a person's understanding of the War on Terror. (This makes sense, given that the book is assigned reading for the "War on Terror" class I'm taking). The book, again, is great history.

The problem I have with it is that the book is poor political science, and it tries to be. In fact, the book was drawn in part from articles in Foreign Affairs (my favorite source of international relations political science), and the book was written with the intent of influencing major policy decisions. Checking the wikipedia on Bernard Lewis, it was kind of startling to read that he was one of the major intellectuals arguing in favor of the United States invasion of Iraq. The book itself doesn't overtly advocate the actions wikipedia attributes to Lewis's influence. But it's implied, and it's a strong undertone in the last chapter.

The book was written and published before the United States invaded Iraq. Lewis' plan, as it can be inferred, was for an externally imposed democracy to become a catalyst for more genuine democratic movements in the middle east, which would lead to prosperity, stability, and a positive outlet for moderate Islam to regain control of the debate from radical extremes. This is, as you've probably reasoned, absurd.

The logic behind it states that Islam, as nation-religion, no longer has adversaries to play off against each other. The rest of the West is out, Russia is out, and the United States stands as the only civilization opposing the glorious spread of Muhammad's nation and religion. Bernard Lewis does such a good job explaining the desire for the global religion-state as the objective of radical Islam, and he does such a good job showing the current regimes in the middle east as failed custodians of the faith and successors to the Caliph, that he can't figure out how a nativist movement could be anything but violently radical. In Lewis' view, the only hope for democracy in the middle east (excepting Turkey and Israel) is an external catalyst.

This contradicts his own understanding of the importance of nativism to the nation-religion of Islam. The importance of bin-Laden and the threat that he represents is based on and enhanced by his success in driving Russia out of Afghanistan. Khomeini and al-Sadr both can be pointed to as having had meaningful action against the corrupt and the foreign, and without the legitimacy of the act they would be fringe elements. That Khomeini's state became more oppressive than the one it succeeded is a grave flaw, but the quasi-democracy it operates, the poor economic fortunes of many Iranians, the concentration of poor economic prospects in the younger half of a nation where the media age is 26, and the fading memory of revolution all provide the opportunity for a nativist change in government, and a move away from oppressive and radical Islam. The state bin-Laden supported has been reduced to the margins, and with luck will remain there. Meanwhile, a variety of ethnic parties have filled the void left by a religious government, and this too bodes well for nativst change. Perhaps the devolution of the state of Afghanistan, but certainly a trend towards nativist rule over outsider radicals.

And then we have Iraq. Iraq is my major sore point with Lewis, and it baffles me how he can write that history and assume an imposed democracy will work. The way Lewis sees it, the United States needs to just maintain a presence, outlast the terrorists, and it can claim victory. He points to the fact that the PLO repeatedly engaged in terrorist activity but never had Isreal give in as a sign of success, and treats the largely one-sided negotiations between Israel and Palestine as a positive sign. The trick, Lewis seems to be saying, is for the US to master brinkmanship - we stay right on the edge, we keep our opposition there, and we don't blink. If we can hold out, prove by our existence their futility, they will be forced to adopt other means, and the whole crisis of radical Islam will be over. This actually justifies making the Iraq the battleground for the war on terror, as it is an overt desire to create an actual battlefield on which terrorism can lose.

It's a bold statement, but it's fundamentally stupid. In all his reading of history, and in his undertanding of bin Laden's reading of history, Lewis makes the astute observation that the terrorists are motivated by percieved marks against the dignity of the nation-religion of Islam. Specific grievances cited are the crusades (which are much more of an after-the-fact grievance), the breakdown and destruction of the Ottoman empire, and US support for corrupt and weak leaders in the middle east. Again, the grievances are: 1- an invasion by infidels, 2-the destruction of an important and powerful muslim state, and 3-the support of government that otherwise shouldn't exist. Having made this claim, I cannot understand how he thinks the overthrow of the government of Iraq by the US with the express purpose of putting in place a new government is a good idea. That is two of the above indignities, and close to the third (Iraq was, in name, secular, but it has a muslim population and is a historic center of muslim government).

The problem with the crisis is that it is too big an issue to be tackled by one solution. Catalysts are nice, and sometimes essential, but that are very hard to create from the outside. And I think that is the fundamental frustration that Lewis is unable to address. The United States has suffered from terrorism, and the destruction of the United States is the stated objective of radical Islam. The United States, as the most power country in the world, should be able to do something about it. The wars is Iraq and Afghanistan were moves to do something about it. But the problem is that they don't work, and the thing that is absolutely terrifying about this conflcit is that the United States is powerless here. To end radical Islam, moderate Islam has to make real gains at home. That will require the end of oil money and the end of US interest in backing corrupt governments that provide oil, and then it will require American non-interference in the potentially revolutionary or democratizing moves that follow. The United States must let native movements take place, and let self-determination and human dignity be affirmed by these movements of their own will, even in the shape of religious parties or states. Without dignity, the terrorists will continue. With human dignity restored, with governments responsive to the needs of the populace (or at the very least vulnerable to the populace), then and only then will we have outlasted the War on Terror.

But we've created a battlefield on which it is impossible for us to win. Brinkmanship won the Cold War, but that was against a nation. The Nation of Islam that bin-Laden wants to establish doesn't exist in a present form, and as a transient quantity, it can't be destroyed. As an ideology, and as an ideology with at 1400 year legacy, it can be outlasted. That's an impossibility, and even turing Iraq into an accelerator of the movement, the lighting of match to burn out the gas leak, will not help. The problem cannot be changed in that way, and our continued actions only breed contempt.

We need to find a solution other than this impossibility.

Edit 9/12/2008: It's well worth mentioning that Lewis is very orientalist in his perspective, and that he sees most of the past two centuries of development in the Muslim world as adapted or inspired by Western ideals. That said, the history is still good, and he even counters his own emphasis on the West by repeatedly referring to the necessity and importance of nativist trends.

Independence Day

There's a lot this holiday brings to bloggers: skepticism, location-based pride (or scoffing at location based pride), the opportunity to examine national triumphs, the best lead-in to extol the granting of self-determination to colonies still remaining. The Fourth of July on the blogosphere is our nation examined through it's ideals.

And we sit here, far close than we imagine, to the brink of a third imperial exercise in the first decade of this new century. This video, found on a fantastic blog I need to add to my blogroll, is of Ron Paul making a speech in congress. He's intelligent and made as hell, and this time he manages to give his piece with respect for the integrity of the United States original mission, and international law. Watch it, and temper the bleakness of what he his discussing with the fact that the US has a strong tradition of intelligent dissent. At the very least, in history books we can go down as having people strongly object to the mistakes we make in the name of force. We are a nation with strong currents and strong undercurrents, and the record will have us as bitterly divided but well-intentioned. The nature of our nation is a contentious one, and for all it's flaws, at least it lets us have our cake and eat it too.

Humanitarian War

Blogger's Note: This is a rather long post, and for such a long post it is rather dry. The key point I'm making is in the last paragraph; the intervening 1700 words are all framing and support, so feel free to skip them (or go back to them).

Wikipedia, that stalwart of internet reliability, lists 60+ wars that started since 1991. As an added bonus, they have an ongoing wars page, which includes some conflicts that are carryovers from the previous century. It's interesting, and a way bigger list than I was intending to write about. So I'll just point you in that direction and move on.

The big thing I was looking for was wars authorized by the Security Council since the end of the cold war. Reading "Chasing the Flame", four big wars stand out, to my American/Anglo biased perspective. These are the Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo War, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II. Appropriate big omissions of foreign military intervention are Rwanda and Darfur.

The last 20 years was bigger than this, with more going on, but these 6 conflicts give us an interesting opportunity to examine war's legality, legitimacy, and underlying motive. Each of these conflicts can have a case made for or against Humanitarian War. Each conflict, case-by case:

1. Persian Gulf War
Legal? Yes, authorized by the UN Security Council
Legitimate? Yes. A coalition expels an invading/occupying force from a sovereign nation.
Humanitarian? Debatable. The crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, the huge, morally reprehensible ones, were against populations living with Iraq, were committed in the late 80s, and were largely unrelated to the invasion of Kuwait. Likewise, the victorious coalition hurt the regime and ended the occupation, but they stood by while purges were enacted against populations within Iraq; the Shi'a were most hurt, while the US managed to intervene to help the Kurds later in Northern Iraq. All this distracts from the point; the war had the chance to be humanitarian, chose not to be, and instead operated in defense of sovereignty.

2. Kosovo
Legal? While earlier NATO bombing had been supported by the UN, the actual move to defend and liberate Kosovo was taken without either the permission or the explicit opposition of the Security Council. This is a grey area, but the war probably falls on the side of illegal.
Legitimate? Many within the UN tended to view it as such, and it was a war against a previously-proven genocidal government.
Humanitarian? Most would agree that it was, but the nature of the war (bombing campaigns) hurts the image of NATO as concerned for the best interests of civilians. That the ethnic Albanians were oppressed, being exterminated, and then saved by the war is more certain.

3. Afghanistan
Legal? Since it was not an officially declared war, it was not illegal, but it had no immediate legality. The UN Security Council later authorized an "international security assistance force", which can be assumed that the post-Taliban occupation is more legal.
Legitimate? Unclear. That the Taliban Regime* oppressed it's people is a well-documented historical fact, and that the Taliban regime engaged in both ethnic and religious conflcit isn't disputed. It was, in the eyes of the international community, an illegitimate regime, reocgnized prior to 9/11 by only 3 nations, and shortly afterwards by only 1. But no war has had legitimacy simply by saying "this government oppresses it's own people, let us overthrow them". The war's stated reason was that the Taliban gave support to Osama bin Laden and al Qadea (which the Taliban, in fact, did), and that Osama bin Laden was the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks (still not proven). The war is almost legitimate, and by almost all still probably considered a good thing.
Humanitarian? As mentioned above, the Taliban was an oppressive regime, and very few mourned it's overthrow. Afghanistan, as a country that has suffered war more or less continuously since 1979, had a brief period of stability when the Taliban assumed control of msot of the nation in 1996. The Northern Alliance and the Taliban still fought, however, which means that the risk of ending a cruel but peaceful era was not a big one. The war is plausibly humanitarian, and what would tilt the balance either way is the nation-building undertaken afterward. The humanitarian objectives that are pursued are several levels below military ones, so I'm going to have to rule this a no.

*Regime has become such an ugly word, but it still seems to be the most appropriate one

4. Iraq
Legal? No, war undertaken after a UN veto of the war
Legitimate? Not on the grounds of preventative war, as Saddam's threats were empty, and if it was a war explicitly against a decades-old ethnic cleansing, then it is unprecedented and failed as well.
Humanitarian? Saddam Hussein was a vicious leader, but replacing a tightly-controlled, stable and oppressive state with the world's number one breeding ground for terrorism and a civil war both count against the humanitarian virtues of the war.

5. Rwanda**
Legal? Was a civil war; saw no UN military intervention/authorization
Legitimate? Was a genocidal civil war; the UN abandonment of it's duty there has been decried as a horrific failure, and itself eroded the UN's legitimacy.
Humanitarian? Not going to war saved the UN from a difficult task of intervening in a civil war. Involvement in such a civil war would have meant placing UN peacekeepers in such a fashion so as to stand between two hostile groups and hope they can hold, or to choose a side and risk the death of innocents. Failure to intervene with armed force, it can be argued, is what made Rwanda Rwanda, as the ultimate example of inaction and atrocity in the face of inaction.

6. Darfur**
Legal? The civil war is seen as having an element of ethnic cleansing, making it illegal even by the standards of a civil war. An African Union peacekeeping force has been present for a while. Recently, a joint UN-AU peacekeeping force
Legitimate? The involvement by the African Union is widely acknowledged as a good thing; the UN itself formed a joint mission with the African Union. Sudan views it as illegitimate, but in places where sovereignty has collapsed the international community has a vested interest, and Darfur certainly qualifies as a collapse of sovereignty.
Humanitarian? The protection of humanitarian operations is an explicit objective of the UN/AU mission, and the usage of both military and police forces entails a strong Humanitarian objective.

** Rwanda and Darfur get big qualifiers because they are not wars engaged in for humanitarian purposes; they are humanitarian crises involving war in which it is hypothesized that armed intervention by an international force may have had humanitarian benefits, and brought about a humanitarian resolution of the crisis. In Darfur, we may be able to witness this happen.

The conflicts of this era are especially important as they more closely resemble the conditions in which the League of Nations was formed and failed. While the UN grew up in the Cold War, it's changed role from mediator between two bitterly opposed worldviews (a mediator that happens to intervene in crises from time to time). Post Cold War, the UN has become the sole source of international legitimacy, and has to deal with a myriad of unbalanced partners in conflict. To better understand these humanitarian wars in conflict, lets look at a pair of wars, from the League of Nations era, where humanitarian concerns were relevant.

7. The Spanish Civil War
Legal? As a civil war, the assumed protocol was to keep out of it, and many nations refused to sell arms to either group of belligerents. This was ignored by the three major nations that interfered in Spain; Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia.
Legitimate? Intervention and arms-selling was viewed as illegal and immoral by most Western Democracies, so if we are using their standard of legitimacy foreign intervention was illegitimate. However, the Soviets, and the Fascists/Nazis, both felt involvement in such a conflict was an ideological imperative, and felt their involvement was justified. Several foreign nationals felt that serving in Spain (esp. on the side of the Republic) was a personal moral imperative, and volunteered; this alone the League of Nations enacted a formal ban against.
Humanitarian? The League's abstention from involvement in this conflict was one of many instances of the League's failure to prevent war, and the ban on foreign nationals was viewed by many as a guarantee of Franco's victory. The volunteers felt a humanitarian and a moral imperative, so armed intervention could have been viewed as humanitarian had it been undertaken solely by altruistic individuals. The history of armed intervention in Spain involves far-reaching concerns, but very few of them altruistic or humanitarian.

8. World War II
Legal? The belligerents in WWII simply left the League, removing any authority it may have had over their actions.
Legitimate? Certain sides can not be counted as legitimate; Lebensraum is not an acceptable political justification for war. The Allies, as glorified in history, fought for the freedom of Europe (and other parts of the world), and so they have that whole moral justification back story. Since they were attacked, and since the Nazis committed massive crimes against humanity, it's easy to gloss over as legitimate. Excepting that the Holocaust was barely known, much less a justification for war. And excepting the history of the USSR, which attacked non-belligerent nations, and whose people often tried to openly join Germany until they found out German had a program of death or servitude for Slavs. So the war is mostly legitimate, but it's a messy legitimacy, made more so by the effective collapse of the League of Nations upon the outbreak of hostilities.
Humanitarian? Keeping in mind that few urging the allied nations to war knew of the Holocaust, the humanitarian objectives of the war have to be seen in the context of what horrors were known to be committed at the outset of war. This also ignores the crimes committed in occupied nations, because by that time the war was underway. Liberation is a humanitarian objective, and it's powerful enough to give the Allied decision to enter WWII a small bit of humanitarian objective. Self-interest, so as to prevent the west (or East, in the case of Russian and China) from ceasing to exist, counts as the primary motive, and means that WWII was not a humanitarian war; it just had a humanitarian component.

All this dry analysis was building to a point, and that is this: Humanitarian War is a new phenomenon, a potentially legal and legitimate one, provided it is undertaken/overseen by the United Nations, and that it has the best interest of the international community, the global commons, and the innocent civilians within a nation at heart. The Persian Gulf War, though a legitimate war, was not humanitarian in much the same way that WWII wasn't humanitarian. NATO bombings in Kosovo/Serbia were humanitarian in objective, but the means and the lack of authorization both detract from that noble purpose. And lastly, the UN/AU mission in Darfur has the potential to be a great humanitarian boon coming from armed force, but it isn't quite a war. This is a new era we have entered, and Humanitarian War has yet to enter as a real thing with form and substance. Currently, it exists as an objective, a justification, and a potential new role for modern militaries. But it is not yet an existing thing.

Nuke Prevention Corollary

John brought up an interesting point today. Now, the point is from a book he can't find by an author he can't remember, but the point rings true - Nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the relative peace that followed WWII; rather, it was the world leader's experience of the Second World War that encouraged them not to engage in anything similar.

This has its merits - Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and De Gaulle come to mind. Generals, especially, who succeeded in the key area of "not having major foreign wars". They came close - Eisenhower had Korea, Khrushchev fell out of favor post-Cuban Missile Crisis, and de Gaulle both came to power through a coup and then ended a colonial war in Algeria. They led nations in conflicts, but they were always about keeping it contained, keeping it manageable, and about ending it. It's a valuable experience, and their respective roles in WWII no doubt had a serious effect on the outcome.

The trick with relying on memory as the reason no major powers went to war against each other is that memory fades, and people with the memories get old and die. Currently, the united states is on it's second "Baby Boomer" president, and seems ready to elect a third. Putin was born in 1952, and to continue the parallel Sarkozy was born in 1955. These people have no living memory of the second world war, and to be fair, they have no memory of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as well.

They do, however, have a lifetime of fear instilled in them over the prospect of a nuclear war. The cold war left that as a solid legacy (what is the point of 'duck and cover' if not to instill fear?), and they had the actual devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to look back on. The atomic bomb, born of the horrors of WWII, found it's place as a lasting reminder of the exceedingly high costs of war between great powers. The living memory of those first leaders is not to be discredited, (surely, if they had wanted to use the bomb they would have), but the bomb itself, that intense amount of otherworldly power in such a small capsule, will last, and will endure, as the ever-present threat and the lesson learned. Perhaps the bomb did not establish the peace - the bomb certainly secured it.

Nagasaki Day

A few days ago, Christine at iMinister blogged about Hiroshima Day. It's a good piece, and worth reading before returning here. It's okay, I'll give you a few minutes.


Okay, that's enough time.

The legacy of the first usages of atomic weaponry is an almost incomprehensible one. I mean, we'll understand that, but I'm not sure if it will take more time, more generations of removal, or if we're already past the point of most valid critical analysis. On the off-chance that this moment is it, I'm putting forth (again) my opinion.

The atomic bomb dropped against Hiroshima was a necessary thing. Not because of the lives of American soldiers/Japanese soldiers it would have saved - I've never trusted that rationalization; after all, it is the soldiers place to fight and die in war, so that the civilian may live. The bomb was dropped instead to herald in a new era of limited war. Pre-1945, casualties in war seemed to grow exponentially. Post-WWII, casualties per year from war remained at around 1 million, which seems rather high but become more impressive when you consider that ever-growing population of the world.

The atomic bomb was such a force that nations that had previously been willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands were now faced with the possibility of a war that cost hundreds of millions, and suddenly, no major power wanted to risk that devastating. Certainly, powerful nations waged war, but one-sided wars, and not at any cost. Not a particularly good thing, but much better than the escalating cycles of devastation that had previously existed.

Of course, this limit on war, this destructive potential was shown with the first bomb. One real, (practical?) application was enough. The second bomb, the bomb on Nagasaki, was Truman being arrogant and impatient. It hardly can be justified as "We needed to make sure it worked the same every time" , and there is no further, more valid reason necessary for it's use. Hiroshima Day is a grim reminder of the cost of an era of limited war. Nagasaki Day is a testament to the risk the existence this weapon contains, and perhaps its greatest potential for abuse.

New to Plastic Manzikert?

Here is a rough and quick guide - the tags are below, and everything I've blogged will fall there somewhere.

I recommend the education posts, as they seem to be the most relevant. Or at least, I can act the most authoritative in them.

Mother's Day

Normally a holiday as innocent as this wouldn't find its way into my musings on war.

Normally, holidays don't exist just for the purpose of hallmark, and mother's day has a long history about being something else. Inevitably, this poem will be read in Unitarian churches and other places this morning, and inevitably, people will complain about the commercialization of this noble aim.

The divergent topics from this point are many and valid. Will more people take complaints about Mother's day more seriously than they took complaints about "Drinko" de Mayo? What good does it do to just remember the original purpose? Is the meaning there still valid? What's the significance of mother's day having its origins in 1870, with the Franco-Prussian war as a backdrop?

Really, what's valid and meaningful is said today by this. (If you're reading this on 5-20-2007 or later, the site will not be mother's-day-themed. This is probably too topical to work well anyways).

And then, as a last note, this and this. Both ends of the standard American political spectrum, tackling the problem of a new phenom in this day and age - single women mothers who are deployed in Iraq.

Cinco de Mayo

Wikipedia reads like a blog on this, so I'm not going to be able to go with the easy reference.

Cinco de Mayo is the catchy title for the holiday that, at one point, commemorated the Mexican victory in the Battle of Puebla. The generally remembered impression of the battle is that the Mexican force (rag-tag or formal military, or both) fought off a superior (more numbers or better trained or some combination there-of) French force, at a time when France was the premier continental power in Europe (which, at the least, implies that being beaten by Mexican forces is really not an expected thing). There's lots of places to go with this, but I'm not generally concerned about the exploitation of nationalism by beer companies (if you really want to name yourself after a failed brewer whose major success was in messing up governments, go for it).

The point I'm going to make is really about the rest of history. The army that won the battle of Puebla was eventually beaten (after a siege? quite possibly). In the long-term the French adventure failed. In the shorter term, the heroes of this underdog/against-the-odds battle were killed. By overwhelming superiority, as Napoleon the Third sent more troops into Mexico, and his generals had a good long spat of winning battles.

There should be more here. France invaded a nation because it could, the nations' people fought, and the early heroes died suitably tragic deaths, and the world moved on. Puebla remembers the battle, and that is almost the end of this.

In casual observation, it seems Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican-American holiday in a much different way than it is portrayed. It's a victory against imperialism, which, in the parts of the United States that were once Mexico, has significance.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, my local paper (Edit-links to the paper still fail to work) ran a series of soundbites from essays written about MLK by in-state high school youth. And I'm of a mixed opinion. Firstly, it is good that thought is being given to King, but when a dozen different children talk about how great ignoring race is, it seems to me that this is a problem.

Priviliege allows colorblindness, since those who are privileged don't have to spend their whole life acknowledging race. To simply ignore this fact of someone's being is to deny them worth as a human. It denies race so that there isn't guilt associated with race. It's the "If you would stop acting Black, we could stop having racism" line of thinking. This is absurd.

Martin Luther King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character, as opposed to being judged by the color of their skin. He did not want people to ignore the color of their skin, he just wanted to make sure that skin color wasn't the determining factor in how people were judged. Ignoring skin color seems to be making as strong a judgement as discriminating because of skin color.

Really, I think the student's essays would have been a lot more valuble if they had to write about Rev. Dr. MLK Jr without citing (or even using at all) his "I have a Dream" speech.