Monday, 24 May 2004
Serious Sam.
Meanwhile, here's the man who should be our Secretary of Defense, if not Kerry's choice for Vice President (link via the DNC's Kicking Ass):
For a president who claims that everything changed after September 11, how can George W. Bush fail to take the gravest threat to national security — a terrorist acquiring fissile nuclear material — seriously?
"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said yesterday in an interview. "It would be so obvious that the obstacles should have been overcome by the presidents."
Instead of making up threats that don't exist, the administration ought to be doing something about the real ones. It's time for a president who takes national security seriously.
Nunn, the Democratic co-sponsor of 1991's Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, has been out in front sounding this alarm for over a decade: The former Soviet Union has dozens of storage facilities containing weapons-grade uranium, plutonium, sarin, and other chemical and biological weapons, most of them secured with a chain-link fence and maybe a security guard.
We've spent billions searching for Iraqi WMDs when the world's largest inventory of WMDs is sitting in unsecured warehouses, waiting to see whether America will overcome its own bureaucratic inertia… or whether the terrorists will get there first.
This is one of these issues that, if you have all the facts, will drive you stark raving mad: We have a plan to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium that would otherwise be at risk of falling into the hands of terrorists — but we've never gotten around to carrying it out, because we're still haggling over insurance issues. As in, who'll pay for the Superfund cleanup if there's an accident in Russia while we're destroying the plutonium.
Hello?
Plutonium! Sixty-eight TONS of plutonium! Why are we wandering around Iraq with tweezers and a magnifying glass when there's — I can't even talk about this without losing it completely, but Sam Nunn can, and for that I thank him. Make Sam our VP. Make him our Secretary of Defense. But, for goodness' sake,
listen to him. Get those nukes under lock and key.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:45 pm. comments.
Monday, 24 May 2004
That I will bear true faith and allegiance…
Donald Sensing, at the end of a long article discussing media bias and pundit bias, declares there are four possible outcomes to the War on Terror — and that your bias, since we're all biased in one way or another, should reflect the outcome you want. The right-wing pundits are playing up Nick Berg's murder, and downplaying the Abu Ghraib scandal, because they love our country and want to see us defeat the terrorists; the "liberal media" and left-wing pundits are still rehashing Abu Ghraib because… they hate America and want the terrorists to win.
This is going to be lengthy, but I want to give that premise the response it deserves.
The slander of the lambs
I've pointed out in Donald's comments that it's not just Abu Ghraib — the claim that Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident, by a few bad apples acting on their own initiative, doesn't pass the smell test — but I want to address a common, deeper problem with Donald's analysis: The belief that the Left hates America.
Part of the reason the liberal left is losing to Fox News in the war of public opinion is that we haven't fought that particular slander fiercely enough. It's absurd to claim that half of Americans hate the United States, but that doesn't matter: If someone in a respectable forum suggests that you hate America, the appropriate response is Don't you ever dare to suggest that I love my country less than you do. Call them on it, and do it immediately.
We need to fight tooth and nail against the left-hates-America crowd, because their poisonous bile is infecting the mainstream… and because many right-wingers are from the Jacksonian school of thought, where the traditional response to an outrageous slur is to invite the speaker to step outside. In that world, failing to protest strongly enough is either a sign of cowardice or a sign of acceptance; I'm not calling for a return to the private duel, but we do need to draw a line between civil debate and fighting words, and then defend that line as though our society depended on it. You have the right to an opinion, the right to free speech, but not the right to slander — not if you want to keep this civil, and I'll assume that civility is something we all value.
The rule of law
Now that we've dealt with that issue, I'm going to talk about the rule of law. And, since the rule of law is a phrase that means different things to different people, I'll start by saying what I think it means.
First, law means a set of rules that applies to everyone equally. Rich or poor, black or white, Sunni or Methodist, American or Iraqi, the law remains the same: If you do X, you get Y. Enforcement is not a question of the offender's faith, family or political party; if (for example) a Democratic president can be compelled to testify under oath, then a Republican president can also be compelled. Establishing the rule of law means setting up a system whereby the overwhelming majority of criminals are caught, tried and punished, and where law-abiding citizens can go about their business without fear of crime or arrest.
Second, the rule of law means that, in virtually all disputes, we appeal to the law as our first and only resort. Where the rule of law is in effect, violence is off the table; we've agreed to put aside our guns and rely on the police and the courts. There are rare situations where you or I might endorse "taking the law into one's own hands" — but these are exceptions, usually involving self-defense against imminent bodily harm, and we investigate such claims for evidence of wrongdoing.
By these definitions, the rule of law is strong throughout the "civilized world" — America, Europe, Japan, et al. — and weak at best throughout the Mideast. Terrorists, by definition, go against the rule of law; in fact, terrorism is best understood as an effort to weaken the rule of law, or to abandon it entirely. By retaliating against those who apply the law, by creating anarchy and reducing faith in the system, and by taunting authorities into trampling the law and giving up their claim to legitimacy, terrorists undermine the fabric of our society in the hopes of destroying and replacing it.
These definitions also make it clearer who our enemies are. We aren't in a war with all of Islam, or even the whole of Islamic fundamentalists, any more than the IRA meant Britain was at war with all Irish Catholics — or any more than a struggle against the Ku Klux Klan could be described as a war against all Southern whites. It's the means, not the ends, that we're fighting against: If religious crazies want to convert us to Islam, that's fine. If they want to go door-to-door with pamphlets, great. If they want to pour millions into a money-losing right-wing newspaper in the nation's capital, we allow that. The fanatics become our mortal enemies only if they take up the tools of terrorism, and only those who take this step deserve to be called our foes.
The double-edged sword
Randolph Bourne once declared that "War is the health of the state" — but for advocates of the rule of law, war is a dangerous practice. It invites chaos and anarchy, and suspends the civil contract in favor of brute survival; the case can be made to justify war, when the alternatives are worse, but war is inherently damaging to the premise that men are ruled by laws.
For that reason, among others, war is our last resort: If there's another way to achieve our goals within the rule of law, then our own self-interest demands we try it first. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an affront to the very concept of law, with tortures, executions and genocides as the order of the day; the case for war could be made on those grounds, and you could argue that we spent twelve years exhausting the alternatives. Saddam was not going to be dislodged from Iraq by anything short of military force; the question was not whether getting rid of Saddam was desirable — it was — but whether the benefits of deposing Saddam by force outweighed the risks of turning Iraq into New Lebanon.
Western civilization, to its benefit, has made great efforts to civilize war and minimize the 'collateral damage' to our principles. We've established conventions and codes of conduct, put certain weapons (e.g., poison gas) off limits, and we make efforts to limit civilian casualties. We do these things in part because we hope the enemy will reciprocate, but also in part because they show how highly we respect the rule of law. Even in the midst of a war zone, we attempt to establish some rules and enforce them; we have given up some tactics that might bring short-term advantage on the battlefield because we think there's a longer-term gain in renouncing them.
We have also, in this war, sought to establish ourselves as the legitimate (if temporary) sovereign of Iraq, on the basis that we are liberating the Iraqi people from a genocidal tyrant; we're just running things for a little while until we can establish a government of the Iraqi people, or so the theory goes. This too requires that we limit our actions to those a legitimate sovereign would perform — and America established centuries ago that cruel and unusual punishment is out of bounds.
Why Abu Ghraib matters more
Nick Berg's murder was a deplorable act by a band of terrorists. It joins the murder of Daniel Pearl, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings, the USS Cole attack, and many other acts on the list of atrocities for which the terrorists will be made to answer — and we'll all celebrate the day when that happens.
The Abu Ghraib scandal was a series of deplorable acts by U.S. soldiers, carrying out orders from senior officers, in support of a policy that came from Donald Rumsfeld's office. If our goal in Iraq is to establish the rule of law there, then Berg's death is a matchstick compared to the raging, burning inferno that Abu Ghraib represents: How can we possibly bring the rule of law with one hand while holding instruments of torture in the other?
Individual terrorist acts are not going to prevent us from establishing a peaceful and secure Iraq. Collectively, if there are enough terrorist attacks, they may lower Iraqi confidence in the rule of law below the breaking point… and Nick Berg's murder is one step in that direction.
Abu Ghraib is an Olympic-class sprint in the direction of destroying whatever faith Iraqis have left in American competence. Not faith in our goodwill, or trust in our motives (though arguably these are up for grabs as well), but a renewed disbelief in American promises — of which the Iraqi people have a long, bitter memory.
The only reason Berg's murder comes up in the same sentence as Abu Ghraib is because of the "blame Americans first" crowd — the right-wing pundits whose constant refrain is that everyone to the left of Paul Wolfowitz is a traitor. The libruls are all worked up about a few frathouse shenanigans in Iraq's prisons, goes the claim, but beheading an American doesn't bother them. Beating an Iraqi prisoner to death is good clean fun for all involved (except perhaps the Iraqi, but he was probably a terrorist), but beheading an American prisoner is an act so brutal and savage that the Right questions your patriotism if you're not shaking your fist right now.
It's a moral equivalence (or, rather, a moral unequivalence) that should disgust any decent person, regardless of your political beliefs — as should the transparent lie that the tortures at Abu Ghraib were an isolated incident by low-level soldiers acting on their own initiative. We already know the same tortures were being applied at Gitmo and in Afghanistan, and that they are still going on. We're setting fire to the house at the same time we're trying to build it, and that requires our full attention; the shame isn't that liberals lack compassion (never thought I'd hear that from the right), but that conservatives would use Berg's death as a partisan cudgel, to distract attention from their incompetence.
A "bias for reformist impulses", indeed
Donald Sensing says there are "only four basic outcomes of this war", which I'll summarize as follows: Democratic reform in the Mideast (and, with it, an end to the terrorist threat); restoration of the Islamic caliphate; Armageddon; or stalemate.
No one, left or right, is wishing for Armageddon; no Americans would want a pan-Arab nation hostile to Western interests; and stalemate isn't an outcome we'd pursue unless the only alternatives are defeat and Armageddon. So we're left with democratic reform as the only serious option… and with the oft-repeated false dichotomy: You're with us, or with the terrorists.
The real question isn't whether we support democratic reform: The question is how we support it. If you don't care what the international lawyers say, because you're going to kick some ass… then you might not be in a good position to engender respect for the rule of law. If you're criticizing the media because they keep bringing up Abu Ghraib, then you're probably not ready to sell the Arabs on a free press. And so on.
Winning this war will take a long time, and it will require that we stick to our principles — including the ones about cruel and unusual punishments. The moral choice isn't between the goals of the West or the goals of the terrorists; the choice is between standing up for American principles… or for voting to continue to cast them aside.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:21 am. comments.
