Arms and influence

If not Vietnam, then...

IN THE NEWS
When William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the grandfathers of modern conservatism, argues that the American war effort in Iraq is a failure, we've reached some sort of crossroads in the sad history of this conflict. There has not been a dramatic, Tet Offensive-like moment when a sudden hurricane of events smashes the domestic political support for the war effort. Instead, the foundations of the war effort have been crumbling bit by bit, while we watch the edifice of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy sink slowly.

Meanwhile, back at National Review, where Buckley recently retired as the journal's editor-in-chief, columnists resist all Vietnam parallels, except for the ones that cast the critics of the war in an unflattering light. Arguing over the appropriateness of the Vietnam analogy can easily lapse into pedantry, obscuring what useful points of similarity or difference one can find. However, if the staff of National Review thinks that the worst historical analogy possible is defeated, once they've chased away the grim specter of Vietnam, think again. There is another, obvious parallel that can make the Bush Administration's Iraq misadventure look even more foolish: the American incursion into Lebanon from 1982 to 1984.

In hindsight, the Vietnam War was easier to justify than it might have seemed in, say, the late 1970s, when the post-Vietnam anguish was at its peak. There was a genuine Cold War dimension to the conflict, one that wasn't just invented by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Administrations. There was a domino theory of sorts in effect: North Vietnamese troops effectively occupied large swathes of Laos and Cambodia, where indigenous Communist movements seized power in the wake of North VIetnamese military power. North Vietnam proved to be a cruel overlord of both its own population and its newly-conquered South Vietnamese subjects. While none of these outcomes substantially affected the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union, there was some nobility in the effort to prevent them from occurring.

In contrast, the Reagan Administration's Lebanon intervention pursued far murkier goals, and the means were clearly inadequate to the task (whatever it really was). Ostensibly part of a multi-national effort to help the PLO escape an Israeli invasion, the military mission in Lebanon mutated into an unsuccessful effort to compel warring Maronite, Shiite, and Druze militias into a peace agreement. The battleship New Jersey's volley of Volkswagen-sized shells into the Bekaa Valley was supposed to work the same way that the Bush Administration hoped the invasion of Iraq would: a demonstration of American military might would so awe the locals that they would drop their weapons and run for the political exits.

In both cases, the strategy didn't work. Worse, the American presence in Lebanon and Iraq proved to be politically convenient for some of the worst elements in those conflicts. American civilians could be kidnapped; American troops could be bombed. While in Iraq we have not yet had a dramatic, Tet-like moment like the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, we do have the slow decay of American support from roadside ambushes and suicide bombings. Beyond defending themselves, American troops have been unable to stop violence directed against Iraqis, such as the recent bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.

There are worse analogies than Vietnam, and worse problems than admitting failure.

Back from travel...

IN THE NEWS
...And back on the road, though this time I have Internet access. (I was in the Gold Country region of California last week, where Internet connections are hard to find.) I'll be posting this week, though I may be a bit limited by the travel schedule.

Lincoln's port controversy

IN THE NEWS

BRITS NOW CONTROL
ALL UNION PORTS
Congress Outraged,
Unrest Threatened

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Widespread hue and cry against the White House's decision to grant administrative control of Union ports to Great Britain forced President Lincoln to the political defensive. Meanwhile, members of the House and Senate usually at odds with one another joined forces in their common outrage against this decision and demanded a Congressional inquiry.

"I can't imagine what put this fool idea in the President's head," fumed Congressman Jebediah T. Wannamaker (R-Ohio). "But the American people are not going to stand for having English bureaucrats and laborers in effective control of our ports. The safety of American military and commercial shipping is too important to risk, not to mention the possibility of Confederate spies and saboteurs getting the wink and nod from their British friends."

President Lincoln's representatives confused the issue during the first two days of the controversy, alternately claiming that the President had either approved the decision or did not know about it. Yesterday, President Lincoln told reporters who had followed him on the tour of the recent Antietam battlefield that, "Any decision that this Administration makes is mine and mine alone." However, he refrained from commenting further, citing the secrecy under which the negotiations with the British firm, Chimera Shipping and Lading, now responsible for managing and operating Union ports from the Mississippi to the Atlantic seaboard. "We knew what the likely reaction would be," Lincoln said, "and here it is."

"The unwarranted secrecy under which this contract was negotiated just makes a bad problem even worse," Congressman Wannamaker retorted. "Only the worst rascal would argue, once caught stealing from the cookie jar, 'See? Sneaking was perfectly justified.'"

Other members of Congress are concerned that the British government's neutrality may be either a façade or a temporary condition. This part of the controversy has sparked an angry reaction from the British ambassador, who in a letter to this newspaper warned that "the amity between our two countries depends on more than the agreements between us, but the complexion of opinion in America at large."

Meanwhile, in Boston, dock workers have threatened "another Tea Party, only worse" if the government does not revoke this decision.

A few days away

I'm on the road the next few days, and I can't be sure if I'm going to have Internet access where I'm going. I'll be back late next week, when I'll resume regular posting.

Beyond sterile excitation

IN THE NEWS
The sociologist Georg Simmel coined a noteworthy phrase, sterile excitation, to denote a state of great inner passion and tumult with no practical outcome. For people who believe that politics is about concrete outcomes, not just smug self-satisfaction, sterile excitation is perhaps the worst political sin. A case in point is Max Weber, who quotes his former colleague in his own magisterial essay, "Politics as a Vocation":

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

This means passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a 'cause,' to the god or demon who is its overlord. It is not passion in the sense of that inner bearing which my late friend, Georg Simmel, used to designate as 'sterile excitation,' and which was peculiar especially to a certain type of Russian intellectual (by no means all of them!). It is an excitation that plays so great a part with our intellectuals in this carnival we decorate with the proud name of 'revolution'. It is a 'romanticism of the intellectually interesting,' running into emptiness devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility.

The United States has more than its fair share of people interested in sterile excitation over real politics. On one side of the political spectrum, you have Little Green Footballs, a pressure cooker of endless outrage. (Go read the comments on LGF postings to see what I'm talking about.) On the other side, you have Eschaton, who regularly posts a "Wanker of the day." (Again, read the postings and the comments to get the full flavor of the site.) On a good day, these sites provide links to interesting news items. On a bad day, they devolve into a kind of digital primal scream.

Happily, you can see the polar opposite of sterile excitation in the work of several people investigating Guantanamo Bay. Calmly sifting through the facts, soberly arriving at conclusions, and presenting the results to the global audience, these intrepid souls do a lot more good than, say, someone who calls Rumsfeld a fucker, or Hillary Clinton a bitch.

Based on habeas corpus petitions that the attorneys of 132 Guantanamo Bay detainees have filed, Corine Hegland has made some important discoveries:

• The majority of detainees are not from Afghanistan.
• Many of those arrested in Pakistan may have been refugees, not Taliban or Al Qaeda supporters.
• 75 out of the 132 detainees are not accused of being "enemy combatants."

Even more hair-raising is the study from a research team at Seton Hall Law School. Using the same information sources, supplemented by interviews with the detainees and their lawyers, they reach even more startling conclusions:

• According to the US government's own classification of prisoners, 60% are "associated with" Al Qaeda and Taliban, a nebulous category outside "fighters" and "members" of these two organizations. (Incidentally, I've been trying to call attention to the dangers of the phrase, linked to terrorists, for a long time.)
• Only 45% of Guantanamo Bay prisoners are accused of committing hostile acts against the United States.
• Only one-quarter of prisoners defined as being "associated with" Al Qaeda are accused of hostile acts against the United States.
• 93% of the detainees were not captured by American forces. Instead, Pakistani authorities or Afghanistan's "Northern Alliance" handed the prisoners over to US custody.
• The rewards offered for Taliban or Al Qaeda members cast further doubts on the real identities and affiliations of many detainees.

If you're troubled by America's gulag in Guantanamo Bay, you're likely to make headway with people you need to persuade with statistics like these. Screaming "Fascists!" at the top of your lungs might make you feel better, but it's not going to convince your neighbor who watches the Fox News Channel that Guantanamo Bay isn't really filled with "the worst of the worst." If your neighbor doesn't believe the facts or conclusions as presented, you can at least start a substantive conversation about Guantanamo Bay and the rest of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies. While Donald Rumsfeld may try to ignore these studies, the weight of outrage did eventually force the Pentagon to begrudgingly release a slow trickle of detainees. You have to start somewhere.

Like hell he can

IN THE NEWS
Let's not act surprised at Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that he can de-classify any document, under the provisions of an executive order that President Bush signed in 2003. Cheney's statement is perfectly consistent with what the Bush Administration has said about Guantanamo Bay and other executive decisions made since 9/11. The Administration believes that war creates situations that only the executive branch has the authority to handle. Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution contains only 34 words about the President's war powers ("The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States"), but the Bush team has been willing to stuff the justification for everything from warrantless wiretaps to Guantanamo Bay into those few words. If you're shocked, shocked to discover that Cheney wants to stretch Article II, section 2 even further, you just haven't been paying attention.

The only surprising development is the absence of mass demonstrations over a clear subversion of the Constitution. Nothing in the US Constitution says that a state of war nullifies the Constitution itself. The issue is not, as jurists have argued in past decades, the wartime limitations on free speech or other individual liberties of the Bill of Rights. The real question is the separation of powers, the system of overlapping responsibilities that the Framers clearly and deliberately assigned to the different branches of the federal government. In other words, there's never really been a debate over whether a Roman-style dictator is granted emergency powers during war; the Constitution clearly does not allow it. We've managed somehow to get through a Civil War, two World Wars, and the threat of nuclear armageddon without a dictator. Rather than defending the Constitution that somehow saw them through these national emergencies, Americans are watching docilely while the Administration says, Because some terrorists got lucky, the Consitution is now whatever we say it is. Or we just ignore it.

If that doesn't get the average American's blood boiling, how about the craven way in which Cheney exercised his so-called authority? Rather than de-classify a document and present it to the public, the Administration leaked the information to a select group of "friendly" reporters. The Constitution certainly does not grant the executive branch the authority to be sneaky and underhanded in presenting a cassus belli to the American public.

Americans should have already been on their guard when, in 2001, Bush broke with centuries of  political tradition and Constitutional interpretation in naming Cheney as a virtual "co-President." The Bush people will continue to bend and break the Constitution, as long as there isn't a noisy, obnoxious protest. Not the timid complaints of the Congressional Democrats, a few choice bon mots on the talk shows, a witty cartoon in The New Yorker, a fund-raising campaign for a particular PAC or party, or another primal scream in the blogs. The only way these abuses will end is if you, Dear Reader, get out there and put yourself on the line. It's what "America's heroes" have done in countless wars, where blood was spilt to preserve, not suspend, the US Constitution. You will have to be polite and persuasive to those who don't agree with you, but you will have to confront them. You will have to make time out of your busy schedule to make your voice heard--in person, not in an e-mail or letter to the editor that will be quickly ignored. You will have to demand of leaders that that lead, providing the organization and means needed to convert a single person's outrage into a roaring tumult. If you have waited your whole life for the moment when you can do something important, that time has arrived.

"Iraq without a gun"

IN THE NEWS
I regularly read a sampling of first-person perspectives from people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This post about one person's trip into the Kurdish part of Iraq was especially well-written and interesting, so I'm passing it along.

UPDATE: I also recommend reading this moving account of a woman soldiering through some real idiocy during her assignment to a search and rescue unit.

Taliban enclave in Pakistan

IN THE NEWS
The remnants of the Taliban obviously feel comfortable enough in Western Pakistan to announce the reconstruction of their Islamist government. This gesture of defiance is directed both westwards, towards Kabul and Washington, and southwards, towards Karachi.

Arms control expert exodus

IN THE NEWS
Via Arms Control Wonk comes this Knight-Ridder article about the exodus of arms control experts from the US Department of State. Before the Foggy Bottom-bashers out there uncork the champagne over this news, keep in mind that the US government, not just the State Department, suffers from the loss of this expertise. It's pretty clear that, as long as the current Bush team is in place, there's little hope for rehiring these counterproliferation specialists in any part of the executive branch. It wasn't just Bolton and Feith, but Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cambone, and others who made government service intolerable.

God is my co-pilot

IN THE NEWS
Lawyers, Guns, and Money features this biting post about the US Air Force, blasting it for both its strategic myopia and the inappropriate role of Christian fundamentalists within its ranks.