09.28.07
Posted in Social at 10:21 pm by steve
We learned this week from tapes of a conversation between Dubya and former Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Aznar that Saddam Hussein was amenable to the idea of going into exile in 2003 before the Iraq invasion. How did Aznar know this? Bush told him so. It’s not an unlikely idea. Saddam had accumulated billions of dollars and could have lived very well in many places.
So we know now that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or with “war on terror.” We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And we know now that the invasion of Iraq was not about ridding the nation of Saddam. These exhaust the public justifications made by the Bush administration for the invasion, directly or by implication. We know, therefore, that every public justificaiton for the invasion by the Bush administration was a fabrication. A lie. A falsehood. The whole thing was a scam, a fraud, a deception.
Why Invade Iraq?
The question remains: what were the reasons. Here are some possible reasons for the invasion of Iraq:
- Oil: to secure oil resources or to manipulate the price of oil.
- Croney Capitalism: thousands of contracts have been granted through the Pentagon as “no-bid.” Halliburton alone had more than $10 billion in such contracts. And in too many cases the services have either been paid for at highly inflated rates or the services have been improperly rendered.
- Personal Vendetta: Dubya hated Saddam. It is possible that he wanted to invade Iraq for personal reaons having nothing whatsoever to do with national interests.
- Bring Democracy to Iraq: Please. Don’t make me laugh.
- Distraction: If one wishes to understand the purpose of this administration judged in terms of what it has accomplished, one looks not at Iraq but at the so-called Patriot Act and at the Military Comissions Act. These two acts suspend a number of Constitutional protections and shift power from the Legislature and the Judiciary branches into the Executive Branch. The items in these bills that are objectionable would make big news but for two things. One is that people do not pay much attention to abstractions in news, no matter how important their implications might be to their daily lives. But the other is that news organizatons are focused on Iraq.
The idea of fighting a war in the mideast for oil is not a new one. The Germans, during the first half of the twentieth century fought the British in Egypt and Mesopotamia and they fought the Russians in the south western edge reaches of the Soviet Union to gain access to oil reserves. The idea of oil as a strategic resource pervades our culture. It motivates the action in the seventies classic Three Days of the Condor and in a number of other movies since then. It is even one of a handful of special, strategic resources in the old classic computer game Civilization. We think about oil in a special way. And that is appropriate, because all of post-WWI civilization is built on oil.
To argue that the invasion of a state with - by some accounts - the largest untapped proven oil reserves in the world is unconnected with the idea of securing this strategic resource is sheer nonsense. Some part of the motivation for the invasion and the occupation lies below the surface, as oil. And considering that the special concessions amount to $5 per barrel for more than 200 million barrels of crude, the motivation is huge, at least $1 trillion. Especially when the war can be fought with other peoples’ money.
On one hand, the war might have been about getting special drilling concessions. This would be a strategic move that would bolster the profits of oil majors by as much as $50 billion per year for twenty years. On the other hand, the short term effect of the war would be to make Iraq’s oil production unavailable and to artificially tighten the oil supply, driving up prices. The price of oil, in fact, has more than doubled since the start of the war.
There can be no question that the war is, in some ways, about oil. But there can also be no question that it has been exploited for other purposes, and that much of the activity and press focus has been on other issues and facts. If the singular focus had been on oil production, and if the US military has any operational efficiency whatsoever, then one might reasonably expect that more of the military effort would haven actually secured the oil production and transport areas and facilities. And in making the oil flow. But Iraqi oil production is still short of the level it was before the war.
One might argue that until Iraq has a functional government the problem of sabotage would be a constant threat. And this is true. But if one provides adequate roadways along pipeline routes and if one polices them adequately, it is reasonable to expect that production could continue at the normal pace. This may sound like it should be easy. It is not necessarily so. But we are spending a lot of money on Iraq. And the promise made to the American people before the war started was that oil revenues would pay for the work. That has not yet begun to happen, really.
So the invasion of Iraq is about more than oil. It’s clearly about croney capitalism, also. Early on the Pentagon signed a ten billion dollar, single source, no bid, cost-plus contract with a Haliburton. Somehow, the fact that its recent CEO served as de-facto President of the US and held tens of thousands of stock options, potentially worth tens of millions of dollars if a lucrative contract drove up the stock price, never got as much traction in the press as it deserved. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a company in South Carolina that charged $20 million to the Pentagon to ship goods worth a tiny fraction of that cost. In one case it charged almost a million dollars to ship a couple of screws to a base in Texas. Some of the gross abuses will, like this one, be caught and prosecuted. But some, obviously, will not.
The use of public funds, the granting of government contracts to enrich the purses of prominent government figures is strictly third-world stuff. If one looks for a single factor that separates relatively prosperous and ascendant nations from relatively poor or declining ones, government corruption such as this provides a prominent marker. A prosperous middle class cannot survive croney capitalism.
There are suggestions that Dubya may have been motivated by certain personal reasons to “get” Saddam. One is the belief that Saddam tried to have Dubya’s father George H. W. killed during a visit to Kuwait after 1991 US invasion of Iraq. Surely this played some part in the way Dubya might have tried to justify the war to himself. Perhaps this event provided no positive impetus while removing certain reservations. If it did not provide a justification, it certainly did provide a rationalization.
The fourth reason is to “bring democracy to Iraq.” This idea I find inscruitable. It is impossible for any educated person to believe that democracy can be imposed. Democracy arises naturally out of the character of a people. Democracy is not only about voting. It is about choosing virtuous leaders who make good laws. It is about selecting effective executives who enforce laws impartially. And it is about preserving an independent, apolitical, and impartial justice system that judges cases on the basis of real evidence rather than political expediency.
Instilling such cultures in existing institutions takes decades, generations. Doing it once one has dissovled such institutions is simply impossible. Therefore, the deBaathification of Iraq belies the idea that the US intended to build functional democratic institutions in Iraq. It suggests, instead, that the goal was to create and sustain disorder as a pretext for perpetual occupation.
Or else the people who made Iraq policy were sheer idiots. What is more likely, however, is that the stated goal of “democracy” in Iraq was never a real one. The interest, instead, was in creating the impression that this was the goal. The people proposing the idea of promoting democracy in Iraq are living by the a maxim that is a paraphrase of P.T. Barnum, “Nobody has ever lost an election by overestimating the stupidity of the US voter.”
While all of the arguments above must have played some part in the decision to go to war in Iraq, the real reason for war in iraq, I believe, has precious little to do with these. Rather, it has to do with something else.
What it has to do with is a curious Bush trait of viewing war not as a tool of foreign policy so much as a tool to manipulate domestic public sentiment. Recall that in the several years prior to George H. W. Bush’s election as president he served as vice president. During these years, Reagan’s health was declining and his mental energy was flagging. The ship of state was run by others. From time to time the US would conduct a foreign war.
In 1983 it was the war in Granada. A guy whom the Americans claimed was a Marxist took power in a bloodless coup. Then the US invaded and set everything right. There is cheering and flag waving. And there is widespread cheering stateside. But not everyone is happy. Maggie Thatcher, for instance. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth and Britain considered the events on the island an internal affair. The whole thing could easily be mistaken for a CIA black op of the sort carried out in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1955. Bush and Casey had worked closely with the men who conducted these. They knew the drill and they endorsed the policy. All this leads us to supspect the invasion of Grenada was nothing but a Bush-engineered act of re-election campaign theater.
In 1989 the US invaded Panama and captured its president, Manuel Noriega who was brought against his will to the US and prosecuted on drug charges. The legal principle used by Bush to justify the act of siezing a foreign national in a foreign land (known in polite company as kidnapping) was unprecedented, and the invasion earned the US censure by the Organization of American States. But the invasion was televised; and it made great theater in the US. It pretty much assured Bush of winning the presidency the following year.
Bush (41), Cheney, and Colin Powell were all involved in organizing the invasion of Panama. And it was the same characters who organized the invasion of Iraq in 1991. We will never know what it was, precisely, that caused Saddam to invade Kuwait. There were rumors at the time that the US had encouraged him to do it. Specifically, US ambassador to Iraq April Gillspie told Saddam Hussein on July 25th 1990:
we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late ’60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods.
It would be easy to imagine that Saddam heard “no opinion” and “any suitable methods” to mean that the US would not interfere if he were to invade Kuwait. Given his slightly megalomaniacal tendencies it is difficult to imagine he could have heard it otherwise. Given in this reading, the final event that precipitated Saddam’s invasion was a kind of wink given by the US State Department under the direction of James Baker. Why behave this way? A good war would make for great theater. It would make Bush invulnerable in the polls.
It worked. Bush’s popularity soared during the invasion. Then it failed. The invasion made Bush (41) very popular. But when the Iraq war ended. and people forgot about it. Bush hiked taxes. The economy tanked. And Bush(41) lost the next election.
Theater, Media Control, and Government by Distraction
Dubya learned all the obvious lessons from all of these events:
- Wars make for great theater.
- While they are running, wars bolster popularity and garner nationalistic support.
- People understand taxes. But they neither understand nor care about debt.
- Therefore, run a perpetual war, cut taxes, borrow and spend irresponsibly.
It is the unbeatable way to win the election. ( Especially when combined with a very robust, broad, and aggressive plan for cheating. But that is another story.) So Dubya understands war as theater, as a tool of popularity. He also understands it as a tool for controlling the press. War stories always enthrall because they are about life and death situations. Therefore, any newspaper correspondent with a modicum of ambition would kill to get a war assignment. The consequence, of course, is that one can exert a great deal of power over the stories that corresponents tell; for the ultimate power over their success appears to lie not with their editors or their media or their viewers, but with the President’s favor.
It is disturbing to imagine manipulation of public opinion to be the primary reason for Dubya’s support of the war; yet it is easy to see this as being so. No other theory of the crime quite explains all of the observed facts quite so well.
More disturbing than the idea that Dubya manipulated the press purely to gain popularity is the possibility that the war is used primarily to eat up news coverage attention and to distract from more nefarious activities. In other words, a nation has its literati who care about real theater. And it has its news-hounds who care about important public events. War seems like an important public event and it is theater. Therefore, if all news is focussed on the war, there is no news attention focussed on any other aspect of governance. The war, then, becomes a distraction. Highly controversial changes in law or policy take effect invisibly not because they are actually secret, but because everybody’s attention is diverted. It is government by distraction. It works the same way pickpockets, magicians, and old Mission Impossible shows work, by misdirection.
Naomi Wolf discusses precisely this issue, though perhaps in slightly different terms, in her new book “The End of America: A Letter to a Young Patriot.” It is a work that documents the ten steps used by leaders planning to turn any nation from a democracy into a totalitarian fascist regime. She discusses how misdirection, combined with “ironic framing” and bold-faced lies are employed in this process. She talks about how rampant militarism, fundamentalism, and nationalism are cultivated using ideas and language that resemble Bushspeak.
Here are here ten steps:
- Develop a Terrifying Enemy
- Create a Prison and Justice System Captive within the Executive
- Cultivate a Thug Caste
- Set Up Surveillance of Citizens
- Harass Citizens’ Rights Groups
- Engage in Arbitrary Detention and Release
- Target Key People
- Cow the Press into Submission, then Control the Public Dialogue
- Equate Dissent with Treason
- Suspend Rule of Law
That’s pretty much all there is to it. Virtually every item on this list has been worked on during the Dubya presidency. In a few cases a great deal of progress has been made. A few items have suffered minor setbacks: but all of these are marked not against the standard of pre-Dubya era, but by the standard of the high water mark of this regime ca 2005.
The Padilla case, for instance, forced the executive to use the normal justice system for all US citizens, making item #2 more difficult. It was not until the Petraeus confirmation hearings that we heard high officials equating dissent with treason. But it happened then when Lieberman asked Petraeus if dissent equated to “aid and comfort.” This suggests that #9 is progressing quite well. Not since WWI has there been such hysteria over national identity. Warrentless wiretapping was the first example in my own lifetime when a President admitted to breaking the law. And if I am not mistaken, it is one of the few times, perhaps the only time when a President has openly admitted lawless behavior. But some or all of Bush’s signing statements defy law as well. So Dubya has dealt a major body blow to #10, the rule of law.
The Real ID law and the upcoming requirements that US citizens identify themselves on domestic flights and train rides suggests that the government plans increasing surveillance. Thousands of cameras are slated for installation in NYC. Promises more surveillance. Item #4 is well along.
The creation of paid military contractors who shoot people for money, as does Blackwater, suggest some success in the creation of a thug class. Here is a class of people trained and paid to act beyond the reach of the law. This is the very definition of the term. In the seventeenth century they were called privateers or pirates. And they did a huge amount of economic damage to the very parties who started them. So in the context of Wolf’s argument #3 is making great progress. Outside that context, a dangerous precedent is being set.
Of course, most of this can only be done on the pretext of “making things safer,” which is why the first item is so critically important. If 9/11 had not been done by terrorists, it would have had to be invented by the very people who intend are pushing these ten steps within America. And that is why one might legitimately be concerned when one hears men like Pat Robertson predicting terrible events, and other high Republican Party officials saying that another terrorist attack is what is needed to get Americans into the right frame of mind. #1 has progressed in fits and starts. But people have a great deal of difficulty hating and fearing an abstract enemy. The hope of Iraq was that the enemy would materialize before the eyes of the Americans. But if it has, it is in a Pogoesque manner: we can see the enemy … in the mirror.
I agree with Wolf that it is not necessarily true that the days of the Republic are numbered. But as she pointed out, had the Dubya regime managed to purge the DOJ, and fill its posts with crooked, political hacks, things would look much less hopeful. Gnerally, the courts still adhere to rule of law. But there are occasional cracks in the system. The whole “strict contstructionalism” drive on the part of the right has been to narrow the scope of liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. The idea is comparable to the idea that one can completely wear away the blade of a knife if one sharpens it enough.
A Democratic Congress has not been willing to cede complete control of the DOJ to the White House. When it came to light that Gonzalez had started the process of politicizing the DOJ, he was forced from office - probably because of other high crimes and misdemeanors he has committed while in service to this President. We experienced a stroke of good fortune in this turn of events.
We have now a brief period in which the sun is shining through the gaps in the heavy storm clouds. It’s hard to tell whether the storm will pass us by or whether the passed cloud will be followed quickly by a darker one still. And whether before long we will be awash in sheets of rain and torrents of rising water that drive us from our happy, comfortable existences like the unfortunates of the Ninth Ward during Katrina.
One way or another, we are in for some rainy weather. How much damage it does depends on many factors beyond our control. But one factor upon which it depends is how quickly and how thoroughly we reject the ideas and ideals exemplified by Dubya. Almost no part of the story that the Dubya-style Republicans have been telling us since at least 1980 is true. What is not a pure fabrication to serve the desires of the powerful is a distortion for the same purpose. And it has all proven immensely destructive to America’s middle classes, threatening to drive the US into the economic extremes of certain Latin American nations where political power swings back and forth between proto-communist populists and capitalist fascists. And where paeons exist on the slim margins of what the powerful have no ambition to take.
It is my sincerest hope that America and Americans succeed in preserving personal liberties and human dignity within a prosperous society. But how well we manage to do these things will depend upon our ability to admit that we have been duped, that the people who have duped us have done so not for petty reasons, or out a mistaken view of the world but for grandiose ones and with malice. Then we need to reject the ideals of rampant nationalism, ethnocentrism, militarism, and unregulated capitalism that have prevailed for the greater part of half a century in the US. We need to adopt, instead the values of openness, dialogue, debate, and genuine respect for hunan dignity.
The war in Iraq can teach us about a lot more than just the huge cost of military adventurism. It can teach us about how to live and trade more responsibly in a world that is much bigger than America. That involves thinking carefully about common goods, and by engaging in contstructive dialogue about the best means of achieving them. The sooner we learn the right lessons, the less pain we will experience in adapting to the challenges that the future promises. We may still experience storms. But maybe sometimes the levees will not break.
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09.27.07
Posted in Social at 4:10 pm by steve
For more than 25 years US intelligence and law enforcement authorities say they have suspected the New York based Alavi Foundation is a front for Iranian espionage…For more than 25 years court records show the foundation has been publicly .. represented by the New York Law firm where Robert Mukasey is a Partner: Patterson, Bellknap, Webb and Tyler. ABC NEWS
And for eight years the Vice President of the US was a man who was instrumental negotiating the sale of high-tech stinger missiles to the Iranian Revolutionary government in defiance of laws against trade with Iran. In 1979 he either dealt with the current President of Iran or with one of his cohorts.
It is one thing to break the law purposefully, boldly, blatantly, and harmfully by selling contraband to an official US enemy and then to go on and be President. It is another thing altogether to represent felons, knaves, spies, or idiots in a court of law and go on to be Attorney General. There is nothing illegal about representing felons and knaves. Nor is there anything necessarily occult or nefarious about it.
But Mukasey was absent from the firm in question for virtually all of the time when the firm was active in representing the client in question. Mukasey was not the legal counsel of record. And the allegations against the foundation in question are only allegations.
In short, Mukasey has an association with a firm that provides legal services to an organization that has some kind of association with Iran or Iranians. That anyone should consider this to be a problem is, frankly, unbelievable. Interesting as the association might be, it has absolutely no bearing on Mukasey’s fitness to be Attorney General.
Of much more concern is his evident notion that surveillance needs to be easier for the government to do legally. And his narrow interpretation of fourth ammendment protections. This narrow view of constitutional protections, IMO, might be enough to disqualify him from any appellate court. Similarly, it might reasonably give us pause about such a person serving as Attorney General. But the prosecutorial position, while giving constitutional protections due reverence has the obligation to uphold law - even law that may be unconstitutional. The position must occasionally err by prosecuting cases that fail on constitutional grounds. Mukasey seems to fall into just about the right spot on the spectrum.
As a jurist he insisted that Padilla have legal counsel. And that his case go through the court system. This, in essence, derailed the current administration’s plans to undermine the court system by setting up a parallel-path system within the executive branch. And by virtue of this action he has shown that he can act in defiance of an executive that is out of control.
If I were a US Senator, I seriously doubt that I could vote for Mukasey to be a Supreme Court jurist - although I imagine he would probably be less of a loose cannon than Scalia. But his history as a jurist seems completely appropriate for a man who is slated to be Attorney General. He is clear-headed, independent, strong-willed, and has good judgment. IMO, his conception of the Constitution and its protections is considerably more narrow than it should be to sit on the high court, but it is perfectly adequate for the Attorney General spot.
Mukasey’s history conveys a sense that he might stop short of actually breaking laws, purposefully undermining the Constitution, and tranforming the DOJ into a political organ. And that will be a huge improvement over the status quo.
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09.25.07
Posted in Social at 11:02 pm by steve
If a carbomb goes off half a mile away, how many people does a soldier need to shoot to be safe where he is now? To answer the question, we need to understand precisely how it is that shooting at and dozens of civilians makes the world a safer place.
Scenario
Here is the scenario: A convoy of conspicuous paramilitary vehicles moves through a congested part of the city. It is market hours. Pedestrians are on the sidewalks. Traffic is stop and go. While it is true that car bombs can go off any time of day, one of their reasons for existence is the shock value of their destruction; therefore, from the point of view of a car bomber the most productive time of day for set off a car bomb is during the day when people are out and about. This is when the most people will be injured. It is when the bombing is likely to get the most press coverage. This is the most risky time to be out and about in terms of risk of exposure to car bombs. The people in the convoy, therefore, are alert to the possibility.
Imagine next that one sees a car behaving suspiciously. “Possible car-bomb,” one imagines. I am skeptical that one can, in fact, accurately predict whether a car is likely to blow up on the basis of its mobile behavior; but perhaps this is one of the subjects of the extensive intellectual training given to private contractors before they are given powerful automatic weapons and huge salaries.
Finally, imagine that there is a loud bang. It is the detonation of a car bomb. What should happen next?
End of Scenario.
Analysis
One can simplify the analysis by looking first at elementary behaviors: to shoot or not to shoot, to change course and speed or not do change course and speed. And so on.
First, we examine the idea of shooting. What is the purpose of shooting? In some cases one fires warning shots. The purpose of warning shots is to cause people to flee, clear the area. Presumably, people who intend no harm will, in fact, flee. And perhaps those who intend harm will as well. But sometimes warning shots have the opposite effect. If armed people are using mobs of civilians as shields, firing warning shots can have the effect of mobilizing those armed people into shooting. So how one goes about executing warning shots is non-trivial. And it is at least hypothetically fraught with hazard.
Shooting can, perhaps, be an effective way of clearing an area. This can allow one to run away. But the devil is in the details. Dead people do not flee. And dead people drive even more erratically than live ones: usually the bring their cars to a halt in inconvenient places. Thus, if one wishes to clear a safe perimeter by shooting, it is imperative that one not shoot the drivers of vehicles. This point was apparently lost on the Blackwater ops. One witness tells of being a passenger and discovering his brother, the driver of a car has been shot dead.
A third hope one might have for shooting is if there are cases in which a driver of a car with a car-bomb is in-transit and that by shooting the driver one can keep the car bomb from going off. There are a number of problems with such a idea. One is the problem of knowing whether a car contains a car bomb. One never does. Unless one has solid evidence, say a radio message from a trusted source giving an eyewitness account that a bomb was loaded into a vehicle with a particular license number, one will almost always be wrong in assuming that a car contains a bomb. The second problem is that, assuming a given car does contain a bomb, there is no assurance that the bomb is not on a “dead man” switch and shooting the driver will cause the bomb to detonate. Furthermore, certain kinds of explosives might actually be caused to detonate if they are hit by bullets. Shooting at a car that actually is a car bomb can increase the likelyhood of an imminent explosion. Shooting at a car that is not a car bomb can increase the likelyhood of one more distant in time. Either way, the act makes no sense.
Accounts of the event in question suggest that the privateers began shooting when a distant car-bomb went off. All accounts agree that this was the event that triggered the shooting. Local residents place the car bomb at some distance. Given their rather extensive experience with the subject matter, one would expect nobody to be better at estimating how far away a car-bomb explosion is than a Baghdad resident. That half a dozen residents say it was “distant” suggests that by any functional definition, the car bomb was, in fact, remote enough that there was simply no cause for alarm. And if it were nearer, the simple physical fact is that any given bomb goes off just once.
An exploding car bomb might be cause for alarm if there were a long record of synchronized bombings or if car bombs were used to initialize other acts of violence; but they are almost never depicted as such in the media stateside. All of this suggests that there simply is no advantage to opening fire.
So the question one must ask about the shooting is: Precisely what was it that the Blackwater Ops were trying to accomplish when they shot at many dozens of Baghdad civilians, killing at least eleven and injuring many more? Why did they shoot at people driving and running away, unarmed men, women, and children? What was their objective? What could they have reasonably accomplished by shooting? Are they trained to react this way? Or is this reaction a symptom of a gap in training. Or worse? Is it a symptom of a kind of ethnocentric culture in which citizens of Baghdad have become non-humans in the eyes of men with automatic weapons?
Farther Afield
The massacre raises a lot of questions about the use of military contractors. According to the Economist (22Sept07 p61) “The Pentagon now regards contractors as an integral part of its “total force.” America could not go to war without them.” But contractors have two roles. One role is exclusively logistical, to provide the services that soldiers require to exist: food, shelter, supply, entertainment, and so on. Such roles can be defined in such a way that shooting other people is rarely a job requirement. In fact, one would expect that the whole force could exist without arms. Because most of these functions are contingent on deployment and they utilize skills that are in demand in civilian functions, it makes perfect sense to use contractors to perform them, at least so long as the jobs are bid as open contracts rather than as juicy prizes of croney capitalism.
The idea, however, of hiring people to shoot other people raises a host of very knotty issues. One issue is the immediate issue of accountability. The chain of command in the military - at least hypothetically speaking - sets the bounds of authority, enforces rules, keeps order, and punishes infractions. Thus, if a group in the military shoots civilians, there is an orderly process by which justice is served. In Iraq, by contrast, the military contractors are beyond the reach of Iraqi law enforcement agencies. But they are also outside the grasp of the military. The punishment for Blackwater in this incident was loss of license to operate in Iraq.
But there is no telling what will actually happen to the half dozen or so people who injured or killed more than two dozen innocent Iraqi civilians. Nor is it clear that the temporary loss of license will have any repercussions for Blackwater itself. In other words, it may be that nobody gets blamed or punished. The game-theoretical ramifacations of this set of facts is troubling; for it ensures that the same kind of thing will happen again. And that Americans as a whole will be blamed for bad policy of a minority and actions of a few bad actors. Nothing could be more effective at inciting people to join up with groups that do violence to Americans.
Who is culpable for the incident? Clearly, the privateers themselves own much of the responsibility. There is a presumption of expertise that comes with a $600 per day price tag; and while this level of expertise may be represented in their ability to hit moving targets with weapons fire, it is not represented in their judgment about whom to shoot. The Pentagon, too, owns much of the problem for its role in placing them there without adequate training and policing. And ultimately the people who argued for private contractors to do this sort of work share some culpability. There is a logic of inevitablility to the outcome. Give enough people body armor and expensive, automatic weapons. Then put them in conspcuous, expensive vehicles and cause them to drive around in a city population that they have been trained since childhood to hate, fear, and distrust. What is bound to happen given such circumstances? The Blackwater Massacre.
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09.23.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social at 5:49 am by steve
Shock and amazement has accompanied the release of several hundred photographs taken by an officer at Auschwitz depicting functionaries at the prison in their daily lives. They are depicted drinking beer, eating blueberries, joking, cavorting, laughing, smiling. This is not the face of evil. Nor does it seem to be the face of evil people. These people could be out neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, our relatives, our children. “They offer an interesting perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide,” notes director of the Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield.
Indeed, the acts they committed were monstrous. So we expect that the people who committed them must be monsters. But that’s not the way it works. Stanley Milgram showed that when people were placed in a particular context they would inflict pain or even put other people at risk of serious injury or death. The requirement was that they be working as part of an institution that they believed had legitimacy; that they believed that their behavior was necessary to the goals of that institution; and that responsibility for any harm could reasonably be shifted to the institution.
It turns out that most of the people in Milgram’s study entrusted much or all moral judgment to the institution. They are compliant with institutional ideas and ideals. They behaved as they are expected to behave. And when they did so, they do not exercise independent moral judgment.
The idea that people are social beings who act in institutional roles rather than individual ones has been employed in Africa in two recent settings. One was the “truth commissions” set up in South Africa with the end of colonial European rule. The implicit assumption was that people who perpetrated violence against blacks did so not out of personal animus, but because this was their institutional role. Such a point of view would absolve a person within the apartheid police apparatus of violent or inhumane acts they would have taken to enforce government policies of apartheid. Rather, the reason for their behavior was because they were performing institutional duties to that government.
The great advantage of doing this is that it breaks the cycle of violence. Change the way officially sanctioned way of looking at race relationships so that racial differences are no longer a reason for power differences; and make it impossible to think that behaving in the old ways is acceptable within the society, and behavior changes without creating huge reactionary backlash.
Similarly, trials of Hutus in Rwanda have had a similar element. The Hutus, when they hacked their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes were responding to calls by public authorities at the time to do just this. Therefore, one might argue, they behaved in a way that was supportive of the institution in power. While it is true that some Hutus have been punished, and many more still live as refugees in other nations, some participants have been reconciled with their tribal communities.
If we think about the Milgram experiments; and if we acknowledge that people who live in societies do have some practical limits placed on their abilities to think independently and to act on independent thought, then we realize that the people in those old Nazi photos are not just monsters. They are ordinary people who are sometimes called by their duties to society to act as monsters. And they were behaving rationally, considering the society they inhabited.
The reason we are shocked that those photos do not depict monsters is that we have been conditioned to believe one of the most dangerously evil ideas there is: that people who do certain bad things are so inhuman as to be recognizably deformed. Rarely is this true. And if it ever is true, it is typically true of people who have spent most of their lives pursuing evil ends. But much evil is not apparent to the eye. Most of what we see as evil has compelling logic. In fact, the logic of “evil” is frequently a great deal more compelling than the logic of “good.” More than a third of German society fervently believed in all that Hitler stood for. They thought he would transform Germany into a powerful nation, restoring Germany to a place of prominence on the international stage.
The logic that underlay the lives of the people in these photos was almost indistinguishable from the logic that underlies our own lives as they are defined by ordinary daily events and by the political events that go on around us. As people, they had hopes, dreams, and ambitions. They absorbed the ideas they heard most often in the press. They interacted with people they knew, with institutions. Many are in their twenties or thirties; they grew up entirely in the world of the Third Reich. They believed what they were told. They did what they could to do to be successful.
But they lived in a blighted time. Just as our own political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space that would allow us to do violence to them, so too did their political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space for violence. Nobody believes and lives the great body of mythology that their culture creates more than the ambitious twenty-something person who is rewarded for their compliance. It is not uncommon that the brightest are rewarded most, making it all the more difficult for the group as a whole to exercise independent moral thought.
But in Germany it was worse. Germany had thought police. And they made unutterable all thoughts that so much as questioned party dogma. The simple fact that these prison functionaries lived and worked in such a society and under such institutions made them no less human. In fact, one can argue that their commitment to the social institutions that reared them is behavior that in any society would be lauded as compliant and, therefore, exemplary. These were the future leaders of German society in training for their leadership roles.
We have created much the same conditions in Baghdad. Only now, instead of SS stormtroopers or prison camp guards, we have “independent contractors.” They shoot and kill fleeing Iraqi men, women, and children by the dozens with essentially no provocation and with impunity. They are outside the reach of Iraqi law. And there is no US institution set up to systematically police their behavior and punish malfeasance. They are paid $600 a day to behave this way. That is the institutional reward for this behavior. If we believe that the shooting of innocent civilians in a foreign land is morally wrong, it is incumbent upon us to change laws and institutional beliefs and practices stateside so that such behavior is not preferentially rewarded.
One could argue that there is an institutional difference between a government that sets out to exterminate a group of people and one that exterminates them as a consequence of bad policy and flawed execution. But the result looks approximately the same to the victims. In both cases there are dead bodies of civilians numbering in the hundreds of thousands or the millions. And in both cases institutional malfeasance is at the root of the problem.
When we think of the family photos of the Blackwater contractors who shot 28 men, women, and children in the back as they were trying to flee, do we expect to see faces contorted with evil? Probably not. Nor is it likely that most of the people doing the shooting hoped to be in that situation in Iraq. If any did, they probably should be doing work that does not put them in reach of or in line-of-sight with any guns or munitions. As evil as their acts are and as sad as the consequences are for all touched by the violence, we need to understand that the people who pulled the trigger, were not monsters, even if their acts were monstrous.
Ideas matter. And the currency of ideas circulated by the neocons and their affiliated supporters have led us to the brink. An important reason for the existence of Worry Wart and for Devil’s Dictionary Defiled is to argue that institutions matter; and that the ideas they stand for and promote matter. If we start out with the same ideas and practices as the Nazis, and we build our institutions to exploit ethnocentrism, promote fundamentalism, integrate church and state, and dominate the world; then we will doom ourselves to behaving in pretty much the same way. And to meet the same end. When we are off-duty, we may still have fun drinking beer or eating blueberries or “scamming for babes;” but what we do when we are fulfilling our society’s expectations for us may prove to be crimes against humanity. In the end, if we are people of conscience, we will have bad dreams. And our grandchildren, convinced we were monsters, will deny being related to us.
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09.21.07
Posted in Uncategorized, Philosophy &c at 8:25 pm by steve
Mandela is dead. Saddam Hussein killed the Mandelas.
Who said this?
- The village idiot.
- An isolated American with neither interest in nor minimal functional knowledge of foreign affairs
- The nominal president of the United States.
- Just an ordinary fella who likes beer and who can’t be bothered to get the facts right.
- All of the above
- Nobody of importance. The actual quote should read “Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”
The quotation is from a paragraph in which Dubya implicitly blames Saddam for pretty much every tragedy that has happened in Africa in the last twenty years and for some that haven’t. The quotation goes on to say that Saddam “split up families,” a reference that might be more accurate in describing the Hutu uprising in Rwanda than in describing Saddam’s behavior. Mandela, similarly, is a citizen of South Africa and is very much alive. While he lives, his spirit of reconciliation and cooperation is the underlying fabric mesh that holds together the potentially explosive political world of South African politics.
There is, however, a very symbolic sense in which Mandela is dead.
Mandela is a symbol of liberalism. It was Mandela who advocated a “truth commission” for South Africa that would uncover the abuses of apartheid and forgive them. The reasoning was that the behavior was a logical part of thinking about the world in the wrong way. And if one exposed the consequences of this bad thinking, it would be impossible to choose to behave the same way. And it worked. There is something profoundly liberal and liberating in such a point of view. One simply cannot stop evil by killing bad people. One must stop evil by changing behaviors: theirs and ours. Mandela understood this as nobody in power in the US seems to do.It is the most liberal of ideas. And the most Christian, too.
What is required for Mandela’s solution to work is for people to see humanity in those with different political points of view, different cultures, different experiences, and different economic interests, and to acknowledge that humanity. This is not the style of the Bush-neocon politics of hatred and fear. Indeed, in America the spirit of Mandela is departed. Mandela is as good as dead. His ideas are forgotten by at least half of America. But Saddam had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the people who went after Saddam who killed the spirit of Mandela.
Bush has confused his own behavior and that of the neocons with the behavior of Saddam. He won’t be the first. Or the last.
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Posted in Policy at 7:15 pm by steve
Why is it that we do not use pieces of gravel as currency? It seems like an absurd question; but answering it will help us be sensible in sorting out other questions. Two fundamental issues underlie the idea of metal coinage as currency: trust and efficacy in trade.
Currency takes the form of metal coinage because the metal has an intrinsic value. Thus, if the intstitution minting the coin fails to behave responsibly and in a way that maintains the nominal value of the coinage, any holder can melt down the currency and recover most of the value. This fact makes it easy to establish trust in a currency. And up until the middle of the twentieth century dollars could be exchanged for gold boullion. This stabilized the dollar.
It actually pegged the dollar to a value higher than its worth; for at one point in time $35 would suffice for a foreigner to purchase a troy ounce of gold from the US treasury. And only a year later when the US went off the gold standard, free market price of gold was roughly $200. Within half a decade it spiked to over $800. So we know that at that point in time the dollar had already slid quite a bit from those golden days in the ninteen twenties when $35 might actually have been worth an ounce of gold.
Suppose one used gravel as currency, one would have to carry a lot of it. And it would take forever to count out. That would be time wasted. For example, how long would it take to count out $200 worth of gravel? Even the finest white crushed quartz would require an afternoon of rather intense counting to get to $200 worth. So anyone whose afternoon was worth $200 would lose the full value of the transaction simply in the transfer of currency. Not a good deal. It is for this reason that currency is composed of valuable materials and represents concentrated value: counting can never represent a major portion of a transaction cost.
During the great Peso collapse of the late 1980’s there was a story about a minister in the Mexican treasury department who bought a freight train full of small denomination coins, shipped them to a smelter, had them melted down and sold. The metal was worth more than the nominal value of the coin. Back in the days when currency was guaranteed by precious metal, this is precisely the mechanism that one would use to stabilize a currency. By destroying currency and increasing the supply of metal, one might theoretically restore value to the currency. But when currencies float free this no longer works. In such cases, nations who defile their currencies end up in a situation where no amount of melting down of coinage changes the fundamental value of the currency, for its value lies elsewhere. And when this happens, the people who melt currency for a profit are deemed criminals by a government who has robbed its citizens of the value of their currency by creating more than the economy can bear.
In other words, when a nation reaches a point at which it makes sense to behave as this particular treasury official, it has been in the business of defiling its currency for some time. And its citizens are poorer than they reckon.
I was reminded of this by P.J O’Rourke’s piece about the two cent penny. What two-cent penny, you may ask. The one you got for change this morning when you bought your latte at Starbucks. Either because the cost of zinc is going up in real terms, or because the value of the dollar is dropping in real terms, or some combination of both, zinc costs a lot. Pennies today are made of zinc. And it takes two pennies’ worth of zinc to make a penny. So the logical thing to do is to use dollars to buy pennies, melt them down, and sell the zinc. Except that it is illegal. The pennies themselves belong to the mint. It is only the value they represent that belongs to us.
It’s been a long time since the penny was anything. In the mid 1980’s I moved. I took all the currency I had accumulated over a small number of years of adult life - a gallon or two of currency. And I wrapped it in those nifty paper coin sleeves. It turned out to be a great idea. I ended up with several hundred dollars that I otherwise would not have had, sort of. But I learned an odd fact. I could not make minimum wage stuffing pennies into those paper sleeves. This was at a time when minimum wage was not a third of what it is today. What that meant was that every time a penny was tranferred from one party to the next, the time spent counting it was worth more than the penny itself. In other words, if time has any value at all, the penny represents negative value in any transaction in which it is handled.
The arguments we would use to get rid of the penny are so old and so worn that they are almost appropriate for getting rid of the nickel. Minimum wage approaches five times what it was twenty years ago. And while it is true that one can take coins to banks to have them counted, in my own experience, the counters always do it in a back room unobserved, and emerge with a credit slip that seems to take 20% off the top for using their counting machines. In the case of pennies, that’s not unfair at all. Perhaps not in the case of nickels either. But in the case of dimes and quarters it is quite costly.
Tell me again why we have the penny? Now explain to me why it is categorically different than using huge mounds of crushed quartz gravel as currency. On second thought, forget it. My time is too valueble.
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09.20.07
Posted in Social at 8:58 pm by steve
Since when does the Senate sanction people for political speech? Since today. Two resolutions came before the Senate this week. One was a resolution sponsored by Senator Boxer that was a kind of blanket condemnation that would have condemned the behavior of people like the “Swift Boaters” who, during the 2004 election attacked John Kerry on his military record and an allied group who attacked Max Cleland, a congressman injured in the same war running for re-election.
Boxer’s resolution also condemned Move On for its recent attack ad on General Petraeus. Boxer’s resolution garnered a vote of 51 to 46, with virtually all Republicans voting against it. Another was a resolution sponsored by Republicans that simply condemned the Move On ad. In this case, virtually all Republicans switched sides and supported the bill. Half the Democrats did as well. It passed 72-25.
First, we need to thank Sentator Boxer for making an important rhetorical point with her resolution: the condemnation of Move On is not about the principle of saying bad things about people in military service; rather it is about saying things that are inconvenient to the Republican cabal. Were it otherwise, Republicans would have supported the Boxer resolution broadly and heartily. Her resolution adds credence to another proposition, too. That is the idea that Republicans are highly partisan and vote reflexively, almost slavishly for their party’s interests. But Democrats are a different animal. They will vote with Republicans when they agree with them either for personal reasons (ones that have to do with pleasing the same donors, we suspect) or for reasons of higher principle.
Once we are finished thanking Boxer for clarifying things a little, we need to ask her what she was thinking. Did she have any hope that her own resolution would pass? And what would she have done if it had? The problem here is that the Senate seems to have gotten into the business of sanctioning speech. Never mind that these sanctions have absolutely no teeth. Once one starts down the trail of legislative initiatives limiting political speech, things get very ugly very quickly.
The cases of Cleland and Kerry are quite interesting. In the era before WWI there is no question that the defamed men would have sued the men who defamed them. And it is quite probable that they would have won large claims, especially if they had named as defendants the parties with financial interests in the defamations. It was a matter of honor and of defending one’s honor. Such cases are ideally suited for court battles because the most difficult aspect of the case is in determining the appropriateness of the speech. Such determinations cannot be made legislatively.
In the political arena, virtually all speech is and ought to be protected. Even some false speech. Even some mildly incendiary speech. But speech which actually causes harm to a person’s reputation and does so because it is false is and ought to be actionable. Similarly, speech that is known to be false by the party that creates it and speech that then causes destructive policy decisions ought to be actionable. But that is a different essay. Thus, if what the Swift Boaters had to say about John Kerry had been factually accurate, they must have the right to say it. They must have the right to be heard. Same holds for Cleland. And if the speech is false, one would hope that the point could be made in a suit. In the absence of court action in which the facts of the cases are heard, it is impossible to come to a conclusion about the veracity of the speech. This state of things serves no legitimate cause well.
The simple fact that these people served honorably is not enough to require that nothing ill be spoken of them if such ill-speech is true. The world is not black and white. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. People who do constructive things frequently have self-serving motives: capitalism is founded on this assumption, in fact. The whole notion of “good” and “bad” people is a convenient simplification, but it is mostly misleading. But this, too is another essay.
As for the Petraeus case, the logic is quite simple. Petraeus, in his testimony before Congress was acting in a political role, not a military role. No matter what his position, and no matter how he would testify, his testimony was in support of policy before a deliberative body formulating policy goals. There is nothing military about that at all.
That Petraeus would answer in a politically facile manner was established by his response to a question by Lieberman during his confirmation hearings. The Senator asked whether Petraeus believed that those who said bad things about the Iraq war were “giving aid and comfort” to enemies, and Petraeus answered in the affirmative. This exchange materially prejudiced all future exchanges with Congress. And it meant that Petraeus could not say anything negative about Iraq policy or military execution for fear of falling into the “aid and comfort” trap Lieberman set for him. Perhaps that was the whole purpose of the Lieberman trap.
Even in the absence of this trap, Petraeus’ recent testimony was informing a political decision. So it was political speech. Move-On viewed his testimony correctly as being essentially political in nature and it viewed the contents, nature, style, and substance of the testimony as being politically motivated. To the extent that his testimony was false or misleading or incomplete in a sense that led to support of current strategy it was harmful to the situation. It would further betray the trust of Americans in their government and it would perpetuate a divisive and destructive situation in Iraq. Such acts do not serve the nation well. And when one puts personal ambition above the desire to serve one’s country it amounts to betrayal. This is what Move On was saying.
Regardless of whether it is factually true that Petraeus is behaving this way, it is vitally important that we, as a nation, talk about this problem that is Iraq and that we discuss the possibility that Petraeus is doing precisely as Move On says. Move On’s ad is not about Petraeus in his military role; it is about Petraeus in his role of advising policy, his political role.
The Senate voted to condemn the critical process Move On started. Condemning speech about Iraq and its policy problems is simply unthinkable in a functional democracy. It cannot happen. For democracy proceeds by speaking about problems. When political speech is threatened, democracy is finished.
Boxer’s failed resolution, and its successful foil both say it is “bad” to say negative things about military personnel. But it is one thing to support military personnel in their legitimate institutional military functions and something else entirely to agree with them when they enter the political discussion about their mission. Petraeus was doing the latter. And to the extent that his testimony betrayed the interests of the American people, it is reasonable to call his character into question.
It is expected of all commissioned officers that they have some opinion about their office and their mission. It is useful to the Executive when the opinions align well with those of the Executive; but it is vital that when they are polled about the effectiveness of a policy that they give truthful answers. To do otherwise does disgrace the uniform. In the end, however, opinions about military action are necessarily political in nature. And while we agree with the Senate that it might be more constructive to disagree publicly with Petraeus than it is to demonize him, there may be occasions in which getting attention by being shrill forces an important discussion on a subject. That is the case here.
If we follow the Boxer resolution down its logical path into legislation, then the path touches on two undesirable points. One is a point where the government as an institution has assumed an obligation to defend the honor of those who serve in the military. Were it to, say, make interest-free loans for men like Kerry and Cleland to take legal action against their detractors in order to set the record straight, it might clean some things up. But it could also have chilling effects on legitimate complaints about military behavior. It would handicap any challenges to military behavior in favor of military personnel. It would, in effect, make actions taken by military personnel be beyond the control of law and justice. And that would eventually create a lawless military. At that point in history democracy and rule of law have long been forgotten.
The second point is the point at which legislation makes it impossible to say anything negative or derogatory about military action or its actors without breaking a law. In such a world, the military assumes the role of God, as did the church in dark ages and as did the third Reich in 1930’s Germany. Life in such a world offers nothing but unconditional love of goose-stepping brown-shirts, unconditional loyalty to the “homeland.” Dissenters will find bootmarks all over their backs and necks. And silent dissent must inevitably grow as the brown-shirts control ever more of our daily lives. But in the end, such worlds tend to create conflagrations that burn themselves out. As the old nursery rhyme goes “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
In the mean time, we need to ask “Why did three quarters of the US Senate start us down the path to such a world?” Or are we much farther along that path than we once believed?
——
Here’s Boxer’s resolution:
Purpose: To reaffirm strong support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and to strongly condemn attacks on the honor, integrity, and patriotism of any individual who is serving or has served honorably in the United States Armed Forces, by any person or organization IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES–110th Cong., 1st Sess.
H.R. 1585
To authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2008 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes.
AMENDMENT intended to be proposed by
Viz:
At the end of subtitle E of title X, add the following:
SEC. __ SENSE OF SENATE
(a) FINDINGS — The Senate makes the following findings:
(1) The men and women of the United States Armed Forces and our veterans deserve to be supported, honored, and defended when their patriotism is attacked;
(2) In 2002, a Senator from Georgia who is a Vietnam veteran, triple amputee, and the recipient of a Silver Star and Bronze Star, had his courage and patriotism attacked in an advertisement in which he was visually linked to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein;
(3) This attack was aptly described by a Senator and Vietnam veteran as “reprehensible”;
(4) In 2004, a Senator from Massachusetts who is a Vietnam veteran and the recipient of a Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts, was personally attacked and accused of dishonoring his country;
(5) This attack was aptly described by a Senator and Vietnam veteran as “dishonest and dishonorable.”
(6) On September 10, 2007, an advertisement in the New York Times was an unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus, who is honorably leading our Armed Forces in Iraq and carrying out the mission assigned to him by the President of the United States; and
(7) Such personal attacks on those with distinguished military service to our nation have become all too frequent.
(b) SENSE OF SENATE. — It is the sense of the Senate –
(1) to reaffirm its strong support for all of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces; and
(2) to strongly condemn all attacks on the honor, integrity, and patriotism of any individual who is serving or has served honorably in the United States Armed Forces, by any person or organization.
Permalink
09.14.07
Posted in Philosophy &c at 2:43 am by steve
Or, How to Blow up the World
In a recent piece at the Weekly Standard, Mathias Kunzel argues that the attack on the WTC has its roots in Nazi hatred of Jews. This image is introduced in the first paragraph:
“In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame,” wrote Albert Speer in his diary. “He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky.”
Then he goes on to make an argument that goes approximately like this:
1) Hitler hated Jews.
2) Hitler intended to fly planes into NYC buildings to destroy Jews.
3) All people who intend to fly planes into NYC buildings hate Jews. Therefore,
4) Hamas and al Qaeda are organizations that hate Jews. Therefore,
5) We need to bomb Iran.
We are willing to grant Kunzel the first proposition on inspection. We must take Speer’s word for it that the second proposition is true. Getting from the second to the third proposition is tricky. And this is what most of Kunzel’s argument is about. The fourth proposition Kunzel gets to by means of the third. But we see problems with the method. Of course there are other methods. If these organizations gain power by exploiting a predisposition to hatred as a means to another end, they have the effect of increasing hatred of Jews even if it is not their main purpose. But how we make sense of these relationships matters.
A significant problem lies in the whole question of who or what is a Jew-hater? And is it reasonable to argue that Jew-haters need to be eliminated? Or what? And that leads us to the final proposition: anyone who believes that any group that poses a risk to one’s own happiness ought to be obliterated before that risk is realized will find that the fifth follows from the fourth.
To start, Kunzel argues that all of today’s “terrorist organizations” descend from the Moslem Brotherhood, a group that was established in 1928. He asserts that their goals and means are essentially the same. That they hate Jews and resort to thuggery to express this hatred. There is certainly some truth in the idea that groups that are oppositional to Jews have something in common. But there are different kinds of of opposition. Not all opposition is created equal. And we need to be able to make meaningful distinctions between them.
Kunzel takes pains to show that the Moslem Brotherhood was generously funded by Nazi Germany. And he uses this idea to help convince us that the Moslem Brotherhood hated Jews in the same ways and for the same reasons as did the Nazis. But what is more likely is that Germany had identified the Moslem Brotherhood as being the most influencial organization in the Levant. Germany had aspirations of power; and it calculated that it could best exercise power and influence in the region. Kunzel notes that Gamal Abdul Nassar was an influential member of the group. He went on to become Egypt’s ruler. And was so for several decades.
Germany, at that point in history, was competing with Britain for influence in the region. And it needed an inside-track to counter Britain’s post WWI regional dominance. So Germany’s pre-war association with the Moslem Brotherhood need not have been ideological. There was no reason to believe that the Moslem Brotherhood’s goals or methods vis-a-vis Jews had anything to do with Germany’s. All that was required was that they not be mutually incompatible. It is reasonable to see German support of the Moslem Brotherhood as nothing more than an exercise in realpolitik to gain influence in a strategic oil area.
Kunzel cites a riot carried out by the Brotherhood in Cairo that resulted in the death of seven Jews and the injury of many more. This piece of information does establish that the Moslem Brotherhood had antipathy toward the Jews. And it establishes that it occasionally resorted to thuggery to express that antipathy.
But the action in Cairo strikes one as being categorically different from the actions taken in wartime Germany. The former is a kind of mob action. And mobs get out of control. The latter is government action. And governments are presumed to be in control. To harrass and annoy is fundamentally different from planning to eliminate and carrying out that plan.
Kunzel fails to convince us that the Moslem Brotherhood’s association with Germany had anything to do with positions on Jews. And he makes no argument whatsoever that links that association with Hamas or al Qaeda. He fails, therefore, to establish that these organizations harbor any institutional hatred of Jews. They may exploit hatred of the Jews. Or they may have institutional disagreements with Jews about the legal status of the state of Israel; but each of these is distinct. In light of this, his argument fails.
The main problem, however, with the argument is not the simple logic, it is the assumptions about terms and relationships. Kunzel’s argument begs for a definition of terms. What, precisely, does he mean by hatred of Jews? To what extent is it because Jews are Jewish per se? To what extent is it an artifact of other natural factors? To what extent is he referring, rather, to hatred of specific acts, or to specific attitudes, practices, or beliefs widely held by Jews? These are all different things.
We have already talked about the distinction between institutional and casual. Another thing to examine is the nature of antipathy and its sources. One can assert sources of antipathies. One is an antipathy based on bad experience. People dislike those who have treated them unfairly. The other based instead on lack of experience. It is a part of human tribal behavior to “reject outsiders.” Every culture does it. Each does it in different ways. And sometimes these antipathies work together.
In Rwanda, the ruling Tutsis are a minority and are considered by the Hutus to be outsiders. While the Hutus follow tribal religious practices, the Tutsis are Moslems who moved in from the north. They tend to be more highly educated and they thrive in towns better than their Hutu counterparts. They tend to have different physical features that allow them to be identified.
According to Jared Diamond, overpopulation and ecological stress created a ticking time bomb in Rwanda in the 1990’s and that time bomb went off when the Hutu expressed their antipathy to these uppity outsiders by hacking hundreds of thousands of Tutsis to death with machetes. There are many reasons for the genocide. Some were cultural and some were environmental. But by all accounts it was the “outsiders” - primarily Tutsis - who bore the brunt of most of the violence.
Tutsis had lived in Rwanda for many generations. So the real “outsider” issue was a simple tribal issue. There existed two competing cultures in Rwanda. The economically and politically dominant culture was a minority. And the majority of Rwandans were pushed past the limit by their physical environment. It is not difficult for an objective observer to explain the situation without resorting to ideas of hatred. And, perhaps, it is possible in the Hutu culture to behave precisely as they did without resorting to ideas of hate. But certainly in informal parlance we would call their acts hateful.
The “outsider” issue is a recurring problem. It is at the heart of political instability in South America, for instance. Popular governments tend to align with the indigenous poor majorities; authoritarian governments align with the rich and educated European descendents. There can be a strong sense of antipathy between the groups. And even after five centuries, those of European descent are viewed as outsiders.
In light of the “outsider” problem, it is not entirely unexpected that Jews should experience some amount of societal animus when they live in distinct enclaves and cultivate distinct cultures. They are not hated because they are Jewish. Rather, to the extent they appear to be separate and distinct from the local culture they are a natural target of animus. The Tutsis were disliked because they were different. They were also disliked because they were more successful in a modern, urban society than the more tribal Hutus were. And this differential success may serve as part of an explanation for why Jews were hated in Weimar Germany, and why Europeans and Americans are hated in pockets of the Mideast.
Kunzel touches on differntial success as an argument. He argues that radical fundamentalism Islam tends to be a causative factor in low economic achievement rather than vice versa. There certainly is a case to be made for this. A recent article in the Economist about Muslims in India suggests that they are always at the bottom of the economic heap. To the extent that it eschews all elements of western styel education, Islamic fundamentalism certainly does lead to behaviors and attitudes that hinder economic development.
But there is a way in which humans believe their own case is normal and therefore normative. So poverty can perpetuate impoverished ideas. And Islam has thrived most in states that have suffered a static or declining standard of living for much of the last two millennia. So one might expect some aspects of Islam to be well adapted to dealing with such non-frontier cultures. And some of those adaptations may put it in conflict with frontier cultures like that of post Enlightenment Europe and the West.
In other words, some of the reasons for the antipathy of Moslems toward the Jews is necessarily the same as some of the reasons for antipathy of Moslems against the West. And some of the reasons for antipathy against Jews stems from their status as a minority with a different culture. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay - in arguing for a single Republic - note that neighboring states are natural enemies. They compete for the same resources. So the simple existence of Israel as a state, regardless of its composition, predisposes it to some competetive tensions with its neighbors.
All of these sources of antipathy are natural and they can be transcended by thinking of cultures in broader ways. Mostly, we have to be willing to give up thinking that our own culture is always good, right, just, holy. And we have to understand both the weaknesses and the strengths of our cultural belief system. Most importantly, we need to think about how cultural ideas and practices produce societal results.
In the absence of a long history of mutual abuses, most tribal antipathies are easily overcome. In places like the Balkans, however, antipathies five or ten centuries old flare up with regularity. Each act of violence is justified by a mythology of violence and abuse handed down for many centuries. And each culture has its own mythology that allows the dehumanization of the other. In the Balkans, it is destructive acts and the framing stories told to children about those acts that perpetuates the violence. The story of Israel and Palestine seems to be shaping up the same way.
At least some of the reasons for Moslems hating Zionists is the way in which the state of Israel was formed. There are merits profound and numerous for Jews to have a homeland. And Israel happens to claim to be exactly this. Unfortunately, the process of its formation caused another problem. And that problem has been the source of friction in the Mideast ever since.
It is unreasonable to expect that if the Palestinians were ultimately treated justly, then all frictions between the Jews and Moslems would disappear; but injustice is a powerful nucleation force for precipitating the haze of normal cultural antipathy into destructive action. The thing that precipitates destructive acts by Hamas and al Qaeda is not hatred of Jews at all. It is hatred of certain actions and the attitudes that make those destructive acts possible. To the extent that Hamas and al Qaeda express hatred, it is for unfair Zionist actions, not for Jews themselves.
Kunzel makes a common mistake. He deliberately confuses hatred of Jews with hatred of some form of Zionism. One is a hatred for a people with an ethnic identity; the other is hatred of an ideal that expressed itself in a way that was unfair to certain Palestinians. How we view this distinction really matters.
It is reasonable to argue that Hitler, in Weimar Germany, transformed a vague fear of the outsider and an age-old European prejudice against Jews into a hatered of a people. Many societies imagine they are superior to other societies. And Germans who responded positively to Hitler certainly believed this of themselves. Max Weber’s “Protestant Working Ethic” had, only a few decades earlier, been published and it proved to the industrious German that he was far more holy than anyone else.
The Germans also saw themselves as victims; the Treaty of Versailles was artificially punative and it led to serious economic problems. A millenium-old tradition in Europe was that the banking system was run by Jewish people because until roughly the time of the Enlightenment it was illegal for Christians to lend money with interest. Using this fact, Hitler shifted blame for Germany’s economic problems to Jews because it was convenient to his political purposes. He exploited prejudice to parlay hatred of actions into hatred of persons. And he institutionalized this hatred within the government. The outcome was terrible, terrifying, hateful.
Today, from other sources, we hear how superior Ashkenazy Jews are to everyone else. They are smarter. They have higher IQ’s. They achieve more. They have better musical sense. They play chess better. And they are the only people with any sense of humor. And we hear how everyone else hates them; how they have been victimized by this or that group. While there may be solid reasons to believe that all of the statements about them are factually true, there is a psychological pathology about any ethnic group who believes themselves superior simultaneously identifies themselves as victims. Dr. Salman Akhtar identifies these as being two of the four qualities of fundamentalism - the form of belief that is at the heart of any destructive act for the purpose of an ethnic group. Fundamentalist belief uses both factors to dehumanize all people who threaten its hegemony. If one wishes to find an idea to blame for the events of 9/11, no matter what theory of the crime one chooses, one will find fundamentalist belief to be the motivating factor.
The great problem with Kunzel’s work is that the simple act of creating individuals or groups of people that “hate Jews” is an act of fundamentalist aggression. It sets up the possibility of engaging in unprovoked acts of violence against those individuals or groups. Even if the facts that inform this behavior are valid, the response to those facts is destructive. The act of creating and propagating the mental frame of a distinctive ethnic group that is simultaneously distinctly meritorious and victimized sets up the logic for acts of pre-emptive aggression that lead to an endless cycle of violence. This is where choice comes in.
It is theoretically possible to hate ideas and acts of people without necessarily hating people themselves. While is possible to argue that hatred is hatred, its effects are the same and it doesn’t matter how it arrises, this point of view is dangerously fatalistic. It dooms us to an eternal cycle of ethnic hatred. If hatred is informed by action and if action is informed by belief, then what we believe is the ultimate cause of hatred. This suggests that if we can choose to believe and act otherwise, we can have some hope of breaking a perpetual cycle of hatred.
If a person is hated simply because he is a member of a distinct ethnic group, that hatred - though natural - is categorically wrong. In a world with distinct ethnic groups it predisposes violence. Yet, it is extremely rare for a person to perform a destructive act where they perceive no harm to their person or to their group.
If, on the other hand, a person is hated for holding some distinct and threatening belief that informs a destructive action, then it is the belief itself that motivates hatred. Moreover, if a person acts on that threatening belief, the act itself is hateful. It is not just reasonable to hate the act, it is necessary. But if we assume that the act was not simply an arbitrary or gratuitous act of violence, we may see the person behind it. *
And if we assume that change of behavior is possible, then it is rational to hate bad actions and the bad beliefs without causing us to hate “bad people.” This gives us a choice. And it gives the potential object of our hatred a choice. It makes communication and reconciliation possible. It humanizes us because we recognize the humanity of our adversary. To do the opposite removes choice from the equation. It dehumanizes us. It makes conflict inevitable.
The problem with believing that people hate unconditionally is that it makes the reconciliation between parties with a long antagonistic history impossible. If bad character is what causes bad action, there is no hope of getting a good outcome except to exterminate the foe. But to do this one must dehumanize the foe by depicting them as hateful.
So what is the rhetorical purpose of comparing 9/11 to a Hitlerian fantasy? It is to establish a mental equivalence between Hitler and certain contemporary organizations of Moslems: Hamas and al-Qaeda.** It is to dehumanize people in these groups just as Hitler dehumanized the Jews and just as Hitler has been dehumanized by them. This sets us on the course to escalating conflict. If the cycle of hatred is not broken, it must lead to similar ends.
Sadly, this seems to be precisely what Kunzel is counselling. The last third of his piece is about Iran’s nuclear program and how the West fails to comprehend Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We hear Kunzel trying to argue that Iran under the Revolutionary Guard is just like Germany under the Gestapo. It hates Jews. It wants to destroy them all in a great nuclear blast. The only logical choice is to stop them before they strike. Where have we heard this before?
Perhaps it is time to think of things differently. If, instead of simply arguing that Moslem hatred is irrational and endemic, we imagine that Moslem hatred is informed by policy, by action, then what we do actually matters. Any person who has been in a relationship with another person might understand that sometimes this actually is true. Sometimes we have choices about the way we behave. Somtimes we can choose to get along. Working things out requires the establishment of trust and open lines of communication.
If we fail to do this, our children will wake up in a world where “going Hutu” is the deault means of conducting relationships between tribal cultures. And no matter what we do, both sides will be armed with something more dangerous than machetes. We will all wish we lived in Baghdad in 2007. It’s time to stop the hate-talk, time to take responsibility for our hurtful actions, time to view people from other cultures as humans.
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* One of the great tragedies of our time is that Hitler has been so thoroughly demonized that we fail to recognize how his ideas made sense to those who supported him. And we fail to recognize how he manipulated his supporters. If, instead, one worked to understand the choices he made, the methods he used, and the reasons behind those methods, we might find that instead of rejecting those, some of us today are making the same mistake over again; but in a different context. Understand Dr. Akhtar’s definition of fundamentalism broadly and clearly, and one will see that Hitler used fundamentalism in Germany to manipulate the masses. He used the ideas of ethnic superiority and of victimhood to create a hated “other.” And he burned the Reichstag and blamed it the hated “other.” Just as childhood victims of violence tend to visit the same misuse on their own children, history appears to be repeating itself. Our focus needs to be less “who” is hurting us and more on “what ideas” are hurting us.
** It is popular to argue that Hamas hates Jews. But it is more than just a society of Jew haters. It is a functional social organization that delivers social services. And it is by virtue of its functionality that the organization won the Palestinian election that was pushed by the Israelis and the Americans. It is reasonable to argue that its official position about the state of Israel is anti-Zionist; but to argue that Hamas hates Jews does not follow automatically.
As for al-Qaeda, its main goal is to change the nature of Saudi Arabian government and society: to promote Wahibbism. Its means appear to be trading narcotics, arms, and gems. It is probable that al-Qaeda exploits hatred of Jews for recruiting purposes. But how is this exploitation any different from the exploitation of hatred of the Moslem “other” that is present in the popular term “Islamofascists” and in the perpetual “war on terror?” To his credit, Kunzel eschews the incendiary term. But his argument stops just short of it.
In the first case, the organization has legitimate social value. In the second, one is simply dealing with another organized crime society that once had a particular political point of view. In both cases, the most productive means is to interfere with and prosecute criminal behavior. And, if one is determined to undercut the organization, one must take away its raison d’etre. Without a good reason to hate, al Qaeda will suffer serious recruiting problems. And Hamas will either disappear or it will become a normal political party.
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