In Lebanon

Lebanon is bearing the brunt of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Here are just a few notes regarding the situation in Lebanon:

• Kofi Annan and Tony Blair have recommended that an international force be deployed along the border of Israel and Lebanon; the Israelis have rejected the suggestion.
• The UN is warning of a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon as refugees trying to escape areas of Israeli bombardment find escape routes blocked by destroyed roads and bridges.
• Many Americans are getting frustrated with the apparent inability of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to provide assistance. According to a notice posted on the embassy web site today, the embassy is still "finalizing details" for the evacuation of Americans from Lebanon--four days after Beirut International Airport and the Port of Beirut were closed.
• The Canadian government is also being criticized in the aftermath of the deaths of six Canadians in southern Lebanon.
• Meanwhile, the British government has dispatched six warships to Lebanon to undertake "the biggest evacuation since Dunkirk."
• The American University of Beirut has suspended classes "until further notice."

[Update--7/18/06: The United States is beginning to pull it evacuation operation together.]

Zidane, Again

Since we're dealing with world sports tonight--not the Israeli-Hezbollah war, the Iraq war, the G8 meeting, Guantanamo, NSA spying, military tribunals after Hamdan, genocide in Darfur, climate change, rising oil prices, etc., etc.--please allow me to return briefly to l'affaire Zidane.

Over at this British site, we learn that "the Materazzi-felling incident was provoked not by references to Zidane's mother and his Algerian ancestry, but rather the suggestion that Italian wine may be of equal, or superior, quality to its French equivalent." More importantly, we learn that the incident looked very different to viewers of different nationalities. (Be sure to scroll down far enough see how Zidane may have actually save Materazzi's life.)

[Via FP Passport.]

It Ain't Baseball

Soccer is not the only sport that excites millions of people around the world while leaving many Americans baffled. Some day I'd like to be able to read and understand stories in the British press like this one.

For those who choose not to click through, here's a brief sample of what I'm talking about:

Yesterday, [Pakistan's Mohammad Yousuf] was not fluent throughout but showed patience waiting for the muse to strike. In the morning, when Liam Plunkett, in particular, and Steve Harmison were straying to leg, Yousuf contented himself by clipping and nudging rather than reaching for the rapier.

Never the less, he put 15 deliveries to the boundary in the 208 minutes it took him to reach his century, none more pleasing than the cover drive with which he despatched a rare off-side ball from Plunkett.

The German Response

[Update: I should have noted that this photo was taken on a stop President Bush made in Trinwillershagen, Germany en route to the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was published in the Daily Mail.]

Big Bang Busted

E. J. Dionne Jr. argues in today's Washington Post that the real reason for the invasion of Iraq was what he calls the Big Bang Theory. The United States ousted Saddam Hussein to shake things up in the Middle East.

Things have certainly been shaken up, but without the results that the Bush administration hoped to achieve. Dionne writes:

The case for reducing our commitment to Iraq in the interest of other and larger foreign policy purposes--has anyone noticed the growing mess in Afghanistan?--is built on a compelling proposition: that the administration made a huge bet on Iraq and it lost. American voters can decide to keep the gamble going, to risk more lives and money, and hope that something turns up. Or they can decide that this gamble will never deliver the winnings that those who took it on our behalf promised.

By late November of this year, the United States will have been at war in Iraq for as long as we were involved in World War II. Under those circumstances, the burden of proof should not be on those who argue for changing what we're doing. It should be on those who set a failed policy in motion and keep promising, despite the evidence, that it will somehow pay off if only we "stay the course."

Rewriting Common Article 3

It looks like Ted Obenchain (in comments here) was exactly right. The Los Angeles Times today finds signs in Defense Department testimony yesterday before the House Armed Services Committee that "the White House is likely to remain aggressive in asserting its authority over detainee policy." Marty Lederman notes that the Bush administration "is asking Congress for statutory authorization for the United States to violate Common Article 3" of the Geneva Conventions. Jack Balkin draws attention to a new report on Guantanamo issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights and suggests that the Bush administration's stance on Common Article 3 indicates that the administration "believes that the appropriate remedy for violations of basic standards of decency and humanity is not to punish the wrongdoers but to make the conduct legal after the fact."

So much for the restoration of American integrity.

Self-Determination vs. Democracy

Is self-determination antithetical to democracy? Yesterday in the Washington Post, Serbia's prime minister Vojislav Kostunica argued that it is, at least in the case of the Serbian province of Kosovo.

Unequal Obligations

When is a bilateral treaty that only one party has ratified binding? Apparently whenever it involves the the U.S.-U.K. "special relationship." In reality, it's not that simple, but Tony Blair's critics are justifiably angry over what appear to be some unilateral obligations that have been imposed by a post-9/11 bilateral extradition treaty with the United States.

The current controversy involves the NatWest Three--three British bankers who were put on a plane this morning to Houston, Texas to face charges related to the collapse of Enron. Extradition of the three is occurring pursuant to a U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty negotiated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Although the treaty's terms are very favorable to American interests (allowing, for example, different evidentiary standards for the United States and the United Kingdom to gain extradition), the United States has not yet ratified the agreement.

Why did the British feel compelled to extradite suspects to the United States in the absence of American ratification of the extradition treaty? I welcome amendments or corrections from readers who know more about this situation than I do, but it appears that the British government is acting under a statutory (i.e., domestic law) obligation adopted in anticipation of the treaty's entry into force. Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom treats all international agreements as non-self-executing. In other words, implementing legislation must always be enacted in order to give effect to treaties within the British legal system. (In the United States, whether a treaty is self-executing--and therefore a direct source of justiciable rights and obligations--or non-self-executing depends on the wording of the treaty itself.)

Ordinarily, the required implementing legislation would be enacted by the British government pursuant to (or perhaps subject to) the entry into force of the treaty. In this case, perhaps due to Blair's interest in ingratiating himself with President Bush, the House of Commons adopted implementing legislation without waiting for U.S. Senate action on the treaty. Now, as a consequence, the U.K. bears all of the obligations of the treaty while the United States bears none of them.

Needless to say, this situation has made many Britons unhappy with both the British and the American governments. The Guardian reports that "the government is sending Baroness Scotland, the Home Office Minister in the House of Lords, to Washington to deliver the message that Senate ratification of the treaty is now essential." Somehow I rather doubt that the United States Senate will feel the same sense of urgency regarding this matter that the Blair government feels.

Details and Convergences

Good non-fiction books generally offer a succession of interesting details in the course of developing an argument that stretches from beginning to end. Facts, anecdotes, and descriptions presented in the space of no more than a few lines sustain the reader as he or she pursues a thesis that requires tens of thousands of words to articulate and defend.

James Carroll is, in my view, a wonderful writer in part because he attends to details. One such detail in House of War, which I find interesting because it links a favorite Los Angeles summertime venue with the subject of Carroll’s book, is this: The lead architect of the Pentagon, G. Edwin Bergstrom, also designed the Hollywood Bowl. (For an early architectural drawing of the Pentagon, go here.)

Incidentally, Carroll makes much of convergences in House of War. He notes, for example, that ground was broken for the Pentagon on September 11, 1941, sixty years--almost to the minute--before American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the west side of the building.

A Century of Pentecostalism

The century is a common unit of measure when thinking historically, although it had never really occurred to me to ask why until I read this passage recently in Diarmaid McCulloch’s The Reformation: A History (p. 474):

The centenary of Martin Luther’s first declaration of rebellion in Wittenberg approached in 1617. Lutheran historians greatly encouraged the idea that such patterns of years were important. Indeed, the scholars nicknamed the Centuriators of Magdeburg, led by that ultimate Gnesio-Lutheran Flacius Illyricus [Matthias Vlacich], had more or less invented the century as a significant unit of historical measurement. The celebrations of the anniversary mounted as the outlook for Protestantism seemed ever more uncertain.

Who knew?

(Incidentally, I can clear up a couple of points from the passage above: The Gnesio-Lutherans were so-called because they considered themselves absolutely faithful to Luther’s teachings--gnesio is Greek for "the real thing"--unlike the "Philippists," or followers of Philipp Melanchthon. The Centuriators of Magdeburg were the authors of a multi-volume history of the Christian church; their account was broken down by centuries.)

Be that as it may, I’ve learned from reading Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God that 2006 is a religiously significant centennial. (Had I been reading the Los Angeles Times more carefully back in April I could have picked up this bit of information somewhat earlier.) Pentecostalism was born in 1906 in Los Angeles when a group led by William Joseph Seymour had an experience of the Holy Spirit similar to that experienced by Christ’s apostles on Pentecost. Word (or perhaps I should say "ecstatic utterance") spread quickly and people flocked to Seymour’s services so that the congregation was forced to move from the home where it had been meeting to an abandoned building on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles (about three blocks from the present-day City Hall). Within four years, there were Pentecostal churches all over the United States and in fifty other countries.

Reporting on the "Azusa Street Revival" in April 1906, the Los Angeles Daily Times stated:

Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand, the newest religious sect has started in Los Angeles. Meetings are held in a tumble-down shack on Azusa Street near San Pedro [Street], and devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories, and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal. Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers who spend hours swaying back and forth in nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the gift of tongues and to be able to comprehend the babble. Such a startling claim has never yet been made by any company of fanatics even in Los Angeles, the home of almost numberless creeds.

Armstrong fits this development into her general perspective on the rise of fundamentalisms in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. She writes (p. 181):

Pentecostalism took hold at a time when people were beginning to have doubts about science, and when religious people were becoming uncomfortably aware that a reliance upon reason alone had worrying implications for faith, which had traditionally depended on the more intuitive, imaginative, and aesthetic mental disciplines. While fundamentalists were trying to make their Bible-based religion entirely reasonable and scientific, Pentecostalists were returning to the core of religiousness, defined by [Harvey] Cox as "that largely unprocessed nucleus of the psyche in which the unending struggle for a sense of purpose and significance goes on." Where fundamentalists, by identifying faith with rationally proven dogma, were confining the religious experience to the outermost cerebral rim of the mind, Pentecostalists were delving back into the unconscious source of mythology and religiousness. While fundamentalists stressed the importance of the Word and the literal, Pentecostalists bypassed conventional speech and tried to access the primal spirituality that lies beneath the credal formulations of a tradition. Where the modern ethos insisted that men and women focus pragmatically only upon this world, Pentecostalists demonstrated the human yearning for ecstasy and transcendence. The meteoric explosion of this form of faith showed that by no means everybody was enthralled by the scientific rationalism of modernity. This instinctive recoil from many of the shibboleths of modernity showed that many people felt that something was missing from the brave new world of the West.

But what does Pentecostalism have to do with international politics? First, Pentacostalism is a rapidly growing segment of Christianity, especially in the developing world. There may be as many as 500 million–yes, half a billion–Pentecostals in the world. To put it differently, up to a quarter of all the Christians in the world today are Pentecostals. Pentecostalism is a religious forced to be reckoned with.

Second, while Pentecostals have historically been focused on individual salvation and not social transformation, some are becoming more political, especially in the developing world. (Former attorney general John Ashcroft is one of the few Pentecostals to rise very high in the ranks of American politics.) Increasingly, Pentecostals are establishing non-governmental institutions to address health and social welfare concerns in their states. Although they are generally conservative with regard to personal morality and family issues, Pentecostals can be very progressive where social welfare issues are involved. In fact, Hugo Chavez has had significant support from Pentecostals in Venezuela (notwithstanding Pat Robertson's comments about him).

As a coda to the passage quoted above, Armstrong states, "We shall often find in our story that the religious behavior of people who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity articulates a strongly felt need for the spiritual, which is so often either excluded or marginalized in a secularist society." Those of us who have been "major beneficiaries of modernity" (witness the computer sitting in front of us at this very moment) invariably seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding those who haven't. It's not necessary--or even prudent--for us to accept the religious beliefs or the political ideologies or the military tactics of those who feel the modern world has passed them by, but we would do well to try to understand them if for no other reason than that they outnumber us.

Back to Geneva

The New York Times reports:

The White House conceded on Tuesday for the first time that terror suspects held by the United States had a right under international law to basic human and legal protections under the Geneva Conventions.

The statement reverses a position the White House had held since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it represents a victory for those within the administration who argued that the United States’ refusal to extend Geneva protections to Qaeda prisoners was harming the country’s standing abroad.

It said the White House would withdraw a part of an executive order issued by President Bush in 2002 saying that terror suspects were not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

The White House said the change was in keeping with the Supreme Court decision two weeks ago that struck down the military tribunals Mr. Bush established. A Defense Department memorandum made public earlier Tuesday concluded that the court decision also meant that terror suspects in military custody had legal rights under the Geneva Convention.

This is good news that represents a necessary step toward the restoration of American integrity. Recent history provided no reason to believe the Bush administration would reverse itself on this issue without a protracted struggle.

Campioni del Mondo

After what I said about soccer a couple of weeks ago, I probably need to explain this post. This is the back story concerning Il Mondiale (as the Italians call the World Cup). It's a story that brings politics and soccer together. But mainly it's an excuse for me to use the little bit of Italian I know.

Those who watched the Italy-France match yesterday will know that (1) Italy won the World Cup on penalty kicks and (2) France's star forward (and tournament MVP), Zinedine Zidane, was red-carded in the 110th minute for delivering a head-butt to the chest of Italian defender Marco Materazzi. The question circulating in the soccer world is, of course, what did Materazzi say to cause Zidane to lose his composure? Italy's La Repubblica is all over the story.

There are two leading (and not necessarily exclusive) theories: (1) Materazzi called Zidane, who was born in France but whose parents are from Algeria, a terrorist and/or (2) Materazzi called Zidane's sister a prostitute. Zidane has said that he will eventually reveal what Materazzi said. According to La Repubblica, Materazzi said, "Quello che ha fatto Zidane lo ha visto il mondo intero. Gli avrei detto terrorista? Ma dai, io sono ignorante." ("The whole world saw what Zidane did. Would I have called him a terrorist? You tell me. I don't know.") That doesn't sound much like a denial.

On a happier note, La Repubblica reports that Italian defender Marco Cannavaro slept with the Cup last night.

I suppose it's on to South Africa in 2010.

Armstrong on Muslim Fundamentalists

Karen Armstrong, whose book entitled The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is currently occupying about a third of my reading time (along with James Carroll's House of War and R. A. Scotti's Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's), has an essay in tomorrow's Guardian on the divide separating radical Muslims from their moderate brethren. Armstrong is a very perceptive observer of world religions and her assessment of Islam in this essay helps to situate jihadists within the broader realm of religious fundamentalisms.

Armstrong's Guardian commentary is available here. For a review of The Battle for God by Chris Hedges, go here.

On a Mission from God

Very early in my teaching career, I was asked to teach a two-semester survey of political theory. I was woefully unprepared for the task, which is probably why Clint Milner's frequently repeated question--What is justice?--invariably seemed to stymie rather than stimulate discussion. After a while, I came to believe that Clint might be using the question to side-track discussions when he hadn't done the assigned reading. And after a much longer while, I came to believe that if I had known what I was doing, I would have structured the entire class around that question. We all would have learned something important about politics and ethics--and Clint would have had to develop different diversionary tactics.

Thanks in part to Enlightenment egalitarianism and its influence on the founding principles of the United States, most people in the world today seem to believe that justice must be defined the same way for all. Some means of addressing inequality, in other words, is an essential component of justice. Few people are willing any more to argue the justice of slavery, monarchy, imperialism, or any other system that institutionalizes extreme inequality.

But what if God prefers one particular group of people over all others? Can those of us who believe in God simultaneously believe that "all men and women are created equal"? (Here I quote from the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, which in some important respects improved on Jefferson’s wording in the Declaration of Independence.) Can we believe in universal human rights? Can we believe that international law of every sort applies equally to weak states and superpowers, to Christians and Muslims, to secular governments and theocratic regimes? Or must we accept that the rules for those who enjoy God's favor differ from the rules for those who don't?

I happen to believe that God does not prefer one group of people over another. In fact, I believe that a god of partiality would be a deity with serious limitations, not the God Almighty I was taught to believe in. The most ancient Christian creeds assert the existence of an all-powerful God--Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem--and that, it seems to me, argues strongly against believing that God might take sides with one part of Creation against another.

But Scripture is unequivocal in asserting a special relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Jews, in fact, are identified in Scripture as God's "Chosen People."

Perhaps this reveals a contradiction in my religious beliefs, but I don't think so. There are ways to understand what it meant for the Jews to be "chosen" by God while also believing what the apostle Peter preached, that "God is no respecter of persons." But because my point is more political than theological, I will skip the Bible lesson and cut straight to the take-home message: The claim that some Americans have made throughout our history and continue to make today that the United States is a "chosen nation" is a dangerous delusion.

My colleague Richard Hughes, in an outstanding book called Myths America Lives By, writes (p. 19), "Among the most powerful and persistent of all the myths that Americans invoke about themselves is the myth that America is a chosen nation and that its citizens constitute a chosen people." It's a myth, as Hughes points out, that was brought over on the Mayflower. Indeed, during the colonial period of our history, the belief was particularly strong among the religious refugees who settled New England. (Think of the biblical place names like Salem, New Canaan, and Providence that are scattered across New England.) Today the belief is strongest in the South, according to Kevin Phillips, but as many political scientists, historians, and sociologists have noted, the belief is widespread.

Why is it a dangerous delusion? For one thing, it ignores the history of other nations that have believed themselves to be divinely blessed. Phillips reminds us of a couple of these in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. He writes (p. 125):

For centuries Americans have believed themselves special, a people and a nation chosen by God to play a unique and even redemptive role in the world. Elected leaders tend to proselytize and promote this exceptionalism--presidential inaugural addresses are a frequent venue--without appending the necessary historical cautions. Previous nations whose leaders and people believed much the same thing wound up deeply disillusioned, as when Spanish armadas were destroyed while flying holy banners at their mastheads, and when World War I German belt buckles proclaiming "Gott Mit Uns" became objects of derision in the Kaiser's defeated army.

My more immediate concern with the religious version of American exceptionalism is that it commonly leads to the belief that the rules don't apply to us. As Elwood said to Jake in The Blues Brothers, "They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God." Only in the present circumstances, it's not a matter of evading arrest so much as it is trying to establish an a priori case that we have a right to operate beyond the reach of the law. Perhaps a line from John Adams would more plainly articulate the problem than a line of movie dialogue uttered by Dan Aykroyd.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams wrote,

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

***

What, you may well ask, brought on this unusually long post about religion and politics? It was an item in the New York Times yesterday. A mega-church in Memphis, Tennessee unveiled a statue on its property. Of course, non-denominational mega-churches like this one--the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church--tend to be evangelical and evangelicals don't generally erect statues of saints. Nor do they tend to have icons of any sort. So what might their statue depict?

It's the Statue of Liberty with Lady Liberty holding the Ten Commandments and, in her right hand, a cross where the torch would ordinarily be. The converted Lady Liberty stands seventy-two feet tall and is called the Statue of Liberation Through Christ. As for its meaning, the Apostle Alton R. Williams (no relation) summed it up in the title of a pamphlet he published: "The Meaning of the Statue of Liberation Through Christ: Reconnecting Patriotism With Christianity."

I don't think we really want to reconnect patriotism with Christianity. It's far too easy to give our leaders a pass if we believe that somehow they're doing God's work. We need instead to recall that even the rulers of ancient Israel, the state that embodied the original "Chosen People," were constantly chastised by the prophets. Prophetic witness that points out injustice wherever it exists--that is what we should expect from churches that want to "reconnect" with the state.

* * *

"We're on a mission from God."

It was funny when Elwood said it to Jake in The Blues Brothers. It's not so funny when people think it's true of their own country.

The News from Georgia

I don't often get e-mail from Stalin's hometown--in fact, it had never happened before yesterday--but I'm hoping it will happen from time to time over the course of the next year now that recent grad Heidi Laki has written to report that she's enjoying wonderful Georgian hospitality as she begins her Peace Corps assignment in Gori.

Meanwhile, Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, met with President Bush today in Washington. It was the third time the two have met in the last two years. Why is George Bush singing "Georgia on My Mind" these days? It probably has something to do with oil pipelines and the upcoming G-8 meeting in Russia.

Approaching Democracy

It's interesting to see (thanks to a post here) that E. J. Dionne Jr. , writing in yesterday's Washington Post, was also thinking about the connection between July the Fourth and Vaclav Havel's February 1990 speech before a joint session of Congress.

(My post mentioning Havel is here. The complete text of Havel's speech is here.)

Independence and Interests

Perhaps yesterday’s idealist post should be balanced by a bit of realism. After all, American independence could not have been secured without a healthy respect for the role of power in promoting Jefferson’s aspirations. A few people back in England might have been moved by the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, but most probably shared the view of Samuel Johnson, who in 1775 had written, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

At the same time the Second Continental Congress commissioned Jefferson and four colleagues to draft a declaration of independence, it set about the practical work of seeking an alliance that would make it possible to achieve independence. Fortunately, French and American interests coincided–not because the French monarchy was interested in promoting liberté, fraternité, and egalité but because France and England were, of course, bitter rivals.

The following excerpts from a memorandum of the French Foreign Ministry clearly articulate France’s interest in the American struggle for independence. The memorandum is dated January 13, 1778. Approximately three weeks later, France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States.

The advantages which will result [from American independence] are innumerable; we shall humiliate our natural enemy, a perfidious enemy who never knows how to respect either treaties or the right of nations; we shall divert to our profit one of the principal sources of her opulence; we shall shake her power, and reduce her to her real value; we shall extend our commerce, our shipping, our fisheries; we shall ensure the possession of our islands, and finally, we shall re-establish our reputation, and shall resume amongst the Powers of Europe the place which belongs to us. There would be no end if we wished to detail all these points; it is sufficient to indicate them in order to make their importance felt.

. . .

The independence of the Colonies is so important a matter for France, that no other should weaken it, and France must do her utmost to establish it, even if it should cost her some sacrifices; I mean that France must undertake the war for the maintenance of American independence, even if that war should be in other respect disadvantageous. In order to be convinced of this truth, it is only necessary to picture to ourselves what England will be, when she no longer has America.

[Source: Norman A. Graebner, ed., Ideas and Diplomacy: Readings in the Intellectual Tradition of American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 27-30.]

Independence and Ideals

Those of us who worry when the United States fails to live up to its own ideals--by torturing or "disappearing" detainees, by failing to control the corrupting influence of money in politics, by denying many of its own citizens equality of opportunity, by turning a blind eye to genocide, and so on--should consider the possibility that Thomas Jefferson is the ultimate source of our dissatisfaction. Jefferson, after all, penned the words that established the ideals that provide the standard against which we judge our country's behavior.

Jefferson might have written a declaration that established as the justification for American independence the insufferability of George III and his colonial administration. He might have, in other words, listed the problems Americans had with British rule (as, in fact, he did) and left it at that. Or he might have made a realist case for independence--one based on the incompatibility of British and American interests and on the prospects for achieving American aims via power politics. He might have found a formula that would have convinced his colleagues to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of independence without making grandiose promises concerning the new republic's commitment to such lofty ideals as equality and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But Jefferson and his co-revolutionaries based their claim to autonomy on a set of high ideals, ones that they believed would have universal appeal by virtue of their foundation in immutable truths. Those of us who celebrate the Fourth of July have bought into Jefferson's idealism. If not, we have misunderstood what the Declaration of Independence is all about.

The Declaration of Independence accomplished the very practical matter of establishing the stakes of war with Great Britain. (As Benjamin Franklin said after the document had been signed, "Now we must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.") But more than that, it placed a marker with respect to liberty and equality so far beyond the reality of 1776 that we still haven't reached it. Indeed, Vaclav Havel, while addressing a joint session of Congress, reminded Americans that we, like many newer republics, are only approaching democracy.

As James Carroll notes in an excellent column concerning Independence Day, "to be an American traditionalist . . . is to affirm the revolution." I would add that to affirm the revolution is also to recognize that we still have much to do in our effort to live up to the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Happy Birthday, USA

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to adopt a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia that called for independence. John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, wrote, "The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha [sic] in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, and parade, with shows, games, sports, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore."

The Wisdom of Elvis

It was a long way to go for Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to make a political point, but there he was and he nailed it.

At Graceland yesterday, Koizumi, who shares Elvis's January 8 birthday and is a huge fan of the King, broke into song. President Bush was no doubt expecting as much. What he probably wasn't expecting was one of the lyrics Koizumi chose to sing: "Wise men say, 'Only fools rush in.'"

Ouch.

Number 192

The Republic of Montenegro, which until recently was part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, yesterday became the 192nd member of the United Nations. Those wishing to update their U.N. General Assembly scorecards should note that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is now Serbia.

SCOTUS Weighs In

From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions violate U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war prisoners.

In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized by any act of Congress and that their structure and procedures violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.

The folks at Opinio Juris and Balkinization have some useful commentary. The text of the Court's opinion is available here.

Death and Cynicism

This is, admittedly, dredging up old news, but as I was discussing with a colleague Colleen Graffy's undiplomatic response to the Guantanamo suicides--she called the suicides "a good PR move to draw attention"--I thought of Talleyrand's famous reply on hearing of the death of the Turkish ambassador: "I wonder what he meant by that."

Power and Self-Restraint

In Taming American Power, which I first mentioned here, Stephen M. Walt treats American primacy as a national asset to be guarded so that it can be used judiciously to promote order in the international system. Self-restraint is one of the virtues that Walt promotes as a means of preserving the United States' influence in the world. This passage (from page 227) describes what might have been the fruits of a more restrained policy with respect to Iraq:

The benefits of self-restraint can be demonstrated by considering how much the United States would have gained had it followed this approach toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Had the Bush administration rejected preventive war in Iraq in March 2003, and chosen instead to continue the UN-mandated inspections process that was then underway, it would have scored a resounding diplomatic victory. The Bush team could have claimed--correctly--that the threat of U.S. military action had forced Saddam Hussein to resume inspections under new and more intrusive procedures. The UN inspectors would have determined that Iraq didn’t have any WMD after all. There was no reason for Bush and Company to rush to war, because Iraq’s decaying military capabilities were already contained and Saddam was incapable of aggressive action as long as the inspectors were on Iraqi soil. If Saddam had balked after a few months, then international support for his ouster would have been much easier to obtain, and in the meantime, the United States would have shown the world that it preferred to use force only as a last resort. This course would have kept Iraq isolated, kept the rest of the world on America’s side, undermined Osama bin Laden’s claim that the United States sought to dominate the Islamic world–and, incidentally, allowed the United States to focus its energies and attention on defeating al Qaeda. Even more important, this policy of “self-restraint” would have avoided war, thereby saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and keeping the United States out of the quagmire in which it became engulfed. The Bush team had all these benefits in its hands and squandered them by rushing headlong into war. Instead of demonstrating that U.S. primacy would be used with wisdom and restraint, they gave the rest of the world ample reason to worry about the asymmetry of power in Washington’s hands. Repairing the damage could take decades.

Walt, remember, is a realist and realists have a healthy respect for the role of power in international politics. It is, however, a very different understanding of power and its misuses from the one held by neoconservatives.

Incidentally, having recently finished Taming American Power, I recommend it unequivocally.

Iraq's Death Toll

According to research conducted by the Los Angeles Times and published on the front page of yesterday's paper, over 50,000 Iraqi deaths, mostly civilians, have been documented since the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Times examined records from Iraq's Health Ministry, which has collected information on war-related deaths from the nation's hospitals; from the Baghdad morgue; and from various other government agencies around the country. The documented total, although much higher than President Bush suggested last year, is still significantly lower than the actual number of war-related deaths due to the absence of statistics from Kurdish-controlled regions and obviously understated figures from some of Iraq's most violent provinces.

The Times article states:

The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.

However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

The documented cases show a country descending further into violence.

At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had been shot execution-style. Many showed signs of torture--drill holes, burns, missing eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled, beheaded, stabbed or beaten to death.

The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces.

In Just and Unjust Wars (p. 30), Michael Walzer writes,

When we say, war is hell, it is the victims of the fighting that we have in mind. In fact, then, war is the very opposite of hell in the theological sense, and is hellish only when the opposition is strict. For in hell, presumably, only those people suffer who deserve to suffer, who have chosen activities for which punishment is the appropriate divine response, knowing that this is so. But the greater number by far of those who suffer in war have made no comparable choice.

The chapter in which this passage appears is titled "The Crime of War." As Walzer makes clear, it is a serious matter to begin a war because, once it is begun, all manner of evil--much of it unpredictable and uncontrollable--is let loose. In Act IV, Scene 1 of Henry V, Williams puts it this way:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.

Of course, Williams speaks only of combatant casualties. How much more severe must the reckoning be with respect to innocents who die in war "if the cause be not good"?

Matt

Here's a video that ought to bring a smile to your face. (It might also make you envious.)

[Via Matthew Gross.]

Sunday in LA

Tomorrow--Sunday, June 25--the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles is sponsoring an event in connection with the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

The principal speakers will be Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis and author of the forthcoming Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror and James Yee, former Muslim chaplain for the U.S. Army at Guantanamo and author of For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.

The event runs from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. and will be held at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard. Admission and parking are free.

For more information, go here.

The Christian Right and Torture

The current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education includes an excerpt from a soon to be published book entitled Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament by Randall Balmer. This passage from the published excerpt provides anecdotal evidence for the proposition that the "Christian Right" is--sometimes, at least--neither:

The torture of human beings, God's creatures--some guilty of crimes, others not--has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation's capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.

Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the administration's use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear "fetal screams" could possibly countenance the use of torture.

Although I didn't really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party's cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.

I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. "It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush administration," the reply from the Family Research Council read, "that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data." The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that "torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings," but conceded that it had "not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject," even months after the revelations. Its president worried that the "anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration," thereby creating a public-relations challenge.

I'm sorry, but the use of torture under any circumstances is a moral issue, not a public-relations dilemma.

Balmer is right, although those who can't grasp the moral issue should understand that torture is also a public-relations nightmare for the United States.

WaPo on Guantanamo

The Washington Post points out some of the complexities involved in closing Guantanamo in this editorial published today. (I'd comment, but I'm off to Dodger Stadium.)

[Via Marty Lederman at Balkinization.]

USA Is Not Ghana Advance

Ghana 2, U S A 1

We now return you to your baseball season, already in progress.

[UPDATE: Apparently Ghana wanted it more than we did. You didn't see our government declare a national holiday so we could watch the match. Maybe I should have said, "We now return you to your work day, already in progress."]

That's Hot!

David Letterman, last night, with a bipartisan weather report:

• It was so hot today that President Bush met with European leaders just for the chilly reception.
• It was so hot today that Al Gore has a new movie out: An Inconvenient Rash.

Do These Methods Really Work?

Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman's review of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine is all over the blogosphere thanks to the fact that Gellman tells what has to be one of the book's most shocking tales. It's the story of the capture, rendition, and torture of Abu Zubaydah. Gellman writes:

Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3"--a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics--travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

. . .

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety--against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Cesare Beccaria, the eighteenth-century legal reformer, argued that a "sensitive but guiltless man will tend to admit guilt if he believes that, in that way, he can make the pain stop." Voltaire made a similar point: "It is as absurd to inflict torture to seek out truth as it is to order a duel to assess who is the culprit."

Apparently we need to relearn some of the lessons taught by Enlightenment philosophers.

Charles Taylor Update

Yesterday Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was flown to The Hague where he will be tried before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the facilities of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Taylor's trial on war crimes charges was moved to the Netherlands amid concerns about its potential impact on Sierra Leone and neighboring states.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone is not a part of the ICC. The temporary use of an ICC courtroom and holding cell is occurring under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by representatives of the two bodies in April. The agreement specifies, among other things, that the Special Court will pay the ICC for the use of its facilities.

Your America

This essay by Andrew Sullivan, which appeared in The Times of London back on June 4, is a powerful call to accountability for torture. It's also a useful corrective to claims of American exceptionalism. The only thing I would add to what Sullivan has to say is that in some measure all Americans bear responsibility for what has happened--and is still happening--because we have not insisted that our nation live up to its principles.

The Dark Side

Frontline aired a program last night on the origins and development of the "war on terrorism" entitled "The Dark Side." Although no new revelations are presented, the 90-minute documentary does an excellent job of putting into context information that has gradually been made public in recent years. In addition, eight former CIA employees are interviewed on camera. (Transcripts of all interviews conducted by the producers are available here.)

"The Dark Side" will be available for viewing on-line beginning tomorrow at the web site associated with the program.

Eruption

Via The Borowitz Report:

Elsewhere, scientists said that what was originally thought to be a volcanic eruption in the Philippines was actually Ann Coulter on vacation.

The Meaning of Ice

A comment left here suggests that An Inconvenient Truth "conveniently ignore[s] important data that don't fit with their desired conclusions." In support of this point, the commenter cites a study by Curt Davis, published in the journal Science, that indicates that the East Antarctic ice sheet increased in size from 1992 to 2003. This press release from the University of Missouri suggests that the commenter, like an oil-industry try-not-to-think tank that has recently aired misleading television ads, misrepresented Davis's research. (I include the press release in its entirety.)

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Recently, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. and partially funded by large oil companies, announced a national television campaign claiming that global warming is not causing ice sheets to shrink. Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia, says CEI is misrepresenting his previous research to back their claims.

"These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," Davis said. "They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public."

"The text of the CEI ad misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers and our current state of knowledge by selective referencing,"said Dr. Brooks Hanson, deputy editor, physical sciences, Science.

Prior to Davis' 2005 Science study, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that if global warming were occurring, increased recipitation in Antarctica's interior would likely result. In his study, Davis reported growth in interior East Antarctica. He said this growth was probably caused by an increase in precipitation.

Davis said that three points in his study unequivocally demonstrate the misleading aspect of the CEI ads.

- His study only reported growth for the East Antarctic ice sheet, not the entire Antarctic ice sheet.

- Growth of the ice sheet was only noted on the interior of the ice sheet and did not include coastal areas. Coastal areas are known to be losing mass, and these losses could offset or even outweigh the gains in the interior areas.

- The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming.

"It has been predicted that global warming might increase the growth of the interior ice sheet due to increased precipitation," Davis said. "All three of these points were noted in our study and ignored by CEI in a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public."

It is worth noting (and I'll gladly take the opportunity to do so) that I should have avoided the term "global warming" in this post. The better term--because anthropogenic effects on climate are expected to produce some areas of local cooling within an overall environment of warming--is "climate change." For example, a collapse of the thermohaline conveyor--a possibility examined in a 2003 Department of Defense (Office of Net Assessment) study entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security (available all over the Internet), would turn London into a decidedly frigid destination, not the tropical vacation spot envisioned in the USA Today series I mentioned yesterday.

Global Warming and Your Next Vacation

I saw An Inconvenient Truth about a week ago in a theater just half a block from the NRDC's energy-efficient office in Santa Monica. It's well worth seeing. Think Al Gore with passion . . . and a PowerPoint presentation worthy of Robert Langdon.

I was reminded of a series in USA Today during the week of May 28 entitled "Making Sense of Global Warming." Here's the summary of the series (as published in USA Today on Tuesday, May 30):

Wednesday:
What will the future hold for the USA if warming continues?
Experts examine how changes in the climate are affecting outdoor sports such as surfing, skiing and fishing.
Animals, birds and fish are falling victim.

Thursday:
Corporate America is embracing the anti-warming cause. A look at the evolution in corporate thinking, motivated by economic effects of climate change and new markets for "green" products.
How one Boulder, Colo. family changed its home and lifestyle to make a difference

Friday:
Across the planet, global warming could change life as we know it. In less than 100 years, Venice and Amsterdam could be under water. London could be a tropical paradise.
Celebrities join the crusade on TV and at the movies.
Worried ski resports are cutting emissions.
Warming could redraw wine country's boundaries.

Let's see if I've got this straight: The primary problem global warming presents, according to USA Today, is that it will change a lot of people's vacation plans.

I suspect the members of AOSIS don't see the issue in quite the same way.

Obligatory World Cup Post

Before I head down to Pacific Palisades for the big Malibu-Pali baseball game--Coach Dave Buss and his Malibu team are undefeated through four games in the American Legion season, but Pali is a tough opponent--I thought I'd post my obligatory observations about the World Cup. Apparently, all bloggers are required to comment on the World Cup regardless of whether or not they know anything about soccer. Believing that baseball is life (and life is baseball), all I can do is offer are a few random comments about the World Cup:

• Switzerland defeated Togo, 2-0, today. Togo is now 0-2, which is too bad because some of us were hoping the 2006 World Cup would include at least one Togo Party.
• Ejections in soccer, as anyone who watched the U.S.-Italy match on Saturday knows, are much less interesting than ejections in baseball. In the former, a guy wearing shorts with black socks blows a whistle and pulls a red card out of his shirt pocket to eject the offending player. In the latter, the ejection occurs when a guy who looks like a Marine Corps drill instructor yells "Yer outta here!" while throwing his fist in the general direction of the stands. And in soccer, the ejected player must confine his emotional display to a sad look combining understated hand gestures and facial contortions. Baseball ejections tend to be more verbal.
• The absence of a clock (witness the Cal-State Fullerton comeback against Georgia Tech on Saturday in the College World Series and, on the same day, Oakland's 17-inning win over the Dodgers) makes baseball superior to soccer--or basketball or hockey for that matter. [UPDATE: The Cal State-Fullerton-Georgia Tech game was yesterday (Sunday), not Saturday. The baseball, soccer, and basketball--I didn't watch any hockey--all started running together on me.]
• It's worth noting that 20,000 fans, almost all of them Korean-Americans, watched Saturday's match between South Korea and France at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Globalization, no? (France and South Korea tied, 1-1.)
• Have I mentioned that there are no ties in baseball?
• Soccer fans sing better than baseball fans. I've got to concede that point.

Anyway, I hope those of you who care about such things are enjoying the World Cup. Forza Azzurri!

[ANOTHER UPDATE: Malibu defeated Pacific Palisades, 12-1.]

Leaving Guantanamo

What is it like for reporters trying to get information about what is happening in Guantanamo? Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times writes,

In the best of times, covering Guantanamo means wrangling with a Kafkaesque
bureaucracy, with logistics so nonsensical that they turn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour day, with hostile escorts who seem to think you're in league with Al Qaeda, and with the dispiriting reality that you're sure to encounter more iguanas than war-on-terror suspects.

In the worst of times--this past week, for example--those quotidian discomforts can be compounded by an invasion of mating crabs skittering into your dormitory, a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an unceremonious expulsion to Miami on a military plane, safety-belted onto whatever seat is available. In this case, that seat was the toilet.

Democracies are not supposed to treat reporters like adversaries. Doing so when the subject of their reporting is Guantanamo is guaranteed to raise even more suspicions about U.S. policies in the so-called "War on Terror." Again, it is time to close Guantanamo.

Outsourcing Plagiarism?

Daniel Nexon, over at Duck of Minerva, has a great post about a good, old-fashioned American company trying to protect American students from offshore paper mills.

Vital Interests

"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."

--Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949)

Close Guantanamo

It's time. Long past time, in fact. And not because of last week's suicides, but because the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo is both immoral and impolitic.

UK Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Harman told the BBC on Sunday the camp should be moved to the US or shut down: "If it's perfectly legal and there's nothing going wrong there--well, why don't they have it in America and then the American court system can supervise it?"

Good question.

The use of Guantanamo as a sort of legal black hole has done enough to tarnish the United States' reputation, but statements by U.S. government officials all too often make matters worse. As an Australian news program reported, the response to the suicides at Guantanamo from former Pepperdine School of Law professor and current Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy was quite impolitic:

COLLEEN GRAFFY: They don't value their own life, and they certainly don't value ours, and they use suicide bombings as a tactic to further their jihadi cause. There were means and methods for protestation, and certainly taking their own lives was not necessary. But it certainly is a good PR move to draw attention.

MICHAEL ROWLAND: What makes the remarks even more glaring is that Colleen Graffy's job at the State Department is formulating strategies to improve America's image overseas, especially in Islamic countries.

In Taming American Power, Stephen Walt notes that the deligitimization of American policies can pose problems for the United States' efforts to act in the world. But surely perceptions of legitimacy can't really matter when the United States is powerful enough to impose its will on other states, can they? Walt states (p. 176):

This view is an article of faith among advocates of a muscular U.S. foreign policy that pays scant heed to the opinions of others. It is also dangerously shortsighted. As many commentators have noted, even the world's strongest superpower cannot go it alone in every arena. In virtually every important policy realm, in fact--international trade, counterterrorism, human rights, nonproliferation, dealing with failed states or global environmental problems, and so on--effective solutions will require global cooperation.

The world pays attention when American officials speak, but it also watches carefully what the United States does. It's time to close Guantanamo.

Fighting Evil

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

--Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (1942)

Taming American Power

Along with Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God and Jonathan D. Spence's Mao Zedong (a brief Penguin Lives biography), I'm currently reading Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt. It is a very good analysis of the problems posed by the United States' post-Cold War position in the world. It reminds me that, for all of its limitations, realism has much to recommend it as a framework for the analysis of foreign policy. Walt's book is also a reminder, however, that modern realism involves much more than power politics. It borrows a good deal, in fact, from the post-World War II liberal internationalism with which it was engaged in the "Great Debate" of the 1950s and 1960s. Power politics may be central to Walt's analysis, but questions about American values appear over and over again in the book.

More Questions about Zarqawi

In a comment here, there are several questions about Zarqawi's death and the reaction it provoked (or, perhaps, failed to provoke). The first question is, what difference does it make whether Zarqawi was al-Qaeda or not?

Here's what difference it makes: The United States entered the war in Iraq under false pretenses. (To call it an "intelligence failure"--as some persist in doing--is to ignore inconvenient facts just as the Bush administration did when the choice for war was made.) One of the falsehoods was that the U.S. would be fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (and in large measure as a result of operations there), al-Qaeda became something quite different than it had been prior to 9/11. Most experts believe that al-Qaeda became more significant as an idea--an inspiration of sorts for jihadists--than as an organization. (See this September 2004 post.) It spawned imitators and, under the pressure of American military operations against it, it metastasized. It would have been more honest of the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 to have said that, thanks to American successes in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda no longer exists as the kind of threat it once was. To have said that, however, would have been to abandon one of the secondary rationales for the war in Iraq. (The WMD threat was always primary.) It also would have necessitated more candor about the real nature of global terrorism in the post-9/11 world. It is not, after all, very comforting to think that our successes against al-Qaeda may have made the threat of global terrorism more amorphous and, consequently, more difficult to address.

So what difference does it make? Quite a lot if the truth matters where the war in Iraq is concerned. Supporters of the Bush administration (and the administration itself, of course) needed to call Zarqawi a high-level al-Qaeda operative in order to promote the fiction that the United States went into Iraq to fight al-Qaeda. Supporters of Zarqawi (and Zarqawi himself) needed to adopt the al-Qaeda brand in order to inflate their own importance. The evidence we have available indicates that Zarqawi called his organization "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" because he was inspired by bin Laden's organization, not because he was part of it. Zarqawi was a knockoff, like a "Rolex" watch manufactured in China.

The second and third questions are these: "Why is it that those who oppose the war reflexively downplay any news of progress? Can't you oppose the war and also admit when there is progress and be glad for it?"

Just as bad things can happen in a just war, good things can happen in an unjust war. It is a good thing that Zarqawi is gone, just as it is a good thing that Saddam Hussein sits in prison. It is a good thing that the U.S. transferred sovereignty to the Iraqis, that the Iraqis have had elections with widespread participation, and that a government has been installed. (This is not presented as an exhaustive list of good things that have happened in Iraq, of course.) Those of us who oppose the war are very much aware of the successes that have occurred along the way. Every opponent of the war whom I have talked to or whose views I have read hopes that, in spite of the problems with the war, Iraq will become peaceful and democratic, that is, that this enterprise, however misbegotten, will succeed. Having said that, there are a wide variety of views (even among those who initially supported the war) regarding what the United States should do now. Those who support an immediate withdrawal have concluded that withdrawal is simply the lesser evil. One can certainly disagree with this prescription, but one cannot honestly conclude that those who support withdrawal are hoping for failure.

It is a good thing that Zarqawi will never again plot, propagandize, or kill. But does his death represent a turning point in the war? Not even the Bush administration is making that claim this time around.

If I, like many other opponents of this war, fail to express much gladness over Zarqawi's death, it may be due to a certain skepticism regarding the ultimate significance of the event. That skepticism, sadly, is a consequence of paying attention to what the Bush administration has said all along about Iraq. (Remember "Mission Accomplished"?)

In The City of God, Augustine argued that peace "is the purpose of waging war. . . . What, then, men want in war is that it should end in peace." Killing a terrorist such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a war may be a necessary evil, but it is an evil nonetheless. (See On Killing by Dave Grossman for some understanding of what killing does to the one who kills.) The only thing any of us should be glad about in war is the peace that ends it.

Questions about Zarqawi

New York Times reporters Dexter Filkins and John Burns seem to have some of the same questions I had after seeing the photograph of Zarqawi and hearing that the house where he had died was hit by two 500-pound bombs:

On Saturday morning, the bodies were gone, including the body of a girl. The rubble had been picked over for the most useful bits of intelligence. Even the crater [originally 40 feet wide and deep] had been mostly bulldozed and filled in.

Along with the scraps, it was mostly questions that remained.

Chief among them was how Mr. Zarqawi, the terrorist leader killed Wednesday in the airstrike, could have survived for even a few minutes after the attack, as American officers say he did, when everything else around him was obliterated. Concrete blocks, walls, a fence, tin cans, palm trees, a washing machine: everything at the Hibhib scene was shredded or blown to pieces.

It seemed puzzling, too, given the destruction and the condition of the other bodies, how Mr. Zarqawi's head and upper body--shown on televisions across the world--could have remained largely intact.

This, it seems to me, is more a matter of curiosity than something that possesses great significance, but it will be interesting to see what additional information is forthcoming, particularly after the autopsy has been completed.

Jay Leno on the GOP Agenda

"Republican leaders say that after illegal immigration and gay marriage, the next issue President Bush will tackle: flag burning. . . . So if you're an illegal immigrant who's crossing our border to burn the flag at your gay wedding, we got your number."

"Do we need a constitutional amendment? Is that the most important issue facing the country today--gay marriage? We were off last week, so apparently we must have caught bin Laden."

Zarqawi's Death

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the U.S. Government claimed was al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, has been killed by American forces near Baquba. According to the military briefing, Zarqawi was killed by bombs dropped by American F-16s. An eyewitness, however, maintained that a firefight occurred in or around Zarqawi's safe house before the bombs were dropped. Furthermore, a photo of Zarqawi's face showed remarkably little trauma for someone whose house had been targeted by two 500-pound bombs.

More important than how Zarqawi died is what difference his death will make. Here's Juan Cole's assessment:

There is no evidence of operational links between [Zarqawi's] Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. Leaders are significant and not always easily replaced. But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don't expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.

Even Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that Zarqawi's death would not end the insurgency: "Given the nature of the terrorist networks, really a network of networks, the death of Zarqawi, while enormously important, will not mean the end of all violence in that country."

Meanwhile, in a poll conducted immediately before the announcement of Zarqawi's death, President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq was given its lowest approval rating yet.

Bolton vs. Brown

UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown has drawn the ire of John Bolton over a speech delivered to the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress Security and Peace Initiative yesterday in New York City.

Brown's speech was presented " as a sincere and constructive critique of US policy towards the UN by a friend and admirer." The central point of the critique was that "the prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable." After noting Government Accountability Office and Rand Corporation studies that have found UN peacekeeping to be a cost-effective means of promoting international stability, Brown stated, "Yet for many policymakers and opinion leaders in Washington, let alone the general public, the roles I have described are hardly believed or, where they are, remain discreetly underplayed. To acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics at home." That, of course, is exactly right.

Does the UN matter? Brown argues that it does:

The US--like every nation, strong and weak alike--is today beset by problems that defy national, inside-the-border solutions: climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, migration, the management of the global economy, the internationalization of drugs and crime, the spread of diseases such as HIV and avian flu. Today’s new national security challenges basically thumb their noses at old notions of national sovereignty. Security has gone global, and no country can afford to neglect the global institutions needed to manage it.

Kofi Annan has proposed a restructuring of the UN to respond to these new challenges with three legs: development, security and human rights supported, like any good chair, by a fourth leg, reformed management. That is the UN we want to place our bet on. But for it to work, we need the US to support this agenda--and support it not just in a whisper but in a coast to coast shout that pushes back the critics domestically and wins over the sceptics internationally. America’s leaders must again say the UN matters.

On the whole, Brown's analysis is on target, which is probably why Secretary-General Kofi Annan declined to distance himself from the speech as Ambassador Bolton demanded. Not surprisingly, Bolton ("Ann Coulter with a moustache," according to a comment here) was left fulminating in a way that very precisely demonstrated Brown's main points.

Haditha, Briefly

I've had little opportunity to post lately, but the matter of possible war crimes committed by Americans in Iraq deserves some attention. For now, this brief editorial from The Nation is a good place to start regarding Haditha. I hope to have a chance to say more on this subject soon.

Memory, Memorial, and Myth

When those who can remember have all died, we must move from memory to memorial. Memorial is the institutionalization of memory. It succeeds to the extent that it provides symbols that can call to mind what cannot possibly be remembered (because it was never experienced by those left to "remember"). But, whether deliberately or not, the symbols that are designed to create memories of things we have not experienced often engage myths. That is, memorials often mythologize their subjects.

This is an issue for theologians, certainly, but it is also an issue for political scientists--and their assistants, the historians. It is not enough to know--to call to mind--what happened on the Field of Blackbirds in 1389; one also needs to know what has been made of the battle in modern Serbian consciousness. It is not enough to know something of what transpired aboard United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001; one must also know how that event is being mythologized in the United States.

I'm late with this commentary on Memorial Day, but James Carroll was not, and he touched on some of these things I've been thinking about.

What Is History?

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."

--Konrad Adenauer (Chancellor of West Germany, 1949-1963)

Sgt. Cardona's Trial

U.S. Army Sgt. Santos Cardona is currently on trial at Fort Meade, Maryland for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice committed in his role as a dog handler during interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Hina Shamsi, an attorney for Human Rights First, is blogging the court martial here.

AI's Annual Report

Amnesty International Report 2006: The State of the World's Human Rights has been released. Among other findings, the document states that concerns about terrorism are being used by governments worldwide to justify human rights abuses. The organization noted in particular that the United States' outsourcing of military and intelligence functions to private companies "has helped create virtually rules-free zones sanctioned with the American flag and firepower," in the words of Larry Cox, AIUSA's new executive director.

The full report is available using the link above.

Frontline: Sex Slaves

The PBS program Frontline tonight aired a documentary on sex trafficking in Ukraine, Moldova, and Turkey. The personal stories of women who have been trafficked combined with footage from hidden cameras make this a very powerful report.

Unlike some Frontline stories, "Sex Slaves" is not available for viewing online. There is, however, a very good web site associated with the report located here.

The Year's Best (So Far)

Since I seem to be doing more reading than blogging lately, I thought I would post a list of books. Here--one per month--are the best books related to international politics that I've read this year.

May 2006
The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs
Madeleine Albright

April 2006
The Shield & the Cloak: The Security of the Commons
Gary Hart

March 2006
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
Moisés Naím

February 2006
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
George Packer

January 2006
Lawless World
Philippe Sands

Without a Trace of Irony

The president, responding to a question from an audience member, made an interesting statement in Chicago on Monday:

Bush said he would remind Western Hemisphere nations such as [Venezuela and Bolivia] that "respect for property rights and human rights is essential," that "meddling in other elections ... to achieve a short-term objective is not in the interests of the neighborhood," and that the United States expects other nations to stand against corruption and for transparent governance. "Let me just put it bluntly: I'm concerned about the erosion of democracy in" Venezuela and Bolivia, he said.

Bush did not address the recent recommendation of the UN Committee Against Torture that the United States close down its detention facilities in Guantanamo. Nor did he address the legality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq or its effects on "the interests of the neighborhood." He also failed to discuss the indictment and continuing investigation of members of his own administration as well as the corruption charges against Republican members of Congress.

But he did put it bluntly to the Venezuelans and the Bolivians.

Good News from Iraq

Democracies require more than individual freedom in order to thrive. They require social capital as well. Social capital--the complex network of interactions (particularly those that build trust) existing within a society--is the subject of Robert Putnam's well-known book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Social capital, Putnam suggests, is closely connected to expectations of reciprocity. A society thrives, and trust is built, if people come to expect that their contributions to the general welfare will be matched by those contributions made by others. I'll volunteer to coach a Little League team and feel good about doing it in part because I know that there are others who are volunteering to coach youth soccer teams and still others who are heading up the PTA or volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club and so on. There is, as an aspect of social capital, a norm of generalized reciprocity, not the form of reciprocity that requires a specific response to the initial contribution.

Churches, non-profit organizations, volunteer associations, and other manifestations of what we sometimes call "civil society" are important contributors to the social capital that is so important in a democracy. For this reason, the report that "now, more than three years after the American invasion, the outlines of a nascent civil society are taking shape" in Iraq comes as very welcome news.

According to the New York Times,

Since 2003 the [Iraqi] government has registered 5,000 private organizations, including charities, human rights groups, medical assistance agencies and literacy projects. Officials estimate that an additional 7,000 groups are working unofficially. The efforts show that even as violence and sectarian hatred tear Iraq's mixed cities apart, a growing number of Iraqis are trying to bring them together.

These private organizations are creating what Putnam calls "bridging social capital." While this is by no means the only thing necessary to create a democracy, it is significant. Perhaps even more encouraging is the fact that a robust civil society is something that the United States cannot impose on Iraq. It has to come from within, and apparently it is.

Of course, now we need to get those who are not interested in building Iraq's social capital to stop killing those who are.

The Death of Yugoslavia

The title of this post is borrowed from an outstanding documentary produced by the BBC in 1995. The documentary was, however, released much too early to chronicle the final death of Yugoslavia.

States sometimes die a very slow death. In the case of Yugoslavia, the process of dissolution has taken fourteen years. However, the final step in the process may have occurred today as the people of Montenegro voted on a referendum to dissolve the federal union with Serbia.

Yugoslavia was created in the aftermath of World War I as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, in the midst of separatist violence, the state was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (that is, the Kingdom of the South Slavs). Military defeat led to the dissolution of the Kingdom during World War II, but a socialist Yugoslavia was established after the triumph over fascism in Eastern Europe.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, ruled by Marshal Tito until his death in 1980, brought together six ethnically-based republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Within Serbia, there were two autonomous regions--Kosovo and Vojvodina. Tito is generally credited with keeping separatist tendencies in check, in large measure because he was an effective dictator. In 1990-91, a combination of economic problems, resurgent nationalism, political manuevering, and many other factors led to a series of secessions by the constituent republics. Following the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, all that was left of Yugoslavia was a federation combining Serbia and Montenegro. The name "Yugoslavia" was dropped in 2001 as Serbia and Montenegro loosened their political ties.

Today, if at least 55 percent of Montenegrins voted for independence (as projections suggest they did), the last of Yugoslavia's constituent republics will have opted for secession from the old Serbian-dominated state.

Teaching Iraqis How to Use Guns

"More than three years after the invasion, Iraq's future remains murky. Both in that country and in America, there is a sense that the coalition military--by its very presence--may be doing as much to unite and sustain the insurgency as to defeat it. Even training the Iraqi military and police could backfire if those forces do not give their loyalty to leaders who represent the whole country. There is a fine line, but a significant one, between creating a true national army and just teaching a lot of people who don't like each other how to use guns."

--Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, p. 182

A "National Surveillance State"

Jack Balkin explains how the Bush administration's approach to the "war on terror" (including the use of torture, the suspension of habeas rights, and NSA surveillance) is creating a parallel legal universe outside the limits of our traditional civil liberties. It's something that all Americans should care about--not just the 71 percent who no longer support Bush.