Category: Politics

Juan Cole posts a lengthy analysis of the latest story in the London Times about US and British intentions concerning Iraq.

“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council.”

Hence the need for extensive PR work:

“Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.”

The bottom line: the British government had agreed to support regime change, knew that this was contrary to international law, and was prepared to engage in a PR campaign to convince people that there was justification for the war. And all of this time Bush and Blair were publicly claiming that they were doing everything in their power to avoid war. The documents prove that they were lying. Even if you supported the war, you should be angry about that.

UPDATE: There’s an excellent summary, and a list of links to blogs discussing this further, at Freiheit und Wissen. Following one link, Stephen Bates concludes: “Think this is not much? I speak as one who lived through Watergate: at a comparable point in that story, it didn’t seem like much, either. But this is moving much, much faster. Pass the popcorn…” (Thanks Majikthise.)

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that: “An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge’s unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to ‘non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.’ The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple’s divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.”

What’s really bizarre is that Bradford normally hears only criminal cases. Apparently he chose to get involved in this domestic matter because he read a “confidential report” (yeah, right) from a counseling bureau. “‘There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones’ lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages,’ the bureau said in its report.” So we’re not just dealing with a constitutionally-challenged judge….

While the U.S.A. is getting its knickers in a twist over gay marriage, children’s TV depicting a kid with “two mommies”, and books by gay authors, DER SPIEGEL is reporting that “there is a very real possibility that Germany’s next government will be a coalition between a woman — who will likely become Germany’s first woman chancellor — and a gay man”. Right on!

A less sanguine, and probably realistic, assessment of the filibuster compromise….
(Via Majikthise.)

Professor Stephen Bainbridge (a law professor at UCLA) points out, correctly, that “The filibuster is a profoundly conservative tool. It slows change by allowing a resolute minority to delay – to stand athwart history shouting stop. It ensures that change is driven not ‘merely by temporary advantage or popularity’ but by a substantial majority.” That, certainly, is conservatism as I understood it – the conservatism of Burke (who would probably have felt that today’s neoconservatives have more in common with Jacobins than with true conservatism).

But Bainbridge’s key point is this: “BTW, any honest conservative must admit that the only reason we’re having this debate over filibusters is because of Orin Hatch’s changes to the Judiciary Committee rules and procedures on matters like blue slips, hearings, and so on, which deprived the Democrats of the tactics that the GOP used to bottle up a lot of Clinton nominees in committee.”

Of coure this merely provokes the hard right into accusing him of being a traitor and allying himself with “Demo-Rats”. Yet another example of what Andrew Sullivan has described as the tension between “Conservatives of doubt” and “Conservatives of faith”.

(Via Sully – to whom I offer best wishes – see Me and my virus.)

On one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, the (semi-annual) abortion debate reared its head, and one participant asked, rather aggressively, why people wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare”. Why “rare”, he wondered. If it’s not immoral…. This pushed a button for me, and I replied as follows:
Because not all issues are simple dichotomies: yes/no, black/white, good/bad. One of the main causes of conflict around social issues, issues of conscience, moral issues in general is that there are some people (often the loudest) who refuse to recognize this.

Everybody except for the sociopath or the simpleton has personal opinions that conflict with one another. Aggregate people into a community, into a society, and the same will be true. People make trade-offs, choose the lesser of two evils, try to split the difference, whatever. Sometimes it’s obvious, a zero-sum game, or a mutually-exclusive choice. Sometimes it’s a question of log-rolling: I need your help on X, so I’ll give up some of my Y. In all of these cases, reasonable people (i.e. not sociopaths, not simpletons) will recognize and feel regret for the fact that their choices are less than ideal.

All of these considerations play out in the case of abortion. The first person I ever knew who’d had an abortion was a fellow student at Essex, back in 1970. Abusive father, impoverished background, she’d performed miracles to get to university, to get away from home. Condom broke. (No, it wasn’t me. I was just a neighbour and friend in need.) Her choice was simple: get a first trimester abortion, or (almost certainly) drop out of school. (Even carrying the kid to term and getting it adopted would have been too much – she was on the edge.) She chose to have the abortion, toughed it out. A few months later, a group of us dropped acid for the first time. I had a great trip, but she spent the whole 8 hours sobbing, mourning her lost baby. She got through school, got a good degree, married, raised a family, everything worked out. But OF COURSE I wish she hadn’t had to go through the abortion. Contraception should be so ubiquitous and reliable that nobody has to face the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.
Anyway, I wanted to share that.

From today’s London Observer: Pope ‘obstructed’ sex abuse inquiry: “Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had ‘obstructed justice’ after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church’s investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret…. It asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger… [and] was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone who [said] ‘In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded.’“

One might have reasonably expected that such a letter would emphasize that the bishops should cooperate fully with the police and prosecutors in accordance with local laws. Apparently some Vatican officials still have the medieval attitude that the church is above the law.

Many of Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed pieces for the NYT have been silly or superficial, but today he hit a home run with Bush Disarms, Unilaterally: “At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened – enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before… what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs. We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry…. we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism… Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million… the National Innovation Initiative was virtually ignored by the White House.”

And the punch line:
“It’s as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.”

Exactly. But what do you expect if you elect a know-nothing, born-again, failed oilman? And by the way: this blog piece was brought to you by way of the Internet, created with DARPA tax dollars. And don’t you forget it.

In response to Ideology, American style, Alec weighed in with“ok, here’s a poser for you and jeff: ‘death penalty‘ – in your enlightened self-interest, or not?”

I find this an easy one. Setting aside the moral issues, which are not significant in the utilitarian calculus implied by enlightened self-interest, I find that there are three stances to be considered:

• As a general member of society, I find that the death penalty is uneconomic (wastes my taxes), and offers no added societal protection (crime statistics). Since all human systems seem to be fallible, mechanisms for correction should be built in; the death penalty fails this test. It demonstrably distorts the policing and legal systems in countries where it is used, especially “equal protection” provisions. It impedes police work, since convicted criminals are likely to withhold information on additional crimes for fear of execution.
• As a victim, or someone close to a victim of a capital crime, the death penalty offers me nothing but crude revenge. It will not restore the dead to life, or offer practical compensation. Revenge seems an inequitable basis on which to design a legal system. For example, some victims’ families might object to the death penalty: should the penalty depend on the whim of each family? In any case, enlightened self-interest is not generally assumed to include purely visceral satisfaction.
• The final stance to be considered is if I, or someone close to me, were accused of a capital crime. (Even if I believe myself incapable of such a crime, I must consider the possibility of a wrongful accusation.) In all cases, the rational thing for me to do is to oppose capital punishment. Even if I were in fact guilty, and believed that I deserved the death penalty, I could always kill myself. I have no reasonable basis for imposing this preference on others who might be guilty, and none for imposing it on those wrongly accused.

That seems to cover it. In addition (and not surprisingly) I view the death penalty as morally indefensible. Just say no.

Earlier today, my colleague Jeff Kesselman posted a piece in which he despaired of the myopia of many Americans; of the way in which, at best, they can’t see where their interests lie, and at worst actively work against them. He wrote:

Not long ago I had someone look at me in all seriousness and say, “You don’t have kids. Why on earth do you want to pay for public schools?” Now there are all kinds of good reasons for having top quality schools. Reasons in my self-interest having to do with the health of the American economy, our ability to globally compete, and the ability of the masses to do any kind of justice to this thing we call democracy. For this person though I realized a more down to earth explanation was going to be necessary and I simply said, “If your kid has a good job, he won’t steal my stereo.”

On reading this, I was reminded of the fascinating piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine: the first in a series of articles by Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled In the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I’m going to quote at greater length than usual, because the online copy is for subscribers only; I encourage you to pick up a print edition. Here he writes about visiting the Republican Convention in New York last summer; the emphasis is mine:

These people who say ‘values matter more’; these activists for whom the struggle against Darwin is a sacred cause that should be argued in the schools; this blue-collar man from Buffalo to whom I explain that the promise of the current president to reduce federal taxes will have the automatic effect of impoverishing his native city even more, who replies that he couldn’t care less, because what matters to him is the problem posed by inflation in a quasi-Soviet state. These are men and women who are ready to let the questions that affect them most directly take second place to matters of principle that — in the case, for instance, of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts — do not have, and never will have, any effect on their concrete existence. Aren’t they reacting as ideologues would, according to criteria that have to be called ideological?… What’s the matter with Kansas? Since when has politics stopped obeying the honest calculation of self-interest and personal ambition? How can knowledgeable, reasonable, pragmatic men work for their own servitude, thinking they’re struggling for their freedom? That, Thomas Frank, is what is called ideology. That is precisely the mechanism that La Boétie and Karl Marx described in Europe, which we, alas, have experienced only too often. Now it’s your turn, friends. And as we say in France, À votre santé!—To your very good health!

What kind of person could think that a couple of gay men getting married in Provincetown, MA, was more important than putting books in the school library and cops on the streets? The same species that can’t understand why a childless man would support public education, I guess.