The real case for controlling peoples' lives

John Hawkins has a shockingly argued case for the drug war on Human Events that I think more plainly than anything I've read, lately, illustrates the arrogance of those who limit peoples' freedom in the name of looking after their lives.

In Defense of the Drug War

His closing argument really illustrates how morally repugnant his case is:

"That's why once, way back when William Bennett was the drug czar, he responded like so to a caller on the Larry King show who told him that he should 'behead the damn drug dealers.'

'I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible,' he said. 'Legally, it's difficult. But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don't have any problem with that at all.'

Bennett was right then, he's right now, and my guess is that most parents, upon finding out that someone was peddling drugs to their kid, would agree with him. Since that's the case, do we really want the federal government to take over the role of a pusher and get our kids hooked on drugs to make a profit? No, we don't."

It never surprises how the less people respect the freedom of others, the more they will rationalize anything in the name of their cause.

Bill Bennett and John Hawkins don't even find the most minute of moral qualms with the idea of beheading those who traffic in any of the various substances that they don't want people to use.

Because moral and political self-righteousness become the perpetual rationalization for every form of ugliness that their advocates favor.

The real case for controlling people's lives is because they can't do a fuckin' thing about it, whether they wanted to or not.

And that's really how John Hawkins and Bill Bennett and a whole load of conservatives and liberals think that life should be.

John Kennedy challenged us: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

His Democratic and Republican contemporaries tell us: "Whether you fuckin' like it or not, we're in charge."

Inspiring.

Love,
Ben

Too pussy to admit that we might be wrong

You know the worst part? Of all this rationalization of pressuring and bullying to impose our will and get our way?

Is that it is THE rationalization for terrorism.

You don't think Hamas and Hezbollah don't think that they're killing innocent Israelis to create a credible threat and pressure a better land deal for Palestinians?

You don't think that the Weathermen or Black September were created to enforce various left wing agendas?

You don't think that the KKK and many neo-nazis aren't concerned with terrorizing minority groups and putting the fear of God in them?

You really think that all that terrorism is really so different than the efforts to bully and pressure and otherwise impose our will on one another?

Yeah, terrorists do too. They think others are just too pussy and hypocritical to acknowledge that they do the same thing, just with a less credible threat.

And so it all goes on and on and on and on and on into perpetuity. Terrorist and other radical groups perpetually get cover from the self-righteous associations and impositions among moderate folks.

Maybe they're right. Maybe we are too pussy. Because there is definitely one place in life where everyone, apparently, is too pussy. Too pussy to admit when we might be wrong.

Love,
Ben

The need for thoughtful discourse

Joe Nye has a blog, it turns out, with the Huffington Post. And he writes another excellent article on the discourse about the Iraq war that I found myself nodding with.

Our Impoverished Discourse

Money shot, as Andrew Sullivan would say:

"If Republicans and Democrats continue to ignore soft power and our public discussion is limited to a competition about who can sound tougher, our truncated debate will remain like the sound of one hand clapping. America's current partisan atmosphere has ossified our foreign policy debate. What the nation needs is a discourse that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and debates a smart strategy to integrate them."

Joe's argument, that Democrats and Republicans need to be smarter with power rather than tougher and that our discourse should be about how to use soft and hard power to tackle the situation in Iraq and other policy objectives, is a welcome and important one.

Joe opposes a surge, which I think is a mistake, and seriously humbles any sense I have that anyone really knows what will improve the situation in Iraq (I still support a surge, at this point, because I think Frederick Kagan's arguments on the matter, that a pull-out will undermine the necessary security for Iraq to negotiate a political settlement, are the strongest I have encountered).

And as I watch the most brilliant policy minds in the world disagree about how to best approach this situation in Iraq, I think, "Why would we think, given the diversity of opinion on something as serious and as clearly a matter of goverance of any question that we face, that somehow we have divined the ability that has eluded every past generation to know exactly what matters upon which we should force, pressure, repress, and otherwise impose our will?"

We don't, is the answer. What we maintain is the hubris to believe that we do, and the shortsightedness to think that doing so will have no impact on the credibility, the soft power, of governance.

Politics and policy in Iraq

It is so refreshing to just read something and nod, every once in awhile.

Grand Delusion

Robert Kagan cuts through the political posturing pretty well in this piece.

It is very strange to watch liberals clamor for an intervention in Darfur, Sudan and simultaneously set up Iraq for a similar fate with an American withdrawal.

I'm pretty sure that they are doing so both because they're giving up on Iraq (which, as Kagan argues here, is a recipe for more headaches and more human slaughter to deal with later, and lots of people dying, unnecessarily in the meantime), and more nepharious, as Kagan argues in this piece, because they're positioning politically, because, truth be told, they don't really feel much responsibility for Iraq. Iraq is President Bush's problem, as far as many liberals are concerned, I am convinced. Failure in Iraq has an easy target for blame. So who really cares if we fail there, they reason at some level. It's not our problem anyway. Or, like Carl Levin, they have become convinced that the only thing that stands between them and a sustainable security situation in Iraq is pressure from America. In Levin's distorted worldview, it is people like him who have made the world safe and good. If it weren't for his pressure or the pressure of liberals, reason Levin and millions of liberal activists and politicians, this world would be in a right bloody mess, as Michael Palin says in Monty Python's Life of Brian. It nevered occurs to them that perhaps their ideas might be persuasive, and, more importantly, that sometimes, they may not.

It's so sad to me to find out how little people really care about the important priorities, so wrapped are they are in smaller priorities. Petty partisanship trumps a more thoughtful Iraq policy discussion, because so many people are more interested in proving that they have the right ideology and the President has the wrong ideology, and duking it out, politically, legally, and rhetorically.

And the tragedy of the whole thing is that noone has the right ideology, anymore than the foolish notion that Protestants were better than Catholics or vice versa in the civil wars in Great Britain.

Americans have given up on Iraq resolving its civil war, I imagine, because Americans have given up on finding any authentic resolution to their own civil war, their political civil war between liberals and conservatives, who look just as foolish as Sunnis and Shias who fight one another over who has the right ethnicity or religious affiliation.

It is definitely possible and likely that we will get over our foolish squabbling and engage in a policy discussion that is more thoughtful and engaged and address one another's concerns with a collaborative commitment to success in Iraq or wherever else we must work together.

But, right now, so many people seem more committed to exactly what Robert Kagan is writing about, here: singing to their choirs and hoping that the gods strike down their political opponents and solve this whole Iraq mess for them.

And the sad thing is that their choirs don't mean shit, pardon my French. Choirs for the political churches of liberalism and conservatism are just like choirs everywhere, singing for you what you want to hear and never challening your doctrine.

These days, I belong to both churches and no church, at all, simultaneously, forever frustrated with how every churchgoer puts on heirs and makes all kinds of effort to prove just how pious they are to their political gods.

And all the while, not giving two shits about whether they are actually doing good by one another and by the world enough to consider that, just perhaps, they might need to listen to one another and identify with one another like people who have more in common than they have different, and engage one another and debate one another and discuss with one another what we're going to do with this godforesaken mess like we're grown-ups who are all playing on the same team, in the big picture.

Too many people don't want to play on the same team, is the truth, so wrapped up are they in their own self-righteous sense of the world.

Our hope lies in either our capacity to transcend our narrower visions of the world, in our own lifetimes, or that one day we will die and our children will have an opportunity to do the same.

There is no genuine hope in a world where we are persistently undermining one another and ourselves in the name of ideological or any other kind of dominance.

The only sustainable hope is leaving it behind.

Iraqis are not the only people who have internal divisions that undermine their own interests. Americans and the people all over the world have a long way to go to transcend their small-mindedness.

Why is it so hard for us to transend the petty polarization?

Because, truth be told, we don't really give enough of a shit to try.

Love,
Ben