A clusterfuck of freedom bound

It has occurred to me, today, that the world is kind of fucked up place of our own making.

We take our own opinions way too seriously, is the truth. Especially our opinions about what other people should do for us. And we have made a mess of the world, in the process.

We have created a world where we are always on the brink of happiness and greater genuine virtue, rather than all the fake stuff that struts around with its ass in the air all the time. But we'll never have it, completely, as long as we insist on trying to determine the lives of one another rather than fulfilling our liberal democratic promise, and guaranteeing the right of every person to self-determine their own lives.

We are constantly preaching responsibility. But we have a world where everyone is perpetually avoiding it on the hardest issues, largely because we are just such dicks to one another. More repressive and punitive cultures have the worst problem with this, of course, because it is the repression and the punitiveness that creates the defensiveness that makes it so.

I work in a field, "adaptive special education", much of which is made up of people trying to explain away this desire for freedom, with all its virtues and vices, rather than coming to terms with it.

Everyone wants their own freedom. In fact, it's absence and getting more of it is the obsession of most people in their youth and many people well into adulthood. Most people want to limit the freedom of others. And this creates something of a clusterfuck, where we are persistently taking freedom, whether anyone gives it to us or not, because we could not possibly function without it, but not wanting to take responsibility. All of us. From the top down. In fact, the higher the stakes, the less anyone wants to take responsibility. This fact of life creates most of the cynical realities that we face in 21st century democracies, especially as it concerns our children who are perpetually looking at the adults in their lives as hypocrits and fools. And it will continue to do so until we take responsibility for creating this fact of life and the need to end it in all of the multitudinous places where it interferes with our lives and our potential to be genuinely decent human beings.

The one hope we have is that no matter how cynical and bad the reality gets, hope springs eternal. People want something different. They just don't know exactly what it is, much of the time. And they just aren't willing to do what it takes to change the things that make them unhappy and make us more likely to take freedom and not take responsibility.

You can tell who's given up. You can see it in their eyes. Or hear it in what they say.

The fundamental choice in the world really does seem to be between those who choose a life of freedom and responsibility and those who choose cynicism, in my experience. Meaning, the most likely candidates for cynicism are those who have not really chosen the lives they have or want.

If there is any solace in the more unfortunate experiences in my own life, this is it. That out of all of it, I have a life where I can choose whatever direction I may take with it and make my peace with it, even if it is perpetually less than ideal, especially to the extent that others want to control me. There will never be a time when I will either be happy or be gratified or appreciative that others want to control me. But I can make my peace with avoiding it as much as possible and living a life that is my own despite it, as much as possible.

I don't know what I want to do with my life, at this point, is the truth. I will teach. I will complete my scholarship obligation to teach special education for 4 years in Kansas. I will likely study and write.

But that door is completely wide open for me, at this point. Because there isn't really anywhere that I can go and say, "These are people who are really looking out for me," or "These are the people who are really looking to do good and are not so concerned with their own self-centered outlooks". It's not that these things aren't possible. It's just that more often than not, people are kind of self-centered and not concerned nearly enough with others except as it affirms their own outlooks on the world. Both of those reasons - because teachers seemed to look out for me more than most folks and because teachers seemed less concerned with their own selfish outlooks - are why I took up teaching and where I would otherwise go. I know that's not true, anymore, except insofar as the people I'm dealing with can respect my freedom to choose my life and make decisions, with consultation and respect for others and the consequences in their lives, of course, and know that their opinions about whatever matter are less important than my conscience and judgment.

I don't know what I want to do with my life, at this point. I know that I want the happiest life possible. And I am quite clear that such happiness comes with more freedom in my life and from no other source. And I'm also quite clear that the absence of it is the greatest source of unhappiness for most people in liberal democracies and likely in the illiberal world, as well.

There is only one way out for this, for the whole of society. The question is only whether we will start moving in that direction or not or whether we will rationalize every last repressive instinct that we can muster, no matter how dysfunctional it is for our humanity and tragic it is for so many people who are subject to the most illiberal and often brutal treatment in the world.

In the meantime, I will take the limited freedom I have to take up whatever life will afford me the most purpose and happiness and decency that I can find.

Let's hope that my children and grandchildren don't have to face such limited choices with their futures.

Love,
Ben

Least possible necessary aggression as an important correction to soft power

It's just occurred to me, this afternoon why my work with least possible necessary aggression is an important correction to soft power, and makes me very grateful to have waited before I published anything on it in more formal scholarly journals.

Joe's idea of soft power often assumes and seems intended to assume, given many of Joe's comments on soft power, to be a means of manipulative power. Meaning, Joe argues that using softer forms of power like culture, media, education, etc., that we can make others do what we want them to do. We can coopt them or win them to our way of thinking about things. And Joe argues that such soft power is important for liberal democracies like America to exercise power in the world.

What Joe is saying is true. It is also manipulative. And it is this manipulation that less liberal, traditional, and especially, today, Muslim, cultures often object to in liberal democracies. It is also this more manipulative tendency of more illiberal values, institutions, cultures, and governments which these same people use to rationalize all of the worst abuses of power like theocracy, despotism, genocide, slavery, authoritarianism and totalitarianism, terrorism, political pressure and manipulation in lieu of more genuine liberal democratic engagement, discussion, debate, and thought and other abuses of power (I just want to be clear that it is pretty clear to me that the underlying cause of terrorism is not poverty or humiliation or any of the other pet theories of terrorism; the underlying cause of terrorism is a desire for power to influence and pressure for political outcomes desired by terrorists and the people who support them and that they are willing to rationalize murder of innocent civilians in order to do so).

Many more repressive, repressed, illiberal, traditional, and theocratic or authoritarian cultures of one kind or another see a decadent, libertine side of American and liberal cultures that they - and many American and liberal folks, as well - confound with a freedom respecting and loving liberal culture based on liberal education and liberal democratic values. I don't think most serious liberal democrats - small "l" and small "d", meaning anyone who cares about freedom and democracy - would argue that liberal means "anything goes". What liberals like me, at least, argue, and I think most liberal peoples, is that liberal values and liberal institutions provide and should provide the maximum freedom possible to realize a more self-actualized form of virtue, morality, and a whole host of political, economic, cultural, and other valuable ends that less liberal cultures persistently romanticize and glamourize but are much farther away from achieving.

Liberal values allow us to achieve our highest values with the most integrity most reliably, with much allowance for the propensity of people, in liberal or illiberal cultures, to fall short of those values and to learn from their mistakes. Liberal values, institutions, and cultures allow people to learn from their mistakes more readily, and less liberal values, institutions, and cultures do not allow people to learn from their mistakes as readily, thus entrenching, rationalizing, repressing and repeating them, as people feel social, political, and legal pressure to be defensive of serious mistakes of humanity and of the human heart and rationalize them in the wake of that defensiveness rather than face them more openly and honestly, as liberal values, institutions, and cultures allow. All people, individuals, cultures, institutions, governments, etc. make mistakes. What makes liberal values, people, individuals, institutions, cultures, governments, etc. stronger and better at dealing with the problems and opportunities they face is that the greater freedom they experience allows them more space to face and correct mistakes and problems as they occur. And, perhaps more important than all of that, liberal values allow us to better distinguish between what actually is a mistake and what might be a valuable pluralism, change, experimentation, learning experience or other variation on more homogenous, especially illiberally imposed thinking.

Joe's concept of soft power is often manipulative. There are times when such manipulation may be a better option than harder power and more aggressive options when more aggressive action directed at people is imminent and threatening (though not when such action is not imminent or threatening and when there is legitimate issues of self-defense at stake; the Iranian and North Korean situation and all matters of nuclear proliferation are complicated situations, for that reason, which Western powers have rationalized away in the name of their power to control nuclear proliferation, which is a legitimate concern, but which also needs to respect the legitimate concern and right of sovereign nations to prepare for matters of self-defense).

My assumptions with least possible necessary aggression only assumes a legitimate purpose for the more manipulative use of power when physical danger is truly imminent and when genuine alternatives are more aggressive.

I do not want these principles being rationalized to imply, as has been implied with the "good cop/bad cop" implications of this political period, that soft power or least possible necessary aggression can essentially be used to soften and provide the means of manipulation for any matter of life that anyone may want to regulate. That is a variation on manipulative repressive governing philosophy that is responsible for so much of the irrationality and failures of governing and culture in more liberal and democratic cultures, as well as more illiberal and undemocratic cultures, for as long as they have been around. Aggressive regulation of behavior is only necessary and should only be present when there is imminent physical danger to people. Otherwise, there should be a broad zone of freedom for people, with more collaborative and least aggressive possible efforts, and, ideally, no aggression, to engage difficult matters of life and conflicts and public policy, with an ideal world being one where grown-ups resolve problems between grown-ups in ways that do not involve threatening and aggressive behavior and where disagreement and conscience has as much room as is necessary to sort out even important and difficult matters of conscience, war policy being a particularly important area where respect for disagreements on matters of conscience are needed and where as much room as possible for substative discussion, debate, and disagreement and respect for the consciences of people involved - without rationalizing forcing, pressuring, or otherwise aggressively circumventing conscience - is necessary for more thoughtful policies to be pursued.

The bottom line is that my work - and, ideally, Joe's work on soft power - should not be used to rationalize manipulation that undermines and disrespects matters of conscience. Least possible necessary aggression is an explicit presumption on the use of power to avoid just that manipulation and all its corresponding failures and injustices. It should be used to deal with situations where real danger and threat is imminent and where less aggressive options are and have been used. This current period does not justify well enough, to my mind, more aggressive options since more aggressive options are so readily rationalized and used and less aggressive options are so infrequently used and still abused as a matter of manipulation that circumvents conscience and legitimate self-governance and self-determination, which is exactly what has rationalized the threats of military action to resolve the situation in Iran, for instance.

The idea that a nation or a people could use the threat of military action and supremacy and the most aggressive action to get their way on any important matter of policy or conscience should be recognized as foolish and repugnant to people with more genuine liberal democratic commitments and more genuinely internalized liberal values. What is the use of liberal values if they are going to be perpetually used to rationalize, excuse, and provide cover for more repressive, manipulative, and dominating action by any actor? How exactly are they distinguished from illiberal action or illiberal governance, then?

The short answer that liberal democratic peoples have settled for, at this point, is "Whatever we say it means." Which is not good enough. And it is certainly not good enough for those people who are subject to the power and its abuses of even people with more general liberal democratic commitments, values, institutions, and cultures.

"Liberal democracy" is not an excuse for "whatever I damn well please." And the irony is that those who act in the name of liberal democratic values but who are, in fact, more repressive in their policies, governance, advocacy, thinking, and outlooks are generally the most libertine in this respect. They more often than not want to limit and restrain the behavior of others, but will rationalize any of the worst of abuses of power and ignore or fight limits on their own use of power (and the pride that sustains that abuse) for themselves in the name of any favored causes.

Joe Lieberman will walk to his synagogue on Friday, but he will rationalize a military strike on Iran, even when the Iranians have not engaged in open warfare with Americans? They most likely have provided weapons and munitions to an enemy with which Americans are engaged in open conflict, but if that were justification for open warfare, then Americans have an awful lot of people and governments who have grievances - current and in the recent past - for engaging us in open warfare for our provision of weapons, munitions and other forms of support to their enemies.

If America does not want a free-for-all when it comes to such wartime or peace-time behavior, then they need more than international institutions, treaties, democratic discussion, and laws with empirical, objective justifications and presumptions around the use of force, aggression, and defense - hard power in the form of military, political, and economic aggression and soft power in the form of cultural, educational, media, entertainment, and other forms of power - than just "We attack when we think we are threatened" or "We use hard power and soft power when it suits our pleasure with no presumption on its use, misuse, abuse, or when we should avoid using it". Joe's idea of soft power is clearly too flexible and libertine to create a more empirical, objective justification and presumption for its use to provide any kind of distinction between just uses of force and unjust uses of force.

That accounting for the reality of arguments and use of force don't sound restrained do they? Because they are not. Because their open-endedness gives unlimited justification for the use of power and force whenever it so suits its users.

That is the reason for a need for a presumption and an internalized, reason-based limit on the use of power and force. That is the reason for the need of the presumption of least possible necessary aggression, particularly when the assumption that force and power should only be used when physical danger is clearly imminent and when no other means can protect from physical danger.

The rhetoric of "rules," "accountability," "strict enforcement," have dominated this period. But the truth is that they have done so with virtually unlimited aggression. Meaning, they have done so in a way that is both repressive of others and libertine with its own vices and limits, even as it is justified on the grounds of self-righteous interpretations of matters of public policy. The only way to prevent that more repressive and libertine interpretation of aggression and enforcement is to have a more thoughtful conception of the use of aggression and force that does not justify force and aggression at every turn or in any way that people see fit. Such a conception may be roughly democratic in various political and historical eras, but it far from more ideally liberal democratic values, aspirations, institutions, cultures which presume against the use of aggression and force and external regulation of people and in favor of education, self-governance, self-determination and a broad zone of freedom meant to allow people the space and learning experiences to internalize and self-actualize our best values and to solve new problems and even older problems in novel, innovative, and ground-breaking ways.

Least possible necessary aggression, then, should be read as an important correction to soft power. It should not, nor should soft power, be read as one more manipulative means in the toolkit of propangandists, demagogues, power-mongers, despots, and terrorists. Least possible necessary aggression should be read as a important correction to the notion that power is properly conceived in liberal democracies as the means to get what we want. Power in liberal democracies carries a liberal and moral component to respect the freedoms and self-governance of citizens. Private and public partnerships, for instance, should act as just that: partnerships. Not governance lording over private life. And aggression should be reserved for the clearly and physically threatening and dangerous features of liberal democratic life. All other engagements should be as least threatening and aggressive and cynical and most genuinely collaborative, partnering, respectful of differences, and respecting a broad zone for freedoms as possible. Everything else is a profound distortion of liberal democratic values and life, no matter what laws do or do not get written.

Slavery may be legal in a liberal democracy. But it is hardly liberal or democratic. And liberal democracy should not be read as an institution that must or does entrench illiberal or undemocratic instititutions just because they walk about in liberal democratic clothing. Naziism may use the language and institution of a Wieber liberal democracy, but it hardly either and should not be treated as either just because it can manipulate its way into liberal democratic politics. And, in neither case, are people obligated to obey laws - fugitive slave laws, Nuremberg laws, etc. - that are clearly wrong by any objective liberal democratic standard. Liberal democracy is, at its heart, an idea that all people are created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. It is not a rationalization for whatever repressive instincts happen to be exercised or institutionalized in a democratic political process. Socialist institutions may be conceived and developed to address important problems in liberal democracies. But socialism, itself, is hardly the most liberal of democratic institutions, which accounts for many of the problems it experiences in even it most liberal democratic forms, even as it may use democratic institutions to achieve its aims. And with its assumptions come many serious problems for people who, by their natures, need liberal and democratic values and institutions to live genuinely self-governing and self-actualized lives and all the important tangible and intangible benefits that come with those values.

The idea that power is the means to get what you want is exactly what Lord Acton was concerned with when he said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is true that more illiberal conceptions of power do not achieve their long terms ends as well as more liberal conceptions of power. But the idea that power can or should be rationalized to get what people want is exactly why power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'm not convinced that this is exactly what Joe is arguing, though he is clearly creating the flexibility for interpreting power in this way and seriously flirting with this conception of power in some of his most recent work. That is a turn in his thinking that concerns me and should concern all of us, though my assumption is that more liberal and less power-hungry conceptions of power will out over the long haul, independent of what any particular leader or politician or powerful individual may want, largely because less liberal conceptions of power are unsustainable.

China will not remain a Communist nation, forever, obviously. It will play around the edges as long as it can until its people expect something different, when a more democratic future becomes more readily and generally expected and when a more democratic transition becomes more clearly recognized as inevitable by Chinese leaders, and when, hopefully as peaceful and least chaotic and disruptive democratic transition as possible is made. But the idea that a totalitarian state is a sustainable path to progress, economic or political, is laughable, repugnant, and wrong (incorrect, as much as immoral). And, similarly, the idea that a more repressive path in liberal democracies is a sustainable path to progress, economic or political, is foolish and wrong and will soon give way to less repressive, regressive and a more liberalized path because its folly becomes inescapable, at a certain point, as it fails to achieve its ideals or its commitments.

And, similarly, illiberal governments and cultures cannot and will not remain illiberal, repressive, and regressive forever, since, by definition, if they are to become more progressive and reap the rewards and benefits, tangible and intangible, that more progressive, liberal democratic cultures reap, then will need to become more liberal and progressive. And neither liberal nor illiberal cultures will or can remain blissfully ignorant or avoid noticing and wanting the tangible and intangible benefits of political, economic, cultural, religious, professional, personal and individual freedom, forever. Eventually, all people will expect these freedoms and more liberal values and directions because they so clearly deliver better ideas, values and outcomes, with the stronger values and ideas delivering the better outcomes.

Greed and power-hunger do often deliver money or power. But they are both often either or both short-lived and miserable experiences. And those committed to generating wealth and using power with more integrity do clearly accumulate more by likely any objective standard. And neither accumulation of power or money nor their abuse are celebrated in the long view of history. Because neither offer sustainable ideas and values and outcomes that create better lives and quality of life for people, for individuals and majorities, both of which are taken seriously by liberal democratic values and institutions for good reason and which produce better lives for individuals and institutions, generally.

This notion that liberal democratic cultures can use their ideas and values and the cultures they build to accumulate power to do whatever they damn well please is a pernicious and dangerous rationalization of power that must be corrected by better ideas of liberal values, democratic institutions, and ideas of power. Least possible necessary aggression is one idea to contribute to that end.

Love,
Ben

Getting to the heart of our more repressive legacies

Ruth Marcus, my least favorite and definitely the most self-righteous of the liberal or conservative commentators at the Washington Post writes this unhealthy harangue of David Vitter and Deborah Jean Palfrey, this morning that captures everything that is so wrong in the current more repressive direction for the country, these days.

Private Sin, Public Matter

Ruth basically argues that prostitution is a particularly heinous sin and crime and should be criminalized and that Vitter and Palfrey should hang for their sins.

I responded thus.

"You're right, Ruth. Someone needs to make the consistent case.

Prostitution should be legal. Palfrey should not be prosecuted. Vitter and men like him should not be prosecuted nor unelected. And the only thing standing between that much more realistic and decent policy and us is the vindictive prudishness of people like you who try to guilt men out of prostitution rather than build marriages which are built on mutual love and respect and not on the cynicism that animates too many marriages and too many bitter women's and men's attitudes towards love, sex, and life.

If people want to be bitter about love and sex, so be it, I say. But don't legislate it. And, in the meantime, people should stop taking the lazy way out of the marriage, relationship, and sexually-oriented problems that folks face and trying to enforce backwards legislation so that they don't have the face the bitterness in their own hearts that undermines their own marriages and relationships and sense of sexual intimacy and the marriages of all who get corrupted by their cynicism.

There is plenty of cynicism about sex and love, sadly. But the least of our problems occur between prostitutes and johns. Our most serious problems happen within marriages and relationships where self-righteous defensiveness about our own roles in problems and failures in marriage undermine a commitment to stronger marriages and facing those problems most honestly.

It is marriage and love and raising kids, ironically. where the clearest argument for a less regulated life and a life of free will and forgiveness taken seriously is made most easily.

If lovers and mates and parents think that they are going to reinforce their love with those whom they share their lives by forcing their loved ones to deal with their wrath or their moral authority, then they will live the consequences of that tragic little idea in their lives and relationships. If their bitterness and manipulation is practiced in their marriage, then that marriage might see adultery and prostitution and all kinds of issues creep up. If they want those issues to go away, they will need to start focusing on their own hearts and the hearts of their mates and how to open them up to one another and enjoy more genuine love between one another, instead of on the legislation. If they can't do that, then they will live with the bitterness and cynicism about love and marriage that pervades so much of America and the world, these days.

Luckily, Ruth, most young women my age seem to be figuring this one out and having much more functional and loving relationships, as a consequence. Young people tend to be much more laid back about prostitution, pornography, stripping, and sex and love, generally, which is sign of progress and a more loving, realistic embrace of all that is base in us as well as is great and noble in us. There are plenty of older people who resist this trend. And they will suffer with the relationships that such resistance offers. But the world seems to be working in a much more honest, decent, loving direction on this issue, which is exactly the direction they should be working in.

So opt out of the efforts to challenge the moral hypocrisy and be decent to this guy and this madam all you want, Ruth. It's a lonely party you've decided to attend. And it's lonely in those marriages where sexuality is treated with so much fragility and lack of appreciation for the needs and desires of men and women in relationships that they love. If you want to hang onto that legacy of loneliness and heartbreak, you feel free to.

I and most young people will be leaving that legacy behind us."

Love,
Ben

The most despicable case I have heard of in a long time

This girl was 17 when this incident happened, and it's not clear, at all, that this death was not an accident.

Sri Lankan housemaid on death row highlights a surge in Saudi beheadings

Meanwhile, back in the States...

Execution of Georgia Man Near Despite Recantations

Forgive us our trespasses. There seems no end to how callous and careless with the lives of others that we can be.

Love,
Ben

The fact that everyone is cheering it on

It's not the more repressive direction that the world has taken in the last 6 or 7 years that has me most down. It's not the fact that liberal democratic societies have taken a more repressive direction and that the world is following that has me most upset. It's not the fact that the most repressive cultures and governments have become far more repressive in this period and that too many of more repressive folks in the U.S. seem to be excusing it. It's not the fact that we keep moving in this direction no matter how much it so very clearly does not solve our problems and makes many, most of them far worse.

It's the fact that everyone keeps cheering it on that discourages me.

Terrorism in Palestine is ugly. But watching Palestinians take to the street to cheer it on is far uglier. Repression of democratic student protests in China is ugly. But seeing Chinese people and politicians rationalizing that repression is uglier. The killing and imprisonment and torture of Iranian students who wish to exercise the democratic freedom to protest in a presumed democracy is ugly. But reading about Iranians egging it on is uglier. And watching the American government of my own country, and liberal democracies take this repressive turn, recently, is ugly. But seeing and hearing and reading people in America and the liberal democratic world cheer this direction is uglier.

And everyone, including the terrorists, do it to pressure, punish, and force their way through difficult problems, most of which need more compassion, decency, thoughtfulness, and engagement.

Bobby Kennedy warned us of this propensity in 1968, shortly before his death. And we've all just ignored him. And we are living with the consequences.



The arrogance of it, the hubris of it, is overwhelming for me, right now, as I watch a world rife with conflict and aggression with far too little understanding of aggression and its uses and misuses.

So much of it is premised on the idea that Bobby's and Martin's and Ghandi's and Jesus' love and compassion and decency towards others was naive and that only more cynical outlooks on humanity and human nature offer greater wisdom than these great and wise and courageous men offered. It is true that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Mohatma Ghandi and Jesus Christ did not know or understand everything that is needed to be known or understood about the world. No person has or ever will have that kind of knowledge or understanding. But the heart of their messages were quite wise and true and courageous and decent.

And we mock their decency out of hubris that we know better because the world is a forever uglier place than we can believe that their poor, naive, sweet little souls could ever have imagined.

And we engage our ugliness against one another. And we watch as so many of our problems get worse. And we call it good.

All so our hearts don't ever have to face their own ugly contents and the consequences of that fact on our thinking and acting in the world.

We are a nasty and ugly lot, so often. Humanity. We will all need much forgiveness and mercy when this is all said and done.

Love,
Ben

Freedom and poor choices

My life has been a strange, ever surprising journey where I have challenged and taken for granted every value and idea that has mattered to me only to develop a far deeper and more genuine appreciation for universal and deeply significant values and ideas that up until this point in my life I have largely taken on faith.

The strangest part about my life has been that it has only been by learning and screwing up so many important decisions that I have internalized lessons with the empirical reality of life experience that faith and abstraction never could have offered me.

Like everyone, I hate the consequences of poor choices. But, strangely, those consequences taught me lessons that no abstraction ever could have come close to offering.

Maslow's right. Freedom is the path to self-actualization, because even the bad choices offer learning that good choices and good lessons, alone, could never offer.

And now my life experience replaces that faith as the basis for my confidence in that conclusion, that fact and that central value of a better life.

Love,
Ben

Responsible options in Iraq

Stephen Biddle, of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the obvious in today's Washington Post: that splitting the difference between sticking with the Iraqis and pulling out only satisfies more self-centered political domestic concerns and not the military mission in Iraq.

Iraq: Go Deep or Get Out

Biddle presents us with the harder choice: either abandon the mission altogether and stop risking the lives of American soldiers, or commit to this thing until the Iraqis are ready for us to leave.

As Biddle points out, the training element of this mission is intimately bound up in the fighting element of the mission, since trainers working with Iraqi forces and the forces, themselves, need cover and the offensive security efforts of American military personell. Thinking that we can somehow leave behind trainers and pull everyone else back leaves both the trainers and the Iraqi security forces vulnerable to a sectarian security situation that they have made clear that they are not ready to take on by themselves, at this point.

From the perspective of Iraqis responsible for security in their country, there is only one responsible option for Americans: to support Iraqi security efforts until they are ready for Americans to leave.

But Americans, ultimately, have to choose whether they will support this effort or not. I agree with Iraqis that we need to support this effort until Iraqis are ready to take over security efforts on their own. Iraqis responsible for security in their country, right now, did not create this security nightmare; Americans did, as well as the insurgency we provoked and the sectarian civil war that we carelessly helped initiate without better discussion, planning, and coordinating an invasion with Iraqis - particularly opposition groups and their alligned militias - before initiating it.

But Americans, and American soldiers, in particular, need to decide if they are going to be willing to guarantee such security until Iraqis can take over themselves and Iraqi legislators can reach an workable democratic resolution.

I do think, given the fact that Americans overwhelmingly supported this invasion, going in, that we have a responsibility to see this thing through, since we helped create the security situation that exists today.

But I have not signed up to risk my life for this effort, yet. I've given it serious thought several times and several times been dissuaded by friends and family who have been concerned, probably rightly, that I would get in much trouble since I have an active brain and a big mouth and would likely get the shit kicked out of me at various times for speaking unpopular views.

Ultimately, I think American soldiers need to decide this one. Are they willing to risk and sacrafice their lives to finish this job? If enough of them are, I think we need to support them and fix what we have broken here. If not, there is no use of trying to compel them to complete this mission if they do not have confidence in it. If there is one of many lessons we should learn from Vietnam, this is one of them.

But if they are willing to complete this mission, I think America can do right by the Iraqis and restore it's reputation as a country that is more concerned with the lives and welfare of the Iraqi people than they are with their own selfish interests or domestic political squabbles.

That's what this whole thing was supposed to be about. We have an opportunity to live up to that commitment.

I only hope that Americans will do right by the Iraqis and not just bail because the going got tough. It's easy to say that from the sidelines, I realize, when I haven't signed up for that duty. I'm giving that option serious thought, again. But I do think we need to do right by the Iraqis, no matter what we end up doing, here.

Here's to responsible options in Iraq and doing right by Iraqis who deserve the security and democratic transition that we have said that we are committed to delivering.

Love,
Ben

Liberal democracy is for grown-ups

I don't think Turkey should get it's panties in a twist about being snuffed by the EU, personally. But Joe Nye's analysis that supporting and nurturing democracy in Islamic, near East societies like Turkey rather than invading countries like Iraq without the consent, consultation, and leadership of Iraqis is a wise one.

Instability has Damaged Turkey's International Standing

France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution to avoid another layer of government and bureaucracy in their lives. Surely Turkey can focus on democratizing and building more and stronger liberal institutions for their own sake without trying to win favor or incentives from European masters.

Who wants to build democracy because it appeases foreign governments. Is that real democracy at all? Would America really be democratic if they built a democracy to satisfy the British Crown?

Of course not. And that is the attitude that Turkey should take, that Iraqis should and are taking - if Americans would just listen when they say that the calls on the ground are Iraqis' and what we need to do is help out when we're needed - and that every people in the world should take to democracy.

Real democracy isn't imposed or even incentivized by others. Real democracy, like doing real good in the world, is done for its own sake, and not for incentives or to avoid punishments. That's the kind of democracy and good that people in the world should aspire for in their lives.

The students in Iran know that, now and in 1999. The students in China knew that in 1989 and no doubt know that today.

We just take all of that for granted in a country where sacrafices are made by that poor sucker over there rather than out of a genuine commitment to our highest principles and purposes.

People who do good and love democracy for its own sake know better. And that is who Turkey's people and leaders need to aspire to be. Not also-rans who appease their European benefactors.

We are not and never will be grown-ups as long as we do things for the rewards or to avoid punishment and instead of it being the right thing to do.

That goes for governments and peoples as much as it goes for men and women and all independent folks in the world.

Grown-ups do things because they are right. Children do things because they win goodies or avoid sanction from their parents.

Turkey wants to be a grown-up. We and they should expect them and us to do exactly that. We all need to grow up - America, Turkey, and the whole world - and take liberal democracy, liberal institutions, liberal education, and liberal values seriously.

Love,
Ben

What democracy is about

Andrew Sullivan asks an excellent question:

Why isn't this on the front pages?

As it turns out, it isn't even on the front pages of two major newspapers in Iran, the Iran Daily, a government run periodical, and the Tehran Times, the leading English-language Iranian daily newspaper. The failure to publicize it in the government paper is obvious. Non-governmental papers may be self-censoring due to the government crackdown on independent media in Iran, as of late.

Luckily, there are a few Iranian papers, of those I consulted, the Iran Press Service and Payvand News of Iran that are giving this crackdown on students the front page coverage it deserves.

But Andrew is right. Anyone willing to commerate those June 9, 1999 student protests against the Iranian government and its clampdowns on free expression and harsh treatment of its citizens deserves front page coverage.

From the Iran Press Service:

"On 9 July 1999, the government of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, on strict orders from Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, attacked with unprecedented violence thousands of Iranian students who, backed by the people, were protesting for five consecutive days the brutality of security forces during a night raid on students dormitories against some 200 to 300 students denouncing the closure of 'Salam', a popular newspaper for being the only independent voice among the media.

At the night, the plainclothes men had smashed students rooms, beaten them, burned some of them with cigarettes, and threw one of them from the window of the third floor.

Police, backed by the basij militias, anti-riot units and plainclothes men from the Intelligence and Interior ministries battled with students for several hours, made hundreds of arrests and ended the protest movement in blood.

The event became also the final divorce between Mr. Khatami and the students who, in 1997 presidential elections, were, along with women and the youngsters had played a major role in the surprise victory of Mr. Khatami, then an obscure, middle rank clergyman promising some freedom and democracy.

The Monday 9 July 2007 attack on the students at both Amir Kabir University and the Office of the student’s Alumni is part of a bigger crackdown undertaken by the 'military-security government' of Mr. Amadi Nezhad against all his opponents, including scholars, economists, intellectuals and the press.

The government dismisses such charges, saying it allows free speech. Nevertheless, officials have spoken of a so-called 'soft revolution,' a perceived U.S. effort to use intellectuals and others to undermine the Islamic Republic's system of government.

Last week, the General Prosecutor of Tehran and the Islamic Revolution tribunals ordered the closure of Ham Mihan (compatriot), a pro-reform newspaper that had reappeared in May after an absence of seven years under the ownership of Mr. Qolamhoseyn Karbaschi, a former Mayor of Tehran.

'When we say a creeping coup in the press, it means a person is moving within a framework of an action to overthrow (the system)", Mr. Saffar-Harandi, a former deputy Editor at the hard line daily 'Keyhan' had said, adding: 'When we say coup, it does not mean that some people in a garrison prepare an attack. It means people who are trying to destabilize the regime, the Government'.

In a new wave of crackdown, the independent media was accused of waging a 'creeping coup' against the Government.

Earlier, the same Minister, a close friend of Mr. Hoseyn Shari’atmadari, the Editor of Keyhan and an advisor to both the Leader and the President had accused the independent and pro-reform press like Ham Mihan, Sharq or E’temad Melli (National Confidence), of playing he 'cards of the enemy by waging a soft attack. (against the Government). The flag bearer of this attack is the media'.

Mr. Saffar Harrandi was echoing other accusations by the President’s advisors for the press.

'Creeping coup' was used by Mr. Mehdi Kalhor, one of the several such advisors, adding that 'some newspapers inside the country are propagating ideas of the enemies. They are the front runners, the platoons of the enemies' cultural assault on our Islamic values and sacred system. They are in a creeping coup against the Government'."

That is what democracy is about. It's not about supporting reformist governments or conservative governments or any ideology. It is about supporting freedom from repression. And that doesn't have anything to do with ideology and everything to do with challenging it, no matter who does it.

This is what democracy is about. More people need to be paying attention.

Love,
Ben

Just when I thought that things couldn't get any worse

The granny, the cop, and the lawn scuffle

Are we just about finished with all this "progress"?

Because this direction looks like a backwards mess to me.

Love,
Ben

Power corrupts

Is there any end to news of the march of repression, today?

Pope: Other Christians not true churches

These are the days when I appreciate that I am a free thinker. And when I remember that so much of religion, like politics, is about power and the illusion that it is the same thing as doing good. And that is why power corrupts. Because those who have it begin to confuse their having it with being some kind, any kind, of final arbiter of what is good and holy in the world. And that is when all of the ugliness sets in.

Love,
Ben

Redemption for our sins

A good reason to let immigrants in more easily (and for people to sneak in, if they have no other option).

Persecuted Gays Seek Refuge in the U.S., Foreigner's Abuse Increasingly Seen as Grounds for Asylum

One of the reasons why freedom should be taken seriously, as the most important "rule", I think, is because we really, generally, have no clue what is going on in peoples' lives and what they have been through. If I had a friend in this situation - s/he's been abused or persecuted in another country and he needs to get somewhere to escape that abuse or persecution - I would encourage him to seek asylum. But I would have no issue, at all, with him living in the U.S. and would take him in until he could complete asylum petitions. And I'd let them stay if there was any realistic reason that they might be rejected.

I hope people can understand, then, given the risks that come with applying for asylum in such cases or a million such cases, why people would rather live under the radar rather than making themselves visible and therefore more likely to be sent back to so many miserable conditions that they might be subject to if sent home.

We are a mean-spirited lot, often, aren't we? People, I mean.

We get better. Slowly. We hear more stories like this. We develop more empathy and compassion and, maybe, if our tiny little hearts can bear it, love. We become more decent. We identify with peoples' humanity and not just our sad, small little slice of it. Why would anyone identify with "Americans" but not with "humanity"? What purpose could such a narrow idea of common identity have for any of us?

Our best humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or socialists or religious folks or radicals or terrorists. And our worst humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or romantic communists or racists or Clintonistas or the Bush Administration.

Our best and worst humanity is found in all of us. Without exception, really. It's the one rule of humanity I can count on. All that is best and worst in humanity is in all of us. Which makes it all the more important for us to embrace what is best and worst in us, not try to repress it.

And it makes it all the more incumbent for us to embrace the compassion that makes us stronger and more decent and more loving and more functional and better people for it. None of us are or should try to be superior to others. But all of us aspire or should aspire to be better than we were the day before and to be the best human being we can be and the best possible in our lifetimes.

And no matter how we might try to make excuses otherwise, that means having a heart. And being decent to people because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what the law or the rules say.

I have no truck with people who use laws like fugitive slave laws and the Nuremberg laws and laws against adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, race mixing, and so many laws that have represented everything that is ugly about humanity to justify their ugliness.

Justify your ugliness all you want, I say. You'll find no justification with me.

Follow the law as best you can, is the only advice I can give. But take that conscience of your's more seriously than any law could ever offer any of us.

Because when the Nazis come to my hometown, I'm hiding Jews. And when the South rises again, I'm helping slaves escape. And when Islamic Fundamentalists or Communists are successful in outlawing every decent impulse that people might have in the name of ridding the world of its various ills, I'm resisting, legal or not.

The law is not the final arbiter of morality or decency or goodness. The law is an all-too-neutral arbiter of whatever prejudices or impulses or ugliness guide us this week or this year or this historical period.

I wish law reflected reason. I would like for that to be so. I will work for that to be so.

But you only have to watch the political process for a few evenings a week to see what a godforesaken, foolish, dysfunctional, repressive mess the whole exercise is, as a rule.

And it's not a mess because politicians in Washington are uniquely a mess and us noble savages in the citizenry are really where decency and goodness is found.

It's a mess because we're a mess. Humanity. One long, foolish, repressive mess.

We get better. Slowly. Very slowly.

And then we have periods like this one where we kind of go off the rails.

Maybe showing some decency to gay people escaping persecution is the least we can do to make up for our shittiness.

Love,
Ben

The price of "progress"

Reading this headline was shocking and disturbing enough.

China executes ex-food and drug chief

Then the journalist who wrote this report spends one paragraph talking about the injustice and excessiveness of killing this man.

"His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record."

Which is just peachy, of course, because then the Chinese leadership doesn't have to take responsibility for the fact that it is their cynical, repressive leadership that makes such corruption so likely and that this execution just entrenches and reinforces that same ugly cycle.

One paragraph about how the state killing this man was "heavy" and the rest of the article seeming to justify his execution in the name of safety concerns?

Eye for an eye, I suppose. How ugly.

I don't think I can handle anymore of this progress. The world has seriously gone off the deep end here in the last few years. It's not just the execution that bothers me. It's the fact that this journalist spent one paragraph talking about the human rights abuse that occurred here and that I can see so many people nodding in agreement, "He got what he deserved."

Then this from the Carl Minzer at the Council on Foreign Relations in a May 29th, 2007 International Herald Tribune editorial.

Corruption in China: The anger boils over

"For the past two months, local officials in the southwestern Chinese province of Guangxi have pursued a harsh campaign aimed at enforcing China's population planning laws.

In order to meet targets for allowable births, they forced pregnant women to have abortions. They threatened to demolish homes to make residents cough up fines demanded for excess children.

This month citizen anger boiled over. Thousands of angry rural residents took to the streets, smashing cars and sacking government offices."

The Chinese government claims that it didn't want to use harsh measures to force women to have abortions. They wanted to give incentives to enforce the law that women have abortions to enforce compliance with their population control measures. What nice guys, huh?

Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. Rebellion often breeds greater repression. Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. And so the cycle goes, on and on and on and on until we decide to break it.

The price of progress is getting pretty high, these days.

Bit by bit, we chip away at our souls. Soon enough, we won't have souls to sell off, at all.

We got to get this turned around.

Love,
Ben

H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."

"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught."

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

-H.L. Mencken
U.S. editor, 1880-1956

Maybe I care about politics and this war too much

I was little down this 4th of July.

OK, I was a lot down. I didn't go out with friends that I made plans with. And I didn't even watch fireworks, this year, by the river here in Lawrence, an annual tradition.

The kind of down I was feeling is supposed to happen around Christmas or Thanksgiving for most people, usually due to some unresolved but painful relationship in their families or their lives.

I was down for a different reason. I was down, largely, because I've just been so disappointed with the democratic conversation over the course of this war.

I'm not disappointed because so many people are involved, which I think is a good thing and a promising sign of progress that the internet, especially, has offered so many people a more engaging opportunity to take part in serious, deeply considered thought and discussion and debate on all of the issues of the day, especially the war.

What I've been disappointed with is just how narrow and partisan and fruitlessly vitriolic the discussion has been. How it has focussed on personalities rather than policies. How it has gotten lost in pressure politics rather than more thoughtful discussion. How so many of the even the most responsible people - the activists, the journalists, the politicians, and even too many of the scholars - have gotten lost in partisan or far too homogenous outlooks on the war rather than engaging in more serious thought and discussion about how, if we are going to facilitate a successful transition to democracy for Iraqis, that might be done.

Frederick Kagan, to my mind, has had the most consistently knowledgeable, wise, and thoroughly analyzed political and military perspective that I have encountered, thusfar.

But too much of this all-too-important discussion - which holds in the balance many Iraqi and American lives - has gotten lost in a less thoughtful discussion of how much patience Americans will have for this war rather than the more important discussion of how much patience Americans should have for the sake of the security and democratic future of an Iraqi people who did not ask for an invasion that has seriously disrupted their country.

I hope, I can only hope - and talk, and write, and do everything I can to persuade folks - that we will make our decisions in Iraq based on a genuine commitment to the Iraqis and American soldiers, with a commitment to thoroughly and rigorously and deeply engaged policy thought and discussion, and with a commitment to making good on what we initiated, here (all of us; I didn't even favor this godforesaken war going in, but I know better than to think that just pulling out with solve all the problems we need and want resolved) rather than based on expedience and weariness with the war and with the debate and with the politics and with all of the very strong feelings that everyone legitimately brings to the table on this war.

I've felt that more thoughtful, engaged discussion get overwhelmed, in the last few months, by a war weariness and a pressure politics that seems to blind too many of us to all of the options that we need to explore to handle this situation we've created in Iraq with integrity and not just yet one more political reaction substituted for more serious political thought.

And this 4th of July, I was just feeling kind of discouraged, I suppose, that a more engaged discussion of what might and what needs to happen in Iraq is getting overwhelmed by a much more crass political discussion of what people will support, independent of what the Iraqi people need.

The America I love is bigger than that. And I want it to be bigger than that. But I've been feeling kind of discouraged, lately, that it will be bigger than that, even with so many Iraqis and American soldiers risking and sacraficing their lives for the chance of a democratic, free, and secure Iraq.

I love my country. But it's been disappointing me, here, lately, I've got to admit. People feel overwhelmed, I know, by all of the information and ideas and perspectives and pressure and so much that makes it very difficult to engage this Iraq war discussion without wanting to bow out quickly from the discussion nevertheless the war.

But the stakes are just too high to take our convenience more seriously than our responsibilities and, most importantly, our responsibility to engage in a broad, open-minded, open-hearted, serious discussion of policy alternatives that focus on empirical arguments about what can be done and do not get lost partisan vitriol that has been crippling this discussion, lately.

All of this is evidence that I probably care too much about politics, I suppose. I probably should have been out watching the fireworks and loving America with my friends, this 4th. But I just didn't have the energy, feeling kind of down and disappointed with the state of the democratic discussion about this war and so many issues, this period.

I probably need a better hobby. And to learn to go hang out with friends, even if I'm not in tip-top shape. I didn't even make it down to talk with my uncles who I am sure would be pleased as punch to know that their nephew, who for the bulk of their lives has the been the young liberal kid haranguing them about racism and the environment and every issue that a young liberal kid cares about, is passionately committed to sticking it through in Iraq and getting out the case by the best minds about how and why we must create enough security in Iraq for a political settlement to be reached and for the Iraqi military and law enforcement to feel prepared and confident and comfortable with their role securing the country with minimal American military support.

I promise to have a better 4th of July, next year. But this year, I just needed the time to think and reflect and process it all, I suppose.

Let's hope the next 4th of July brings a lot more news of positive developments in Iraq and an America looking more ready to live up to its ideals and engaging with more honest and genuine concern and appreciation for the efforts of everyone involved - politicians included - rather than live down to its reactions of the moment.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

Love,
Ben

Bryan Caplan (remember that name)

George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has a really fascinating book out that I have got to check out.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

It has been my central frustration with democratic politics this period, as so many issues get decided based on peoples' fears and frustrations rather than based on what I, at least, in all of my not-so-infinite wisdom think should at least guide a more reasonable democratic discussion and debate, nevertheless policies that I favor.

But this guy also seems to share my political and economic instincts, the economic instincts, at least, that embody the current and emerging mainstreams of economists but are often less appreciated if known at all by people less familiar with serious economics.

Bryan Caplan. Look out for that name. Looks like it will be a good read. And a seriously favorable Economist review can't hurt either.

The difference between men and women

Larry the Cable Guy brings us this gem from Morning Constitutions:

"Women say funny stuff together when shop. They always got fun conversations.

I overheard this conversation once.

This girl goes, 'My boobs is too big. I've got to get 'em reduced."

And I was like, 'Come again.'

'Your boobs is too big?'

'I'll help you tote them around the mall for a few hours. You need a spotter, you give me a holler.'

You never hear dudes dude stuff like that.

'What's wrong, Jim?'

'My wiener's huge. I don't know what I'm going to do about it.

'Uh, I swear, it's like an albatross down there. I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't sleep. My back hurts. I got strap marks right here. Uh, it is like a piece of timber just hanging down from there. I think I'm going to get it reduced. That's what I'm going to do. I have had it with this ungodly large penis that I carry with me every day of my life.'"

Libby and mercy

Andrew Sullivan has the best argument I have read for why people might be plausibly angry about the Louis Libby commutation.

Bush's Record on Mercy

"There is none. Part of what makes the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence for perjury so transparently corrupt is Bush's long and remarkable record as Texas governor of denying clemency to almost anyone, and the contempt he expressed for even the process of reviewing appeals for mercy from death row. These were not white-collar criminals threatened by 30 months of jailtime. These were often individuals with very few resources facing the direst sentence imaginable: the death penalty. The massive discrepancy between the brusqueness with which Bush dismissed their pleas for mercy and the hours of careful study he cites in relieving Libby of inconvenience is proof positive to my mind of this president's reflexive sense of privilege, and profound moral and ethical corruption. Here's a devastating article from the Atlantic archives detailing Bush's clemency "decisions" while Texas governor. To give you a flavor:

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes...
The record as a whole is one of a human being utterly indifferent to the fate of others, especially those without money, connections or political value. The number of people George W. Bush sent to their deaths without a second's thought is higher than any living governor in the United States. And yet it took a perjury conviction of a white, wealthy, connected apparatchik to awaken the president's sensitivity to injustice:

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story, but during the 2000 presidential campaign I asked him if Bush ever read the clemency petitions of death-row inmates, and he equivocated. "I wouldn't say that was done in every case," he told me."

While the President may not have a glimmering record of mercy, I, on the other hand, have a long history of favoring mercy as a rule and prison for people who are dangerous, not just for revenge. And the hypocrisy on the Hill of who people favor prison time for and who they favor mercy for means that Americans should start facing up to their vindictive tendencies in matters of justice and law and get honest about the need to go deeper and find a more genuinely consistent and constructive approach to such matters. Everyone keeps flinging around "rule of law" like they actually take it seriously, which they do, until they find a freedom or someone's freedom, and particuarly their own freedom, which they favor and which they think the law should leave alone.

Is the freedom to engage in heterosexual or homosexual sodomy or oral sex really in the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process as Anthony Kennedy asserted in Lawrence v. Texas? Of course not. We just get so full of our bullshit that we start to believe that our less that fully honest assertions of law and politics are more than they really are. Was Lawrence v. Texas good law. Of course it was, if you care in the least about human dignity and peoples' freedom to live their lives as they see fit without everyone deferring to enforcement of even the most foolish and intrusive laws. Lawrence v. Texas and Griswold v. Connecticut and so much of our best juris prudence (I know all the arguments for why Griswold v. Connecticut is not narrowly construed enough as a legal verdict; but Bill Douglas was right in a big way on the larger matter of whether the Constitution should protect a right to privacy, even if he probably should have referred to the 14th or 9th Amendement or any other more narrowly construed means of ruling in favor of a right to privacy) is predicated on argument more than law.

The Constitution said nothing about the equality of the races, explicitly, except that slaves, who were generally African American, should be counted as 3/4 of a man for purposes of a census and that Federal voting rights could not be denied on the basis of skin color. It implies that African Americans should be regarded as equal when the 14th Amendment proscribes that neither the Federal nor state government can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." But then the Supreme Court interprets under Plessy v. Ferguson (with the power to do so under Marbury v. Madison) that such protection does not necessarily mean equal treatment as we understand it today.

The Warren Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, rightly, argued that principles of equality in the Constitution should apply to African Americans. The Constitution had not explicitly regarded African Americans as equal except as it concerned voting rights in the 15th Amendment and as a part of broader equality that was guaranteed under the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the 14th Amendment, in particular, but which has been interpreted under Plessy as regarding African Americans as equal with limitations we would never accept, today. What the Warren Court affirmed is what the law should embody, not what it explicitly did embody. And a more honest reflection on the law must reflect that this is the rule of legal interpretation, especially around issues that matter to us most, and should be. And, regardless of what should or should not be, most certainly is more often than not.

I don't give a shit what Dred Scott said. There is no way on God's green earth that you could have with my own free consent gotten me to return a fugitive slave or turn in Harriet Tubman, whose entirely legacy was built on violating fugitive slave laws. As as brilliant legal debate I just watched in C-SPAN exemplified, I don't give a shit what the law says. I will look for reasons as narrowly within the law as possible to invalidate the re-enslavement of Dred Scott and the fugitive slave laws that made them possible, but I will not sit and pretend like a narrow reading of those laws is somehow the right thing to do because I want to cover my hind end and keep my cooshy little prosecutorial or judicial employment. Because I know and believe that the highest political and moral principles put doing right by people above narrow interpretations of the law. And people who think otherwise have no serious interest in doing right by people, as far as I'm concerned, and thus have no claim on my conscience and should have no claim on the consciences of anyone.

There are a lot of people in Washington and America who want to see Libby and anyone they can get their hands on to go down for this war in Iraq, for allegations that the Administration was going after Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame (a claim I am still not convinced of, though reading widely arguments and theories and reports to the effect). There are others who take the law too seriously and want to use Libby as some sanctamonious stand on how purely and stridently the law must be taken seriously even when it supports our less noble insticts and conflicts with our most noble instincts. Most of those same people wanted to help Bill Clinton escape a similar fate for a virtually identical crime, namely a crime about lying when no underlying crime had taken place. And most others are so full of themselves, the law, and all their bullshit around the sacred nature of the Holy Trinity of the law, their prefered political party, and their backsides that they can't even make the distinction anymore between the law and doing the right thing because doing the right thing doesn't always keep you prepped for your next government appointment. I'm sure many people really believe that strict enforcement of the law is what keeps people in line. I am open and familiar with arguments for why they believe this to be the case. I have not heard one yet that convinces me that this is case, however.

My record on mercy as a rule and prison as a place for people who are dangerous until we can be confident that they are not dangerous anymore and not a place for revenge, especially on your political enemies, is almost completely consistent (I say "almost completely" because it is possible that I have had a vengeful bone in my body at some point, but I couldn't name it for you now).

I'm tired of cynicism, hypocrisy, bloodthirst, political venom, and pious ideological and self-serving sanctimony ruling the day in Washington, especially when a man's freedom is at stake.

The law says President Bush has the right to commute or pardon any case that his judgment thinks warrants such commutation or pardon. Libby's attackers argue from a more narrow interpretation of the law, nevertheless what is the right thing to do, because it suits their venom for Libby and the President, not because it affirms the law. And others favor the verdict because of their pious indignation about the law as not an expression of the will of political interests but as the expression of everything that is right and true in their aspirations for power and access. Andrew, in particular, argues, rightly, for laws such as those against gay marriage, homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, marijuana use and a whole host of laws not be taken seriously, with full knowledge that people do and have regularly violated those laws and with no serious desire to see them enforced. And he's right to do so. Because they are foolish, bad laws.

And this prosecution was a foolish, bad prosecution for a crime around an investigation into a crime that the prosecutor knew full well, at the time, was not a crime that Libby had committed.

This prosecution is not about the narrow politics of Democrats taking down Republicans. This prosecution is about the narrow politics of angry Bush Administration detractors taking down someone, anyone, for what they see as abuses of power rather than disagreements with the judgments of the President and his Administration over the course of this war and power-obsessed observers who take the whole business of power and law far more seriously than it warrants. I've shared many of those disagreements people have with the Bush Administration. But I've done so without the venom or the vitriol that seems to have perpetually blinded the Administration's critics to how to correct or improve the sitaution in Iraq rather than how to take down the President or his loyalists, all in the name of the nobility of disinterested political virtue. It's all enough to make you cry, isn't it? The heroism of the Administration's detractors and the demonic nature of George Bush, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the Administration. It's a morality play of good critics versus an evil Administration. And my favorite part is how many Iraqis' and American soldiers' lives are saved by all of this nonsense and how much the American democratic discussion is uplifted, enlightened, and otherwise improved by this disinterested, noble witchhunt for the hide of Lewis Libby.

Lewis thought he was lying to make sure his friends didn't get in trouble for something that he didn't know would get them in legal trouble or not, even though there is no conclusive evidence that I have seen that they meant to do harm to Joseph Wilson or Valerie Plame, all assertions otherwise to the contrary. Lewis Libby's not a rapist or a murderer or someone dangerous who needs to be behind bars. He's a high level political official who is being used by a lot of people feeling hateful for the Administration and trying to prove how tough they are, in general, to use him as part of a morality tale about the uses and abuses of power. Except I've seen no evidence that he was actually trying to abuse power, yet. There's no reason he should do another day of jail in the name of this vitriol.

Lewis Libby's commutation and hopefully pardon offer some glimmer of hope, for me, that, perhaps, in the midst of all this cynical, high stakes hypocrisy and bullshit that, just perhaps, we might move in the direction of some simple decency while we sort out of what self-centered dicks we all are, even those who claim to only have the interests of the country at stake.

President Bush should think long and hard about all of those folks he executed in Texas and whether they, too, should have gotten the same consideration that he is giving his friend, right now. But that is the way forward. Considering more mercy for all people, not treating everyone equally shitty and with little regard for the destruction we wrought on peoples' lives in the name of our cynicism and bullshitting ourselves and one another about our truer motives and truer selves.

The truth is that we are all going to need an awful lot of mercy after this whole period is through. Because no matter how much we bullshit otherwise, like so many other regressive periods and policies in the past - Japanese internment, segregation, intidimation of political dissidents, and a million other examples - our get tough attitudes have had as much to do with us making excuses for what shitheads we are as it is had anything to do with decency or justice. We interpret law and politics thought arguments and ideas, whether we want to face that or not. Some of those arguments and ideas are better and some of worse. But the worst arguments and ideas are those which seek retribution on people for its own sake rather than saving prison for people who are really dangerous. We're just all so full of our own bullshit and propaganda and long-internalized, decent and higher purposed arguments for law to serve higher purposes and not just narrow legalisms that we forget that the Constitution and the law has not actually said half the shit we've asserted that it's said. We just say it does because we want to do what's right. And know, deep down in our shriveled little hearts, that this is the right way to treat one another and not enforcement of narrow legalisms that we know do wrong by people.

And that is what makes America and democracy great, much more than any narrow reading on getting tough or the rule of law.

Love,
Ben

Leadership is telling people what they need to hear and doing what needs to be done

David Broder and Richard Cohen have been showing a bit of liberal leadership, lately, at the Washington Post, these days. A refreshing departure from the blind and mindless partisanship of E.J. Dionne and his nasty, pressuring, sanctimonious ilk.

David writes a piece, today, that begins to get at exactly why I am so unenamoured with the pressure politics at the Post and by manipulative partisans like Dionne.

A Mob-Rule Moment

Someone needed to say it.

I'm not as hip to David's insistence on broad border control. I want to see more concentration on strategic border control; everbody should cross the border legally and orderly, as reasonably as possible. But there is no reason that we should waste precious immigration service manpower and resources on deporting illegals who want to work and raise families in America instead of searching out true bad guys, like terrorists and violent criminals likely to reoffend.

And I'm not as keen on labor and environmental regulations that don't take into account legitimate needs for flexibility on the part of American businesses and unions, businesses and unions abroad, environmental leaders and heads of state from countries beyond our borders, and other participants in trade and labor and environmental issues who should have a say about specific needs in specific industries and in specific countries that broader and stricter regulations from Congress may or may not be able to address.

But here is where David gets exactly the problem with the current political moment and why pressure politics is such a poor substitute for real leadership:

"The point is pretty basic. Politicians are wise to heed what people want. But they also have an obligation to weigh for themselves what the country needs. In today's Washington, the "wants" of people count far more heavily than the nation's needs.

You can win elections by promising people what they want. But you win your place in history by doing what the country needs done."

Exactly. What we need, right now, in Washington, on the war in Iraq, on immigration, on trade and the economy, and on so many issues that face the country is leaders who exercise their independent judgments and who have better policy ideas to navigate our way through the serious problems we face, especially the war.

Sam Brownback and I disagree about outlawing abortions, even as we agree about wanting to reduce the number of abortions to as close to zero as is reasonably and justifiably possible.

But one thing I respect about Sam, right now, is that when he talks about being pro-life, he talks about it as a debate of ideas, not a moment for bullying the consciences of those we disagree with. Sam and I may disagree about the regulation of abortion. But something I agree with him fervently about is that his nor my conscience should be bullied or bludgeoned into taking a position that I think is wrong. People who do so are cowards who lack conviction in the real substance and better direction of their policy proposals. I don't lack that confidence. So I have no need to bully or bludgeon. I am just fine with persuading and leading.

And that is what America needs, right now. It doesn't need more pressure politics. It needs leadership. Generally, that means engaging people from all sides, those who agree and disagree, to arrive at the best, most thoughtful and well planned policy ideas. And other times it means, as with the case of Scooter Libby, telling the pressure groups to go fuck themselves. As Byron York accurately describes the hypocrisy and politics at play above any real substantive concern, "People who in 1998 argued that lying under oath didn't really matter, at least if it was about sex, will passionately argue that lying under oath really, really matters now. And people who in 1998 argued that lying under oath mattered very much will argue that it is not such a big deal today." Some issues, like a man's freedom becoming the plaything of vindictive partisans, are just too important to treated like haggling for trinkets in Mexico.

Especially on the war, right now, what America needs is less pressure, more thoughtful engagement from everyone on all sides with one another, and leadership by someone who has gotten or who is getting their heads wrapped around that situation. Frederick Kagan, David Kilcullen, David Paetreus, and Robert Gates seem to get it better than most, right now, by my lights. Joe Nye and Francis Fukuyama have important international policy insight that should be solicited. But Frederick Kagan is really the man with his mind wrapped around this situation, that I've seen, thusfar.

And we need political leaders who can try to understand the situation as well or better than these guys, to articulate that understanding publicly for the American people, and to show some leadership in this war and for the country, whether it squares, right now, with the thinking (and, really, the lack thereof, generally) of the American people or not.

Leaders are not called leaders because they follow the whims of pressure groups. They are called leaders because they take stands and lead others independent of the pressure. And that is what we need in Washington, right now.

And it is nice, after a long hiatus, to hear a liberal in Washington say that again.

Love,
Ben

Cynicism and meanspiritedness as organizing ideas of American life

It's starting to occur to me that the much broader generalization that can be said about this period is that Americans figured out that what they all have in common is cynicism and meanspiritedness.

How noble, huh?

We get better.

We just confuse all that cynicism and meanspiritedness with something more noble than it is.

And then the cynicism that nice guys finish last and that you have to be a tough sum bitch to get by in this world is rationalized by this very cynicism and meanspiritedness. Convenient, huh?

As long as we define being and doing good as kicking each other when we are down and imposing on one another and otherwise making excuses for our shittiness, then good people are good the more we want to kick the shit out of whomever we don't like. And nice guys finish last, not because we're so fuckin' shitty, but because they're too fuckin' naive and stupid to see how shitty people are, meaning us.

I've watched people my whole life engage in that bullshit reasoning. I had a group of friends who reasoned this way as the core of the way that they looked at the world, as some kind of sorry substitute for being more thoughtful.

People get hurt. Then they get bitter and cynical. And then they get mean.

I've felt it. I've known that feeling. I think it'd be hard to live long in this world and not feel it. We shit on each other so regularly, it would be hard for people not to feel or get bitter or cynical or mean, at some point in their lives.

It's when it gets confused with being good that it's a real problem.

That's when what is noble and decent in life and in our attitudes toward our most important issues in life get distorted into something meaner and more cynical.

It gets better. We get better. But only after we've done a lot of damage.

Our only hope is in the idea that we get more decent and more loving and more thoughtful, over time.

And this period has been one where we've even wanted to try to define our progress by just how meanspirited and imposing that we become. It's really the most cynical of all ideas that we could have. It also happens to be the cynicism that has rationalized all of the worst attrocities of human history - Nazism, Communism, despotism of all kinds, genocide, slavery, the most unspeakable tragedies of life.

And we have had the audicity, this period, to call it progress. As did the Nazis. As did the Communists. As does every despot and defender of all that is illiberal and repressive.

When, really, it's just ordinary cyncism and meanspiritedness. It's not a governing philosophy. It's just a way of keeping our more cyncial and meanspirited ways in place without ever having to really reconsider them.

We get better. Slowly. We hurt enough people. We start to feel bad. And we get better. Slowly. Slowly.

Love,
Ben

David Kilcullen and the progress in Iraq

Bill Kristol, at the Weekly Standard, alerts me to this really remarkably thoughtful and powerful description of surge efforts in Iraq by David Kilcullen at Small Wars Journal that should give anyone pause who is so sure that this war is lost that they are not willing to give it a chance.

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

I am reprinting that post, here, in its entirety.

"I’ve spent much of the last six weeks out on the ground, working with Iraqi and U.S. combat units, civilian reconstruction teams, Iraqi administrators and tribal and community leaders. I’ve been away from e-mail a lot, so unable to post here at SWJ: but I’d like to make up for that now by providing colleagues with a basic understanding of what’s happening, right now, in Iraq.

This post is not about whether current ops are “working” — for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I’m not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen—sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations.

Ten days ago, speaking with Austin Bay, I made the following comment:

'I know some people in the media are already starting to sort of write off the “surge” and say "Hey, hang on: we’ve been going since January, we haven’t seen a massive turnaround; it mustn’t be working". What we’ve been doing to date is putting forces into position. We haven’t actually started what I would call the "surge" yet. All we’ve been doing is building up forces and trying to secure the population. And what I would say to people who say that it’s already failed is "watch this space". Because you’re going to see, in fairly short order, some changes in the way we’re operating that will make what’s been happening over the past few months look like what it is—just a preliminary build up.'

The meaning of that comment should be clear by now to anyone tracking what is happening in Iraq. On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual 'surge of operations'. I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.

These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have 'gone quiet' as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

When we speak of 'clearing' an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The 'terrain' we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that '80% of AQ leadership have fled' don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

This is not some sort of kind-hearted, soft approach, as some fire-breathing polemicists have claimed (funnily enough, those who urge us to “just kill more bad guys” usually do so from a safe distance). It is not about being “nice” to the population and hoping they will somehow see us as the “good guys” and stop supporting insurgents. On the contrary, it is based on a hard-headed recognition of certain basic facts, to wit:

(a.) The enemy needs the people to act in certain ways (sympathy, acquiescence, silence, reaction to provocation) in order to survive and further his strategy. Unless the population acts in these ways, both insurgents and terrorists will wither, and the cycle of provocation and backlash that drives the sectarian conflict in Iraq will fail.

(b.) The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby 'hard-wire' the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction. We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.

(c.) Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore can never be eradicated by purely enemy-centric means: he can just go to ground if the pressure becomes too much. BUT, because he needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people. And he can't just 'go quiet' to avoid that threat. He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base. That puts him on the horns of a lethal dilemma (which warms my heart, quite frankly, after the cynical obscenities these irhabi gang members have inflicted on the innocent Iraqi non-combatant population). That's the intent here.

(d.) The enemy may not be identifiable, but the population is. In any given area in Iraq, there are multiple threat groups but only one, or sometimes two main local population groups. We could do (and have done, in the past) enormous damage to potential supporters, 'destroying the haystack to find the needle', but we don't need to: we know who the population is that we need to protect, we know where they live, and we can protect them without unbearable disruption to their lives. And more to the point, we can help them protect themselves, with our forces and ISF in overwatch.

Of course, we still go after all the terrorist and extremist leaders we can target and find, and life has become increasingly 'nasty, brutish, and short' for this crowd. But we realize that this is just a shaping activity in support of the main effort, which is securing the Iraqi people from the terrorists, extremist militias, and insurgents who need them to survive.

Is there a strategic risk involved in this series of operations? Absolutely. Nothing in war is risk-free. We have chosen to accept and manage this risk, primarily because a low-risk option simply will not get us the operational effects that the strategic situation demands. We have to play the hand we have been dealt as intelligently as possible, so we're doing what has to be done. It still might not work, but 'it is what it is' at this point.

So much for theory. The practice, as always, has been mixed. Personally, I think we are doing reasonably well and casualties have been lower so far than I feared. Every single loss is a tragedy. But so far, thank God, the loss rate has not been too terrible: casualties are up in absolute terms, but down as a proportion of troops deployed (in the fourth quarter of 2006 we had about 100,000 troops in country and casualties averaged 90 deaths a month; now we have almost 160,000 troops in country but deaths are under 120 per month, much less than a proportionate increase, which would have been around 150 a month). And last year we patrolled rarely, mainly in vehicles, and got hit almost every time we went out. Now we patrol all the time, on foot, by day and night with Iraqi units normally present as partners, and the chances of getting hit are much lower on each patrol. We are finally coming out of the 'defensive crouch' with which we used to approach the environment, and it is starting to pay off.

It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way. But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing. The politics of the matter then can be decisive, provided the Iraqis use the time we have bought for them to reach the essential accommodation. The Embassy and MNF-I continue to work on these issues at the highest levels but fundamentally, this is something that only Iraqis can resolve: our role is to provide an environment in which it becomes possible.

All this may change. These are long-term operations: the enemy will adapt and we'll have to adjust what we're doing over time. Baq’ubah, Arab Jabour and the western operations are progressing well, and additional security measures in place in Baghdad have successfully tamped down some of the spill-over of violence from other places. The relatively muted response (so far) to the second Samarra bombing is evidence of this. Time will tell, though....

Once again, none of this is intended to tell you 'what to think' or 'whether it’s working'. We’re all professional adults, and you can work that out for yourself. But this does, I hope, explain some of the thinking behind what we are doing, and it may therefore make it easier for people to come to their own judgment.

David Kilcullen is Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force—Iraq. These are his personal views only."

Thanks, David, for some powerfully thoughtful reflections and commitments in our effots in Iraq. I count myself among those who are behind you.