Old in Town Roundup

I've arrived in Chicago! I wouldn't characterize myself as "new in town", since I've already lived in Chicago (indeed, in this very building) before. But I am feeling very, very old as I try to unpack various boxes.

Anyway, here's a roundup:

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The Antisemitism Cow finally speaks (beyond just "MOO", that is)!

A pretty big storm is developing at Ole Miss, where a tenure-track professor was summarily fired from his position after criticizing "powerful, racist donors."

Also in academic freedom, albeit garnering less attention: students at the University of Dallas trying to form a racial justice club offering "a welcoming, inclusive community" are encountering stiff resistance from the student government (and some faculty). Opponents claim -- I swear I'm not kidding -- that the club can't be accepted because it would mean conceding that the university might not already be inclusive and welcoming of all students.

Trump issues a new wave of pardons, with special focus on corrupt GOP politicos and American paramilitary operatives implicated in the murder of civilians. Utterly disgraceful.

An interesting and thoughtful interview with incoming Congressman Jamaal Bowman, with special focus on his relationship with the Jewish community (Bowman ousted longtime Rep. Eliot Engel, who is Jewish, in this year's Democratic primary).

Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck, who is also chair of the state party, announces he will refuse to take the COVID vaccine. The GOP has been flirting with anti-vaxx politics for awhile now, but it couldn't have picked a worse time to topple over the edge.

Fraud Squad! Roundup

In a meeting, I got a phone call from my bank about potentially fraudulent transactions on my credit card. Had I recently ordered $50 worth of fast food pizza? No, I hadn't -- and so the account is frozen, and presumably the charges will be reversed.

An hour later, upon returning to my desk, I had the bizarre joy of seeing a confirmation from Domino's promising me that my "pizza is on the way [to Houston, Texas]!"

Anyway, long story short: I'm getting pizza for dinner tonight.

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Jenny Singer of the Forward interviews Young Gravy, a Black Jewish rapper (and GW student). It's a really interesting and worth your time (I'm saying that not just because I think I played a role in putting the interview together!).

I think I missed this when it came out, but a Texas court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act's adoption rules this past fall, saying that act's preferences for Indian children to stay with Indian families was racially discriminatory against non-Indians. The Judge, incidentally, was Reed O'Connor -- the same guy who just struck down Obamacare. He's certainly setting himself up as the go-to-guy for tip-of-the-spear conservative judicial activism.

Alabama was all set to execute a Muslim inmate -- but refused to allow a Muslim chaplain to be present with him during the execution (they did offer a Christian chaplain, which unsurprisingly the inmate did not consider to be a satisfactory substitute). 11th Circuit stays the execution due to the "powerful Establishment Clause claim" (and plausible RLUIPA claim). Alabama is appealing to the Supreme Court.

A new poll finds that over half of Israeli Jews agree that the controversial "nation-state" law must be either abandoned outright or fixed to confirm the state's commitment to democratic equality for all citizens.

A Cameroonian official has apologized for threatening an ethnic minority group by comparing them to Jews in pre-WWII Germany, namely: "In Germany, there was a very rich community who wielded all economic power .... They (the Jews) were so arrogant that the German people were frustrated. Then one day, a certain Hitler came to power and put them in the gas chambers."

I have no takeaways from the Likud primaries except celebrating Oren Hazan's imminent departure from the Knesset. Goooood riddance.

Iraqi Jews commemorate family members who were "disappeared" by state secret police.

Post-Bacchanalia Roundup

I had my bachelor party this weekend in Chicago. That sounds wilder than it was -- my fiancee and I have the same core friend group (we all went to college together), so we rented an AirBnb and spent the weekend as a group. We did split off Saturday to do our own things (mani/pedis for the gals, an escape room for team boy -- which we completed with seven seconds to spare), but by and large it was a non-traditionally gender-unified event.

Still a blast though.

Anyway, here's some stuff that's gone on in the interim.

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In Foreign Policy, Jacob Levy has a neat essay on the philosophy of my great-grandadviser (the Ph.D. adviser of the Ph.D. adviser of my Ph.D. adviser), Judith Shklar.

Also in FP, a discussion of a possible Israeli-Palestinian confederation -- the first articulation of an outcome to the conflict outside the "classic" two-state solution model which I've found remotely compelling.

Labour's antisemitism policy under Corbyn has basically been "fuck you, Jews" in so many words, but I believe this is the first time a prominent Jewish Labour politician has explicitly said "fuck you" back to him.

Iraq has a long Jewish history, which is memorialized in a giant archive of Jewish artifacts. These artifacts were removed for safekeeping following the U.S. invasion, and unsurprisingly Iraq now wants them back. Problem: virtually no Iraqi Jews live in Iraq anymore, and they want the archives somewhere they can actually access them. For the record, this is a great example of the sort of problem intersectionality was designed to illuminate.

D.C. Circuit upholds funding structure whereby FERC gets its budget from fees assessed to natural gas pipeline projects it approves (against environmental challengers who say that incentivizes them to keep approving pipelines). The more interesting part of the case is a bit buried though -- the court concludes that Pennsylvania's Environmental Rights Amendment does not create an individualized liberty or property interest in a clean environment cognizable under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Meanwhile, the Seventh Circuit concludes that refusing to give an incarcerated transwoman medically-necessary hormone therapy -- and later, forbidding her from taking those hormones herself when she's released on parole -- can give rise to a "deliberate indifference" to medical need claim.

Man calls the police on a Black man over a basketball foul. No, seriously. What's his hashtag going to be? I vote #HardPickHal.

Iraq Cuts Arts Ties to the US over Jewish Artifacts

America's refusal to turn over Jewish artifacts recovered from Iraqi archives has caused that country to cut archaeological cooperation with the United States. I wrote about the dispute in more detail here, but basically there are three major elements:

First, the possibility that Jewish artifacts in Iraq won't be safe due to anti-Semitic pressure in Iraq. Second, the possibility that preserving and displaying such artifacts in Iraq will play an important role in humanizing Jews to Iraqis and reminding Iraqis of the long and vibrant Jewish history there prior to their effective expulsion in the wake of Israel's Independence. And third, the interests of the Iraqi Jewish community itself, many of whom live in Israel and thus would likely not be able to access their own history if it was hosted in Iraq (which refuses to admit Jewish visitors).

They Step Up as We Step Down

President Barack Obama has announced the US will begin a complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, to be completed at the end of the year. This, of course, is another major accomplishment for the Obama administration, and we can all be glad that our troops are finally coming home.

Meanwhile, Turkey has just launched a major invasion of its own into Iraq, where it continues to battle Kurdish rebels seeking an independent homeland based in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey. The current Turkish Prime Minister has promised that Kurdish rebels will "drown in their own blood".

Fortunately, then, anti-war and anti-occupation groups can simply refocus their ire on Turkey, which is invading another sovereign country in an explicit bid to maintain political dominance over a disenfranchised minority group that simply wishes to express national self-determination. That is what will happen, right?

A Loose Coalition of Arguments

Stephen Walt makes an interesting two-step in defending his claims regarding the "Israel Lobby's" influence in getting America to go to war in Iraq. First, he dilutes the hypothesis so much that it ceases to have virtually any normative punch, but becomes descriptively banal. Then, having established that banality, he dresses it back up as something shocking, disturbing, and pernicious, for which we should be thankful to have bold truthsayers like Walt pulling back the curtain.

The first thing Walt does is blur together necessary and sufficient conditions. He asks us to consider what Andrew Sullivan calls a "powerful counter-factual":

What if Bush and Cheney had independently dreamed up the idea of invading Iraq after 9/11, but the plan was openly questioned by Israel, AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and the ADL, on the grounds that it might lead to a quagmire and maybe even strengthen Iran? What if these groups had openly opposed the war, or just quietly pushed for an genuine debate on different options, or simply remained on the sidelines and let members of Congress know that they had their doubts? What if their counsels of restraint had been reinforced by similarly prudent advice from respected think-tanks like the Saban Center at Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)? What if staunchly pro-Israel pundits like Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Kenneth Pollack, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Thomas Friedman, among others, had spent 2002 raising questions about the wisdom of an attack, or arguing as passionately against the war as they did in favor of it? It's possible that Bush & Co. still might have been able to stampede the country to war, but surely it would have been much harder.

In other words, if a large quantity of important beltway players supporting the Iraq War had taken the opposite stance, the push for war would have been considerably more difficult. Ladies and gentleman, consider my mind officially blown. It never occurred to me that major reversals in political support would have political consequences. Of course, one can tell the same story about, inter alia, the Evangelical right, or the congressional Republican leadership. Nobody disputes that "neoconservatives" (who are not synonymous with "the Israel Lobby" -- particularly given the expansive definition Walt provides that I'll discuss below) were in favor of the war in Iraq. What's supposed to be controversial is that they were essentially sufficient to get America to go to war. A claim that they were a necessary part of the pro-war coalition is utterly banal. If important elements of the pro-war coalition were not, in fact, pro-war, the pro-war position would suffer. Yes, duh. Can I get a book deal now?

Now let's go to Walt's, shall we say, expansive definition of the Israel Lobby. It isn't just formal lobbying organizations like AIPAC. Nope, it is

a "loose coalition" of individuals and groups that actively works to promote and defend the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel (i.e., the policy of generous and unconditional U.S. support). Having a favorable view of Israel or generally pro-Israel attitude doesn't make someone part of the Israel lobby; to qualify, a person or group has to devote a significant portion of time, effort or money to promoting that "special relationship."

You may note that this definition is amorphous to the point of incoherency. A "special relationship" isn't the same thing as a policy of "unconditional U.S. support". Many of the folks he characterizes as unquestionably part of The Lobby would, I think, hotly dispute that they are in favor of "unconditional support" for Israel. To "devote a significant portion of time, effort or money" to promote this vague vision is a standard begging for scholarly manipulation.

Indeed, as best I can tell, this standard is just double-speak for "people who publicly advocate views on Israel Stephen Walt disagrees with". It hardly restricts itself to uncritical allies of Israel -- elsewhere in the piece Walt completely gives up the ghost by characterizing J Street and Americans for Peace Now as part of The Lobby under this definition. Now, I speak as a staunch supporter of J Street when I point out that there is no conceivable world in which it is uniformly uncritical of Israel. That is, bluntly, a bizarre claim. If everyone to the right of Jewish Voice for Peace (which is, literally, where Walt places the border) who speaks out on Israel is part of the Israel Lobby, the term encompasses nearly the totality of the American Jewish community. A community which, we might point out, was disproportionately opposed to the Iraq War.

Third, even conceding that it makes sense to speak of the Israel Lobby in Walt's broad, messy brushstrokes, he still falls into a trap we've seen before: that folks who hold a particular set of views on Israel (that Walt finds distasteful) can't possibly hold any other policy positions. Everything that they say, do, or advocate for has to stem, ultimately, from determinations of Israel's best interest. And that's clearly false (and offensive). The absolute most generous interpretation of Walt's evidence is establishing a correlation between Israel Lobby views and support for the Iraq War. But this doesn't imply any sort of causation, and as Andrew Sullivan himself noted, in 2003 he'd have qualified as part of the Israel Lobby under Walt's definition, yet his support had nothing to do with Israel in all "but a peripheral sense." At most, Sullivan writes, "Israel was one factor, if one of the least prominent ones, in their [the neo-conservatives] case."

And Walt's essentially concedes this. Turning back to the testimony of Tony Blair which sparked this debate in the first place, he writes:

I made it clear in my post that Blair's comments were not a "smoking gun" that proved we were right, and I neither suggested nor implied that Blair's testimony demonstrated that Bush went to war at Israel's urging or to accommodate the Israel lobby. I merely noted that Blair had said that concerns about Israel were part of the discussion, and that Israeli officials were consulted as part of the conversation. Indeed, after summarizing Blair's testimony, I wrote:

Notice that Blair is not saying that Israel dreamed up the idea of attacking Iraq or that Bush was bent on war solely to benefit Israel or even to appease the Israel lobby here at home. But Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war."

Yeah, that's pretty peripheral if you ask me. Indeed, to characterize this as even remotely mendacious is absurd. "Concerns about Israel were part of the equation"! You're kidding me! You're telling me that, in determining whether to take a relatively major foreign policy operation (say, invading a country), we including in our deliberations considerations about how the shockwaves would affect regional entities particularly vulnerable to the reverberations? How irresponsible! Clearly, the only patriotic approach is to adopt an appropriate, devil-may-care attitude to how launching a war would affect other countries in the region.

So what are we left with. It's hard to say, mostly because the inconsistent definition Walt provides for the Israel Lobby defies cohesive analysis. But at worst, we have (1) Actors who take certain views on Israel that Walt finds disagreeable (2) were part of a pro-war political coalition, which would (naturally) suffer if they weren't part of it (which is somewhat implicit in the notion of a coalition) (3) whose support for the war seems to have stemmed from policy stances entirely independent of their views on Israel but (4) may have acted to insure that Israeli concerns were "part of the equation" in the deliberations over war.

Shocking.

KBR Trashes Jamie Leigh Jones

You may remember the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, a KBR employee who alleges she was drugged and raped by colleagues of hers while working in Iraq, then locked in a shipping container with no food, water, or outside contact for 24 hours when she reported the crime. KBR then tried to prevent Ms. Jones from getting her day in court by asserting that her allegation was "employment-related" and thus fell under a mandatory arbitration agreement (y'all know my thoughts on those in general). The story sparked the passage of a law written by Al Franken which would prevent such arbitration clauses from being enforced by defense contractors in cases concerning rape, sexual assault, or discrimination (Republicans were stunned when their opposition to the law turned into a political disaster).

But KBR is still fighting. Pilloried in the press, stung by hostile legislation, and losing its case before the 5th Circuit, KBR has petitioned the Supreme Court to grant cert in its case in a last ditch effort to keep Ms. Jones out of court. And its primary strategy is to try and trash the reputation of Ms. Jones:

But having lost at the trial court, again at the appeals court and then in the Senate as the Franken amendment was signed into law, KBR/Halliburton, in its petition to the Supreme Court last week, wasted no time at all in trashing her. While advancing its legal theory that Jones's claim is unquestionably "related to" her employment, it also promises, in a footnote, that "The KBR Defendants intend to vigorously contest Jones's allegations and show that her claims against the KBR Defendants are factually and legally untenable." Er, where do they plan to show all that? In the secret underground arbitration lair of KBR?

In addition to going after her truthfulness in its court pleadings, KBR has mounted a zealous public campaign to "correct the facts" about the Jones litigation—urging, for instance, that "Ms. Jones' allegation of rape remains unsubstantiated" and that she wasn't locked in a shipping container but rather "provided with a secure living trailer." Apparently KBR fails to appreciate the irony of demanding that all of its counter-facts come to light despite its love for secret arbitration.

KBR is now claiming that Ms. Jones has "sensationalize[d] her allegations against the KBR Defendants in the media, before the courts, and before Congress," apparently to experience the joy of being known in public as the victim of rape.

As Senator Franken noted when asked:

"You know where a great place to try arguments is? In court. But they've spent five years fighting against her attempts to have her day there. It seems odd that they wouldn't want to explain their side in the courtroom, since they're willing to in the media."

In any event, one suspects that this will not end well for KBR. Ms. Jones has proven herself to be tough, resilient, and unwilling to back down regardless of the pressure put on her. I fully expect her to beat back this last challenge -- and then cream KBR for their egregious abuses with the full force of the law.

The Iraqi Jewish Archives

One of the artifacts recovered after the US invasion of Iraq were items detailing the long history of Iraq's Jews. Many of these pieces are currently being stored in America, and there is a bit of a fight brewing over whether and under what circumstances they should be returned.

There are, I think, three angles to this.

1) There is the fear that, in a country where "Jew" is a dirty word and anti-Semitism has considerable potency in the public square, the archives will simply not be safe in Iraq. There have already been concerns that Ezekiel's Shrine -- a Jewish holy place within Iraq -- will see its Jewish heritage erased under the guise of "restoration" under pressure by Islamic parties eager to suppress Jewish history and connections to the region.

2) The flip side of number one is the idea that preserving and publicly displaying Jewish cultural history in Iraq is an important way of restoring the values of pluralism and tolerance in that community, and dissipating the view that Jews are their enemies. During the controversy over Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni's possible elevation to a top UN position, one of the things that was concerning was his stated opposition to building a museum of Jewish-Egyptian culture on "anti-Zionist" grounds. This conflation of "Jew" with "Israel" in many parts of the Arab world is deeply problematic. Still more problematic is the ongoing belief that "Jews" aren't in some sense real human beings -- they continue to be perceived as a sort of extra-social malevolent force, based out of Israel, responsible for all global ills. Grounding Jewish lives and experience in their actual historical roots, including areas in the middle east, is important to checking that instinct. Many of the Iraqi officials who are promoting return of the artifacts to their country are making arguments that strongly echo the above. In large part, the debate between the first and second angles is whether a) you believe them and b) whether, even if you think they're genuine, you have confidence in their ability to maintain control over the situation in the face of hostile pressures.

3) The third angle has to do with whose heritage these pieces actually represent: Iraq's, or Iraq's Jews. Oh yes, middle eastern Jews -- how quickly they tend to be forgotten. The richness of Iraq's Jewish history is testament to its status as a centuries-old community that for a considerable time ranked as one of the largest in the world. Unfortunately, during the 20th century, the majority of the community was driven out through violence and intimidation; the current Jewish population of Iraq is estimated at around 10. Not 10,000 -- 10. Representatives of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora are somewhat incensed that their own history will be in the hands of the very people responsible for driving them out. More concretely, since substantial portions of the Iraqi Jewish community now resides in Israel, there is a good chance that any documents remaining inside Iraq will be inaccessible to them, as Iraq continues to have no diplomatic relations with Israel (hey, another victory for boycott policies!). The article indicates that representatives of the Iraqi Jewish community, though upset, are "resigned" that the material likely will be returned there -- which goes to show just how little power and influence that have on the decisions and discourses which affect their lives.

I don't have an answer to these problems -- they are quite vexing. But it is an issue that will have to be addressed somehow, in a way that is both just to all the heirs of the traditions at issue, and that contributes, as much as possible, to peaceful and just reconciliation between the affected communities.

Get Well Soon

I just wanted to send some well wishes to my friend Jeremy, currently deployed in Iraq, who suffered a concussion and an array of minor injuries after an IED exploded several meters away from his position. He got off relatively light -- the brunt of the explosion was taken by an Iraqi army comrade standing next to him, who is currently in stable condition. Jeremy seems to be recovering well, and knowing him he's itching to get back onto the front lines with his platoon (though he was slated to be transferred to a less combative position anyway -- coordinating battalion actions during the evening when the normal leadership is asleep). Knowing his wife, she's less than thrilled at his gung-ho attitude.

Anyway, best wishes to Jeremy to make a full recovery (and also to the unknown Iraqi Army Captain who may have unwittingly saved his life). We're all thinking of you.

Killing Americans

Speaking of things that kill Americans, perhaps Justice Scalia should read this piece by an American military interrogator about the fruits of American torture (H/T):

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

I'd say duh, but that would be too kind to the conservative enablers of this immoral and ultimately lethal regime.

Indeed, in the author's experience, torture isn't just dangerous, it's unnecessary:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Once again, folks could have figured this out from World War II.

The author (writing under a pseudonym for security purposes) is a 14-year military veteran with a background in special forces and counterintelligence. He'll freely tell you that torture is wrong. But it also is unnecessary, and gets Americans killed. Every day we allow this blot upon our constitution to continue, we dishonor his service.

How Mumbai Indicts Iraq (Again)

Obviously, the horrifying attacks in Mumbai, India, continue to be in everyone's thoughts. It seems like the violence is winding down, but the repercussions are likely just beginning. India has faced terrorist violence before. But for some reason, this feels different. It was more organized, more coordinated, and (by the use of gunmen rather than bombs) more visceral than ever before.

Reading USA Today this morning, though, I was struck by how this attack really undermines a central component of how we've been prosecuting our war on terror.

Though it was unclear exactly who orchestrated the attacks, they appear to provide further evidence that the main battleground for Islamist extremists is shifting from Iraq, where violence has fallen dramatically this year, to the democracies of South Asia. Militants are inflicting heavy casualties on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, seizing control of territory from a fragile government in Pakistan and proving they can strike just about anywhere in India.

Some would look at this and say, "victory in Iraq"! And perhaps it is indicative of the fruits of American blood and iron in that country. But if so, so what? If the tangible impact of the Iraq war is simply to have terrorists shift terrain from Iraq to India, we've spent the last five years going in neutral.

The problem is one I brought forward in the very early days of this blog: the overemphasis on sovereign states as the arena for combating terrorists. This, I held, was misplaced, since the very nature of terrorist groups makes them transnational and relatively untied to traditional geographic borders. If we view al-Qaeda as seeking to disrupt the hegemonic power of the Western world (ideally to bring up a new Islamic counterweight), it can accomplish that through operations nearly anywhere in the world. Al-Qaeda could flee the field entirely in Iraq tomorrow, and it wouldn't accomplish anything if they merely reconstituted themselves in South Asia.

The signal of the Mumbai attacks is that we've been looking at the problem all wrong. Cowboy rhetoric of "force being the only language evildoers understand" notwithstanding, it is becoming more apparent that while force is necessary to react to terrorist violence, it is a relatively ineffective weapon for creating an offensive posture. We need to start looking into alternative strategies for stopping terrorist activity before it starts. That's an intelligence issue, in part, but (as much as conservatives hate to admit it) it also is a question of greater engagement with countries and peoples worldwide, and (perhaps more importantly) a greater commitment to inclusion in the world's bounty.

Iraq was the last gasp of the belief that American muscle, alone, could solve any problem. We went into Iraq with the deliberate view that we didn't have to account for any other place or any other people. This was where the terrorists were, we go in, we take 'em out, mission accomplished, let's go home. That has proven to be a fatal error in judgment. And the longer way take to learn from it, the more Mumbai's the democratic world will have to suffer.

Civil Rights Roundup: 08/29/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

The backers of the Arizona initiative seeking to ban affirmative action got a reprieve today, as a judge is willing to give them more time to prove they received the requisite number of valid signatures to get on the ballot.

A suit against American contractor KBR alleges that 12 Nepalese workers were held in slavery in Iraq. They were later kidnapped by insurgents, and all but one was executed.

The Mexican Supreme Court has upheld Mexico City's relatively liberal abortion laws, making it a rare pro-choice foothold in largely anti-abortion Latin America.

Gainesville, Florida voters will have a chance to decide whether to keep civil rights protections for GLBT residents.

California is now adopting guidelines for what to do if gay prisoners want to marry.

To acquire Plan B, you might need a plan b, c, and d.

A UCLA professor on that university's admissions committee is resigning in protest. Professor Tim Groseclose wanted to find out if the school was admitting minority students with lower qualifications, presumably in violation of California's Proposition 209. But UCLA refused to release the data Groseclose said he needed. The professor actually claims to support affirmative action, but is angered by the lack of transparency.

The Black elite is taking special pride in Obama's rise, seeing it as reflective of their own hard work and experience.

It seems like the news is focusing on other issues today....

Another Look

Spencer Ackerman takes a fresh look at the New Republic/Scott Thomas Beauchamp controversy. When I read Franklin Foer's fact-check of the story, I remarked that it did not appear to me that the story needed to be retracted at all -- and certainly, nobody had done anything to justify the vitriol that had been heaped upon both writer and magazine by radical right-wing bloggers. Ackerman's piece only verifies that instinct, and it is well worth the read.

So You Think You Have a Sovereign Nation?

John Derbyshire lays down the law for Iraqis. Democracy? That's for suckahs! We'll do what we want to do in your "country", because we're big, you're little, and we can.

Signal Strength

Dave Meyer has a fantastic post up on the historical practice of America using wars as a form "public relations" or "marketing" -- specifically, marketing that we as a nation are "strong" or have the "will" to impress our desires upon the rest of the world. He begins with Hannah Arendt's retrospective on the Vietnam War, and continues to show how image was always the central element of selling the Iraq War:

In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."

Meyer notes that, insofar as war is used as a signal for will, it requires tremendous message discipline. But as Matt Yglesias points out, such uniformity is effectively impossible in a modern, pluralist democracy -- which is probably why Republican war supporters who are so concerned with the "message" we're sending (to al-Qaeda or Iran or France or whomever) about our "will" have so often resorted to the rhetoric of treason to describe war dissenters, or have engaged in domestic propaganda efforts of questionable veracity (not to mention ethics or legality) to try and keep the American psyche all moving in one public direction.

These are all good points, but Robert Farley, an expert on military affairs, adds that even outside the limitations imposed by American democracy, "signaling" things like "will" relies on several shaky assumptions, which often don't bear themselves out:

1. Signals are unambiguous: The meaning of our signaling is not subject to interpretation, such that different people could, based on different priors, carry away different meanings.

2. Signals always indicate what we want them to indicate: This is related to the first; if we are trying to send a signal of strength, then we send a signal of strength, not a signal of mean, stupid, crazy, etc.

3. We never develop a bad reputation, except for weakness: This is related to the first two; our effort at signaling strength doesn't have reputational costs. If we invade his country, the Other will understand us as strong, rather than as brutal, imperialistic, crusading, evil, etc.

4. No one ever considers that we might be trying to deceive through signaling: This is probably the most important. If signaling is about creating a reputation for strength, and if a reputation for strength is a positive good, then obviously there's an incentive to lie about being strong. The entire premise of signaling depends on no one noticing that we have an incentive to lie about our own strength.

5. We know our own strength: Our effort to communicate the true level of our resolve is dependent on knowing what that level is. However, the resolve of the American people to crush enemies of the American public is a value that is unknown to anyone, including our leadership. At best we're guessing, which basically means that every effort to signal is essentially deception.

This doesn't mean that American actions don't communicate messages that we should be cognizant of. But it does mean that a) we can't pretend like "strength" or "will" are the only signals we'll ever send -- even if that's what we intend to, and b) that it's probably a bad idea to launch entire foreign policy adventures based on the blurry concept of communicating American willpower.

We'll Stay Until We Can Stay In Peace

John McCain has been complaining about Democrats making hay over his "100 years in Iraq" comment. He says that they're implying he wants the war to continue for 100 years, while he claims that he's merely saying we could stay in Iraq indefinitely once peace has been achieved. Howard Dean has responded that McCain's missing the point -- Americans oppose staying in Iraq in any capacity 100 days from now, much less 100 years, and that's what gives their ads punch. This point is buttressed by the fact that the ads never use the word "war", but I'll certainly concede that the ads are playing on the ambiguity to achieve maximum effect.

But apropos the controversy, Hendrik Hertzberg, who gave the quote its (extended) context at the time it was spoken, I think nails the real problem for McCain's protestations of innocence over "100 years":

McCain's wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

This is not a plan most Americans are comfortable with. So why shouldn't the Democrats make hay out of it?

Via Josh Marshall

Sistani Sanctions Sadr

This ain't good news, ladies and gentleman. Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, far and away the most influential religious figure among Iraqi Shi'ites, is telling Sadr not to disband his militia prior to the upcoming elections. Even if, as Publius says, this isn't Sistani "siding" with Sadr, it's still hardly a data point in favor of current American strategy.

I've said for quite some time that Sistani may well be the key to the game for America in Iraq. If that's so, we're beginning to lose, badly.

FM 3-24

FM 3-24 is the Army and Marines' counter-insurgency manual. It was written in part by one Sarah Sewall, who is now an adviser on the Obama campaign. In the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett, not seeming to know this, blasts her along with Samantha Power as embodying "dovish idealism" in the course of his critique of the "Obama Doctrine." It's a lot of juvenile giggling over "climates of fear" (because serious people know that fear distracts us from the important task of killing people) and very little in the way of hard-nosed analysis.

In addition to pointing out some other bone-headed errors ("Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you dumb douche."), Spencer Ackerman helps elucidate why the "critique" is substantively flat out wrong.

What Barnett will never understand is that the real danger from al-Qaeda isn't just the people who've joined al-Qaeda. It's the much larger cohort of people who could join al-Qaeda, and the larger-still cohort of those who would not actively help the U.S. destroy al-Qaeda. Those latter two population clusters are where any anti-al-Qaeda strategy has to focus. And there, yeah, climates of fear -- in other words, the experience of people pinioned between the militia on the corner and the U.S.-backed regime that it fights. Those people come to hate the U.S. Lots of them. And it only takes a small number of them to decide to act on that hatred.

....look at who AQI is. According to this fascinating briefing that Bits Bacon gave last week, we're talking not just about fanatics. We're talking about the people brainwashed by al-Qaeda into coming to Iraq to blow themselves up -- brainwashed thanks to propaganda victories that the Weekly Standard's chosen policies, like the Iraq war and torture, have yielded. That's the swamp that Dean Barnett and his homies will not only fail to drain, but they'll expand, over and over and over again, no matter how decisively the last five years have shattered everything they believe in.

We'll never win a war like this if we keep rebuilding our enemy in the midst of destroying it. Barnett and his crew just aren't bright enough to grasp that, or how to avoid it. So we need a new leadership that can.

One of the best arguments for an Obama presidency is that he has been bringing together some of the brightest experts in the world, from all backgrounds, together in his campaign. I'm not saying that the best and brightest always have the right answer. But if there is one thing we've learned from this administration, it's that trusting questions of national security to politicized amateurs is a luxury we can no longer afford. More than any other candidate, Obama offers the chance to break free from that trap.

Via Balloon Juice

Power On

Is Samantha Power coming back? In the course of defending comments that Obama might not automatically draw down troops upon becoming President ("Take for example that 3 am phone call [from Clinton's campaign commercial]... She is not going to answer the phone and play a voicemail she recorded in 2007. That is crazy. She is going to judge the situation in 2009. Of course she is going to take into account what the generals have to say about the Iraq situation and what they are saying on the ground."), she added:

And, to the delight of many in the crowd, she even hinted that she could be part of that hypothetical cabinet. "Because of the kind of campaign that Senator Obama has run," Power said, "it seemed appropriate for someone of my Irish temper to step aside, at least for a while. We will see what happens there."

How awesome would that be? Also, good response to the substantive attack.

We Can't Win. We Can't Leave.

Most shrewd military observers, writes William Arkin, now believe we cannot win in Iraq. Unfortunately, as David Brooks writes, a Democrat who actually tried to withdraw from Iraq would immediately sink his or her Presidency into a partisan mosh pit from which it might never emerged. But if that President decides to delay withdrawal, the left flank of the party will go ballistic.

While 2009 will be a welcome relief from the current presidency, lets not forget just how doomed we are.

Via Kevin Drum