slacktivist

Dover and Just Wars

Mark Benjamin of Salon points out that former Vice President Dick Cheney and retired Gen. Tommy Franks just aren't that bright.

Benjamin didn't put it that starkly himself, but that's the inescapable conclusion. He recently spoke with Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media about what Franks called the "Dover effect" (see "The True Cost of War"). The occasion for this conversation was the Obama administration's reversal of the policy, in place since 1991, prohibiting the publishing of photographs of flag-draped coffins from Dover Air Force Base. Here's Benjamin on the background and alleged rationale for the former policy:

The original policy was actually written in 1991 by someone everyone’s heard of, Dick Cheney, who at that time was Secretary of Defense. He put that policy in place under the first Bush administration, just on the eve of the first Gulf War, to prevent photographs of those caskets. ...

Early in the Bush administration, [Gen.] Tommy Franks coined the term “the Dover effect,” and what he was referring to was he believed that there was only a certain number of images of flag-draped coffins that the American public was willing to see, willing to put up with, before support for a war begins to fade.

Franks' notion of the "Dover effect" was shaped by Vietnam and applied to Iraq. Reflecting on both of those wars, Lt. Gen. William E. Odom suggested a very different lesson: "There is no way to win a war that is not in your interests," he said.

That's not a difficult or a theoretical concept. It's just a simple statement of a basic principle like "Fire is hot" or "water is wet." Yet somehow Franks and Cheney were not -- are not -- able to grasp this. They still think that the U.S. can win a war that is not in its interest if only it tries really hard. Matt Yglesias calls this the "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" -- the notion that anything, even self-contradiction, is possible with sufficient willpower.

"There is no way to win a war that is not in your interests."

You can almost picture Franks and Cheney dimly staring at that written on a chalkboard, trying and failing to comprehend.  "I guess what it means," Cheney says finally, "is that it's difficult to maintain public support for a war that is not in your interests." And from there the two men go on to theorize about the "Dover effect" and the best ways to hide the sorts of images that might lead to public protest.

An important corollary to "There is no way to win a war that is not in your interests" is this: There is no way for a just nation to win an unjust war. Franks and Cheney, like all adherents of the Green Lantern Theory, can't tolerate the idea of just and unjust wars. The just war tradition arose as an effort to restrain evil and suffering. Such restraint, these willpower worshippers believe, inhibits the unrestrained force of will required for victory. In the words of the leading philosopher of this movement, all such restraints lead to a scenario in which "Somebody wouldn't let us win."

But while the just war tradition is primarily concerned with morality, that is not its only function or benefit. For the purposes of our discussion here, the just war tradition is less important as a means of restraining evil and suffering and more important as a means of restraining self-defeating and counterproductive stupidity.

Appreciate that Franks' notion of the "Dover effect" only makes sense if one believes that war is an option -- a choice that a supposedly fickle and weak-willed public may choose to stop choosing.

If this were actually the case -- if a given war really were optional, then it would also be a war that we should not have been fighting in the first place. It would be, in other words, an unjust war. And, therefore, it would be a war that a just nation cannot win -- a war for which "victory" is not one of the possible outcomes.

This is true regardless of public opinion. No amount of public support can make an unjust war winnable.

And just as an unjust war is unsustainable, with or without public support, so too protest against a just war tends to be unsustainable, with or without success on the battlefield.

Consider the basic criteria for what constitutes a just war: a just cause/redress of wrong (not merely that a wrong has occurred or exists, but that this particular action -- i.e., war -- will redress that wrong); right intention; legitimate authority; last resort; probability of success; proportionality.

A just war must meet all of those criteria. When that is the case, the images of flag-draped coffins at Dover tend to reinforce and redouble the public's support.

A unjust war is any that fails to meet one or more of these criteria. When that is the case, public sentiment will turn against it no matter how well you hide the wounded and dead or how many flags you wave. And this will not happen because the public is weak-willed or fickle, but because the public will correctly conclude, eventually, that any cost is too high for an unjust and therefore unwinnable war.

Take those principles one by one and this becomes clearer.

If a given war is demonstrably due to a just cause/redress of wrong, then the public will tend to support it. You'll still have conscientious objectors and pacifists, of course, but they'll be more likely to be driving ambulances and rolling bandages than to be organizing sit-ins or marching in the streets.

If a given war is demonstrably the last resort then not only is widespread public opposition unlikely, such opposition is moot. Such opposition would mean calling for an alternative that has been shown not to exist.

(The trickiest of these principles for what we're discussing here may be the matter of legitimate authority, about which more later.)

The impulse to hide the cost of war from the public is an indication that the war in question is unlikely to receive the support of the public. It is an indication, in other words, that the public is likely to recognize that the war is not in its interest -- and that it is unjust.

Attempts to deceive the public into supporting such a war may succeed in the short term, but that won't matter one way or the other when it comes to the outcome of such a doomed and counterproductive war.

Band of outlaws

“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”

--- The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton

Ron Suskind describes one of several smoking guns presented in his latest book, The Way of the World:

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD ... the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from [former Iraq Intelligence Chief Tahir Jalil Habbush] to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al-Qaida organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

Well, yeah, that was illegal, and exactly the kind of high crime the founders had in mind when they invented impeachment. So normally, in a healthier democracy, that would be a big deal. But ours isn't a healthy democracy, and the Bush administration has committed -- and admitted -- so many of those that one more hardly seems like news. This is a president, after all, who brags about warrantless wiretapping on American citizens.

So, yes, if you're still thinking that laws and the Constitution and conventional morality somehow still apply to this bunch, then you should check out Suskind's book for a fine summary of the prosecution's slam-dunk case for impeachment.

But that's not my main point here. My complaint here is slightly different: This particular crime, this forged letter and disinformation campaign conducted against the American people, was too late to do any good. Manufacturing a pretext for war only works if it's done before the invasion occurs.

I'm not saying I approve of this kind of criminal deception. It's sleazy, illegal and just plain wrong. Manufacturing a false pretext for war is Very Bad. It is only done when the war in question doesn't have an actual pretext, which is to say when the war was not actually necessary. So we're talking about making up lies to excuse sending young people to kill and die when they didn't need to do either. Very, Very Bad.

But it's not the worst alternative. The worst alternative is what the Bush administration chose to do instead: Assert it's right to go to war without a pretext. The former is the action of an outlaw government. The latter is the action of a lawless government. If forced to choose, I'll take the outlaw over the the lawless every time. Neither choice is good, but we'd still be better off being governed by people who break the law than by people who glibly dismiss the very idea of law itself.

When it came to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration took an approach somewhere in between these two Very Bad options of law-breaking and law-abolishing. They manufactured a pretext (several, in fact, some of them contradictory) but they didn't really put much effort into it. They were intent on breaking the law, but they didn't much care whether or not they got caught.

Thus we saw poor Colin Powell disgracing himself at the U.N. with white powder from the prop room, drawings of WMD and mistranslated radio intercepts. Powell himself called that PowerPoint presentation "bullshit," and no one in the room that day found it persuasive. (It dazzled the wide-eyed rubes at The Washington Post editorial board, but that's not much of an achievement.) The whole effort seemed like the kind of last-minute, half-baked work done by a lazy, careless student. It was just barely enough to provide a fig leaf for members of Congress who had already decided that war would be really, really neat, but for the most part the Bush administration just didn't seem to care whether or not their false pretexts really seemed credible. They weren't so much trying to get away with breaking the law as they were trying to demonstrate that, in their view, the law didn't apply to them.

That was even clearer when it came to the discussion of whether or not the proposed invasion of Iraq was a just war. This was an entirely one-sided discussion. No one who looked at the argument for invasion was able to reconcile this with the jus ad bello criteria of that tradition. So how did the Bush administration -- and their many surrogate pundits -- respond to this criticism? They didn't. An outlaw government might have lied, making up reasons why the invasion was justifiable, but this lawless government didn't bother to do even that. The invasion would not be a just war said everyone from John Paul II to the faculty of the war college and the administration's response was not to argue that it was, but to say, in essence, "Just war tradition? F--- that."

In that case, at least, they weren't abolishing an actual law. The just war tradition is only that, a tradition. It isn't written into the Constitution, nor was it ratified as the law of the land in any of the treaties upholding international law (though it does parallel much of that international law). But it does provide another glimpse of the Bush administration's tendency to claim that ignoring the rules -- whether they be moral traditions or legally binding statutes -- is their prerogative.

All of which is why I found it weirdly encouraging, almost, to read Seymour Hersh's description of an idea being kicked around in a brainstorming session in Vice President Dick Cheney's office:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war [with Iran]. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

I'm glad this Tonkinesque scheme was rejected, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such a thing was even being considered. This silly false-flag operation was to have been carried out with the explicit purpose of deceiving the American people and the Congress -- all of which would have been illegal. But that's what I find hopeful here: They're thinking like mere criminals again, like outlaws.

All of that, again, is Very Bad, but not as bad as the alternative of claiming that the law does not apply to them, that the law does not matter, that it can be not just broken, but ignored with impunity. The Bush administration seems to have backed away, slightly, from its agenda of abolishing the rule of law and to have gone back to merely trying to break the law without getting caught. That's progress.

Sort of.

Un-natural

On Monday in London, appearing at a press conference with President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown endorsed Bush's strategy for the ongoing occupation of Iraq. And Brown did so using one of Bush's signature absurdities.

Here is Brown from the official transcript:

Can I just say that in Iraq there is a job to be done and we will continue to do the job, and there's going to be no artificial timetable.

"Artificial timetable" is one of Bush's favorite phrases when discussing the occupation. It appears more than 800 different times in the speeches, press releases and official statements posted on WhiteHouse.gov. Yet for all of that, I still have a hard time accepting that the president really means what he's saying here, because what he's saying here is insane.

To say that America's strategy in Iraq must not be based on an "artificial timetable" means that America must not have a strategy in Iraq. It is to say that we're just sitting back and watching events there unfold according to some natural timetable, some organic timetable unshaped by art or artifice. America is not acting according to a plan or a strategy but is, rather, a spectator to this serendipitous, windblown timetable. Que sera sera.

Military intervention is, by definition, artificial. It means you are relying on military force to force events to occur that would not simply occur naturally without such an emphatic application of artifice. If you're not willing to force a particular outcome, then you shouldn't be sending in forces. If you're not willing to set "artificial timetables," then you have no business sending in the Army.

To say, as Bush has repeatedly and Brown has now parroted, that "We will continue to do the job, and there's going to be no artificial timetable" is the same as saying that there is no military solution -- that the military is powerless to affect or effect the hoped for outcome. If the military is not capable of producing that outcome, then why keep them there? What "job" is there for them to continue to do?

How many years must the soldiers stay there? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

A third possibility

"Attempts to confront or wake up patients during the events frequently lengthens the parasomnia episode and may induce resistance or violence from the patient."
-- WebMD's emedicine entry on Somnambulism

In comments for the previous entry, Doctor Science points us to an insightful post from Kit Whitfield (aka Praline) that suggests a possible third explanation for the insane popularity of the Munich Analogy -- an explanation other than the obvious ones of unbelievable stupidity or willful dishonesty.

To review, briefly, this analogy is employed to suggest that any response to hostile nations other than Kill All the Bad People is mere appeasement. This assertion is deeply confused and irreconcilable with the facts of any given case, with history and with any prospect for effectiveness. It claims that every enemy currently demanding our attention is ≥ Hitler and that therefore said enemy will respond only to the application of unrestrained lethal force (which is to say, they cannot be expected to respond, only to be exterminated in their unalterably non-responsive state). It claims that any approach other than such extermination is naive and ineffectual and thus the moral and practical equivalent of unconditional surrender. For proponents of the Munich Analogy, there is therefore one and only one possible response to hostility: extermination.

This is brutally, self-destructively stupid. The slightest thought or exploration exposes the idea as nonsense. It seems impossible that any sentient being could find the idea persuasive. The fact that someone is capable of speech, therefore, can be taken as proof that he is too smart to credibly believe what he is saying when he invokes the Munich Analogy.

In the previous post, I suggested there could be only one other possible option: that these people don't believe what they are saying, i.e., that they are saying something they inescapably know is not true, i.e., that they are lying.

But of course there is another option. When someone says something that they are smart enough to know is insanely false they may be lying, or they may just be insane. They may, somehow, have come to believe that this insane thing is true. (If insane strikes you as too strong a term, substitute "deluded" or "delusional." But keep in mind that we're talking about a form of delusion that leads inexorably to an exterminationist "Kill All the Bad People" mentality -- the same mentality that is universally described, in its aftermath from Sarjevo to Kigali, as "madness.")

Where does such delusion come from? How does someone become convinced that this unreal madness makes any kind of sense at all?

Here is where I will turn to KW/Praline, writing about "Macho Sue":

The essential story structure of a Macho Sue tends to revolve around untouchable pride. If love means never having to say you're sorry, being Macho Sue means the whole of reality loves you. Typically, Macho Sue's storyline follows a certain trajectory: he begins by acting egregiously, picking or provoking fights and causing problems. However much the ensuing difficulties can be laid at his door, Macho Sue is not about to apologize, in any way. So the problems continue -- only to be salvaged by some immense reversals that give the impression that he was right all along. The man he insulted turns out, suddenly, to be a bad guy. The woman who dislikes him falls into his strong arms when he solves a problem that is not the same problem he caused for her. People change their personalities, storylines shift and flip like a mechanical maze popping up new paths and lowering old gates in order to keep Macho Sue from ever, ever having to backtrack. As John Wayne says, "Never say sorry -- it's a sign of weakness."

Similarly, Macho Sue's suspicion of the unfamiliar is inherently right, because he already embodies all that is good and right: if something were good, he would already be doing it. Hence, anything new to him is some sort of corruption of the proper way of doing things. Usually it's assumed that Macho Sue has a code of honor that is at heart the right one, that if people disapprove of his behavior it's only because they don't understand him and his righteousness, that his code of honor is never found inadequate to a situation, and that he never falls below it. It's not only apologizing that's considered too emasculating for him to endure, it's learning. For his character to be improved and matured by encountering new circumstances would be a humiliating admission that he wasn't just as he should be from the beginning.

That passage is about a particular species of bad fiction, but it applies just as well to a particular species of bad person. The flaw in both cases is the same: characters incapable of change and growth. (I'm reminded of a saying from church: "God loves you just the way you are, but God loves you too much to let you stay that way.")

Characters that cannot grow, that see no need to grow, cannot adjust to reality and so they force reality to adjust to them. Funny thing, though, about reality: It doesn't care what you think. And it's got a nasty habit of reasserting itself with a vengeance. How does that proverb go? "Untouchable pride goeth before destruction, and a Macho Sue before a fall." Something like that.

I'm not sure that the self-deluded exterminationist is in an entirely separable category from the mere liar. The primary audience is different, but the act is the same. Yet where the liar is wholly willful, the self-deluded fool is only partly willful, and that "partly" may provide a toe-hold of hope ("There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead ..."). Neither utter stupidity nor wholly willful duplicity can be engaged, but delusion suggests at least the possibility of a productive response.

Here is where I wish I could tell you how best to present such a response. Instead, annoyingly, this turns out to be one of those posts where I conclude by asking you to supply the conclusion. Is such delusion something that can be engaged? And if so, how? Anybody found an approach that works?

Look at their shoes

Matthew Yglesias recommends Jeffrey Record's monograph, "Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s."

I realize no one is going to read that and think, "Ooooh, a monograph! How exciting!" But if you've got a crazy uncle/co-worker/president who makes a habit of invoking Neville Chamberlain to dismiss any hesitation to invade Iraq/bomb Iran/annihilate Fredonia, then Record's thoughtful separation of reality and myth may come in handy. Record can't be dismissed as a dirty hippy, and his paper was published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College -- so he's got the kind of hawkish credentials to which your crazy uncle/co-worker/president likes to pay lip service.

Much of the monograph is remedial history -- an explanation of why what he calls the "Munich Analogy" isn't really applicable even to Munich. But let's jump ahead to Record's conclusion:

Invocations of the Munich Analogy to Justify Use of Force Should Be Closely Examined.

Such invocations have more often than not been misleading because security threats to the United States genuinely Hitlerian in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945. Though the Munich analogy’s power as a tool of opinion mobilization is undeniable, no enemy since Hitler has, in fact, possessed Nazi Germany’s combination of military might and willingness -- indeed, eagerness -- to employ it for unlimited conquest. This does not mean the United States should withhold resort to force against lesser threats. Nor does it mean that Hitlerian threats are a phenomenon of the past; an al-Qaida armed with deliverable nuclear weapons or usable biological weapons would pose a direct and much more lethal threat to the United States than Nazi Germany ever did.

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

That's all quite thoughtful, reasonable and factually sound. The problem here, though, is that the people Record is responding to don't give a damn about thought, reason or facts. They are not arguing in good faith.

No one who invokes Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Analogy is arguing in good faith. That goes for your crazy uncle, your co-worker, President Bush and John McCain. Just look at their shoes. Are the laces tied? No one smart enough to be capable of tying their own shoelaces is stupid enough to really believe what they're saying when they invoke this analogy.

The one-size-fits-all Munich template requires that we pretend that all diplomacy is capitulation. It requires that we pretend that containment, deterrence, isolation, sanctions, international pressure, inspections, soft power, summit meetings, aid, withholding aid, trade and every other form of possible influence whether political, economical or cultural are all just cowardly euphemisms for surrender.

To really believe that, one would have to be sublimely ignorant of history, geography, politics and the basic vocabulary of the English language. That level of perfect ignorance takes too much effort to achieve and sustain for anyone to master it accidentally.

It is simply not possible that these people are sincere. They do not -- they cannot -- believe what they are saying.

So there's no point in responding to them by patiently attempting to explain that diplomacy does not equal capitulation. Anyone who really required such an explanation wouldn't be capable of understanding it.

Discussions of civility often focus on the superficial, such as avoiding name-calling and not using dirty words. But those minor transgressions against civility are nothing compared to the fundamental duplicity of the sort practiced by those crying "appeasement" and "Chamberlain" at every turn. Such duplicity and dishonesty precludes civility, it makes honest conversation and dialogue impossible.

When confronted with such disingenuousness, then, the only way to defend civility is to put those lying mofos on notice by calling bullshit. That's not a dirty word, it's a precisely accurate and appropriate response.

Bombing the prize

National Public Radio's Morning Edition presented an interesting report today on the U.S. Army's internal debate: "Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within." NPR's Guy Raz interviewed a series of leading military strategists to provide a useful description of this focus on counterinsurgency:

The counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the use of minimal force, with the intent of winning the hearts and minds of a civilian population. ...

"I would say that Gen. Petraeus' promotion is an affirmation of the fact that the counterinsurgency doctrine he wrote and the counterinsurgency strategy that he implemented in Iraq was successful," says Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the Army's top experts on counterinsurgency doctrine.

... Nagl was based in Anbar province during a 2003-04 tour in Iraq, and he says it was there that he realized the U.S. Army had gotten itself tangled up in an insurgency.

...He began helping write the Army's counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

... Col. Peter Mansoor, a top aide to Gen. Petraeus, also helped write the manual. Mansoor, who spoke from Baghdad, is part of Gen. Petraeus' famed brain trust of advisers, a group of officers and civilians who live and breathe counterinsurgency doctrine. "The people are the prize in a counterinsurgency operation. They are the key terrain, if you will, on which victory or defeat rests."

I appreciate this "the people are the prize" approach. It makes sense to me.

The problem for Mansoor and Nagl, however, is that this report aired on NPR following the morning's main headlines. That included a report, also from Baghdad, on the fighting in that city's largest slum, Sadr City.

That district is sometimes referred to as a "neighborhood," which is misleading. The population of Sadr City is about the same as that of Brooklyn, jammed into an area less than a quarter as large. It's home to 2.5 million people, including thousands of Shiite militiamen from a Shiite faction that U.S. forces have alternated between wooing and trying to crush (at the moment, they're in trying-to-crush mode).

For the last nine days, NPR reported, the U.S. has been hitting Sadr City with airstrikes. "Airstrikes" implies a more targeted, more intentionally discriminate approach than crude carpet bombing, but how precisely discriminate can such strikes really be when directed at a densely populated slum that's home to almost 1 of every 10 Iraqi civilians?

If "the people are the prize," then we're bombing the hell out of the prize. That seems unlikely to be an effective way to win hearts and minds or to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

Imagine if the FBI announced a new strategy to combat the Brighton Beach-based Russian mafia. For the next nine days, they say, Brooklyn will be the focus of military airstrikes. Don't worry about all the innocent New Yorkers, the FBI says, our missiles are really quite precise, the maps and intel guiding them are flawless, and compared to Sadr City, Brooklyn is sparsely populated. The off-chance of a bit of collateral damage couldn't possibly outweigh Brooklynites' gratitude for the attempt to liberate them from the lethal criminals living in their midst. Right?

The U.S. Army's internal "debate" that NPR reports presents two competing philosophies. In old-fashioned, conventional war, the military conducts all-out conflict to destroy an enemy nation. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers. In 21st-century counterinsurgencies, the military conducts wars of liberation to free oppressed people. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers.

I suppose what we need to do now is to sit down with the 2.5 million residents of Baghdad's most crowded district and explain to them this important philosophical distinction.

All She Wants to Do Is Dance

Here's NPR's Dina Temple-Raston this morning, describing a beloved woman, a fixture of her community who's been driving children to school for 28 years:

She is so popular her nickname is "Dollar;" she says that is because everyone is chasing her to drive their children.

[She] is a big woman — both tall and round. She has long, wild red hair and is partial to tight-fitting, leopard-skin tops and oversized gold costume jewelry. She is the kind of woman who lights up a cigarette and offers to read the fortunes revealed from the grounds in coffee cups.

"Dollar's" real name is Azhar Abbas. She drives her van full of schoolchildren in Al-Andalus, "a prosperous neighborhood of two-story houses on the southeast side of Baghdad." Temple-Raston included a profile of her in a longer piece titled "Iraqi Women Face Risks Behind the Wheel."

In this country where nearly every woman on the street is either veiled or in a long, black abaya, Abbas stands out. The only time she wears a headscarf, she says, is when she buys gas.

"All the gas stations here are controlled by the Mehdi Army and special guards, so to get gas I have to wear a headscarf," she says, holding it up and laughing.

"The other day I went to the petrol station without my headscarf on and they told me next time I better start wearing it," she says.

When her young sons told her it was just too dangerous for her to keep driving, Abbas told them it was impossible for her to stop. Driving was in her blood.

That initial description of Abbas in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry reminded me of several larger-than-life women I have known -- people of whom I'm enormously fond for their love of life and their cheerfully boisterous insistence that the world deal with them on their own terms. But as courageous in their own way as those women are, none of them lives in a place like Baghdad. None of them drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam's dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war.

Read or listen to the rest of Temple-Raston's piece on the perils facing women behind the wheel in Iraq and appreciate that this is what Abbas faces every day.

Azhar Abbas is awesome.

If you're looking for a hero from this miserable war, here's a good one. And if you say a prayer tonight, remember to mention her name.

Karzai: Stop bombing

Scott Pelley of CBS' 60 Minutes spoke with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the use of U.S. and NATO air power in his country.

"The United States is here to help the Afghan people. The Afghan people understand that mistakes are made. But five years on, six years on, definitely, very clearly, they cannot comprehend as to why there is still a need for air power," Karzai explains.

Asked if he is asking the American government to roll back the air strikes, Karzai says, "Absolutely. Oh, yes, in clear words."

Karzai told 60 Minutes he delivered those words, privately, to President George W. Bush. But he decided to take the message public in this interview. "And I want to repeat that, alternatives to the use of air force. And I will speak for it again through your media," he says.

"You're demanding that?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Karzai says.

American air strikes can be impressively accurate. Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf made that point repeatedly and effectively during his frequent press briefings in the first Gulf War. He loved to show one particular piece of video, which appeared to show a U.S. missile being fired down a chimney with pinpoint deadly aim.

The primary intended audience for Schwartzkopf's briefings was not the millions of Americans watching on CNN, but rather the thousands of Iraqi military leaders also watching on CNN. For that latter audience, the chimney-bomb video was a brilliant and effective piece of deceptively intimidating propaganda.

The problem, 16 years later, is that Schwartzkopf's secondary, American audience still believes his mythmaking. Even some of his successors in the American military seem to have fallen for it. So Americans do not question the billions of dollars spent on newer, ever more sophisticated and "smarter" high-tech bombs and missiles. And American military leaders -- even Gen. David Petraeus, who famously "wrote the book" on counterinsurgency -- still view air power as a valuable and necessary tool in our wars of liberation.

But after 16 years of almost daily air strikes -- the bombing never stopped during the interim between the two Gulf wars -- no one in Iraq believes this anymore. They know better. They know from what they have seen with their own eyes for more than a decade that it is not true that American air strikes always destroy their intended target with precision. The truth, rather, is that American air strikes usually destroy their intended target and everything adjacent to it, and that the intended target does not always turn out to be what we thought it was. The most sophisticated and accurate targeting systems are only as precise as the maps and the intelligence that tells us what we're shooting at

And even when we are certain what we're shooting at, we're still using these incredibly precise targeting systems for delivering imprecise weapons. All the dazzling technology of our Predator drones and our satellite guidance systems are as amazingly fine-tuned as those 21st-century robot surgeons. But in the case of American air power, the robot surgeon is employing not a scalpel, but a blunt-edged, six-foot broadsword. It's not surprising, then, that our would-be patients -- the people of Afghanistan and Iraq -- are not keen about going under the knife of our so-called surgical strikes.

60 Minutes' Pelley also interviewed "Air Force Col. Gary Crowder ... deputy director of the Combined Air Operations Center, which runs the air war over both Afghanistan and Iraq." Crowder seems like a thoughtful, principled man, sounding like Augustine or Aquinas as he explained to Pelley the jus in bello criteria of proportionality -- something the American military tries to account for with great seriousness.

Asked what he means by " proportionality," Crowder tells Pelley, "If we know that there is a sniper on a roof and the roof is in the middle of a mosque which is a protected site or in the middle of a very populated area, then dropping a 2,000 pound weapon on that would not be proportional to going after the sniper."

"Two men with AK-47s run into a house. Do you bomb the house?" Pelley asks.

"In some circumstances, we will bomb the house," says Crowder. "It is entirely dependent upon the circumstances on the ground, and the ground commander's assessment of that particular situation."

In the heat of battle, of course, military commanders don't have the luxury of time in considering this moral and ethical calculus. Marc Garlasco seems a bit haunted by his role in those decisions as he discussed it with Pelley:

"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes his team was authorized to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.

"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.

Garlasco appreciates the effort American military commanders take to minimize civilian casualties, because he himself was one of those military commanders:

"I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians," Garlasco points out.

"If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?" Pelley asks.

"Because the Taliban are violating international law," says Garlasco, "and because the U.S. just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs."

But just because "the only thing they can do is drop bombs," Garlasco notes, it doesn't mean this is an effective, useful or productive strategy:

"You have to ask yourself, is a mid-level thug worth nine dead civilians? But it goes beyond that. You're not talking about just losing nine dead civilians. You're also talking about violent protests throughout the country, requesting a democratically elected government be taken down, you then take people who maybe were in a pro-government area, and all of a sudden you're turning them against you, and turning them towards the Taliban," Garlasco says.

Garlasco now works as a senior military analyst for the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch. If you think that means he's become some kind of dirty hippie peacenik, you're mistaken. Take a look, for example, at this thoughtful report, "The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq." That report takes into account not only moral and ethical considerations and the requirements of international law, but also the ways in which so-called "collateral damage" damages and undermines America's purported strategic aims in Iraq.

That, as Karzai said, is the problem with the continuing extensive use of air strikes in the American-led "liberation" of Afghanistan and Iraq. Air strikes are a very effective, but indiscriminate, means of killing people. In counterinsurgencies like these, indiscriminate killing empowers and strengthens the enemy. On balance, American air strikes in Afghanistan benefit the Taliban more than they benefit NATO. On balance, American air strikes in Iraq benefit the insurgency more than they benefit American military aims.

In both countries, we're bombing our way to defeat.

"To return just for a moment to the bombing at Kapisa," Pelley addresses President Karzai. "A rocket was fired at a U.S. base there. It missed. No one was hurt. And yet, the response was to drop 4,000 pounds of explosives on that neighborhood."

"That is wrong," the president says.

"They hit what they were aiming at," Pelley points out.

"That is a mistake," Karzai saya. "I know that. It may be at times careless. A careless mistake, but not deliberate."

"There is one young boy who is the sole survivor from that house," Pelley tells Karzai. "A seven-year-old boy named Mujib. We asked him what he thought of the Americans and as you might expect, he said, 'I hate the.'"

"Naturally," Karzai agrees.

"That doesn't bode well for the future," Pelley says.

"Yeah, it doesn't."

Repost: Torturing the cat

The following was originally posted on May 20, 2003 on my old Blogspot site. The permanent links to those archives have gotten bloggered, and since I'd like to be able to link to this post in the future, I'm reposting it here.

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"The most critical time in the history of the world"

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

-- Walker Percy, in The Last Gentleman

Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul lately has been fruitfully drawing on Chris Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

The truth expressed in Hedges' title is true both forward and backward. Just as war can provide a sense of meaning, so too a lack of meaning -- or the desire to fill that absence -- can provide the cause for war.

A while back, Josh Marshall posted a nasty little piece of hate mail he received that illustrated this point.

It's the typical supercilious undergrad tone -- the kind of thing written by people who want to be Ben Shapiro when they grow small. But one sentence in particular (and yes, this is all one sentence, if not quite one thought) stood out:

This may be the most critical time in the history of the modern world much less of our country; and it is my fervent hope that the American People will remember and appropriately reward those, like you, who have chosen to use this opportunity to forward a political cause, and not incidentally their own careers, by attempting to sabotage an honorable effort to make the world a safer, better place.

You have to love the uppercase "American People" -- and I'm guessing this guy never expresses a hope without it being "fervent." But the important part here is the section I've put in bold -- that ours is "the most critical time in ... history."

Like many people who blindly support[ed] this war -- including perhaps many in the White House and the Pentagon -- the writer is desperate for his life to have some greater meaning or purpose than it apparently does. He hasn't quite managed to stare into the abyss, but he's taken a quick glance in its direction and seen something deep and dark and frightening that he doesn't quite know how to deal with.

"All flesh is grass," the prophet Isaiah said, and "the grass withereth." This guy, understandably, doth not want to wither. He wants his life to matter, to mean something. He wants to be remembered after he is gone.

He has given this war a metaphysical, religious significance. For him, the war isn't about oil, or "liberating" Iraq, or overthrowing an evil dictator. It's grander than that -- grander even than the dreams of empire that seem to be motivating Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz. This war is an attempt to give his life meaning by turning our times into "the most critical time in the history of the modern world." If our times are meaningful, he hopes (fervently), then our lives must also be meaningful.

The writer gives his life meaning by taking a part in this great, epochal, transcendent struggle.

And note how easy, how undemanding of sacrifice, it is for him to play a role in this epochal, historic event. All he has to do is watch Fox News and fire-off the occasional sophomoric e-mail -- maybe even wave a flag, attend a corporate-radio rally, or rename some snack food.

This letter-bomber is not the only one narcotizing his existential crisis with an enthusiasm for "shock and awe." This is widespread -- it's one of the reasons it is nearly impossible to have a civil conversation with our fellow Americans who believe -- or want to believe, or need to believe -- Bush's baseless arguments for capricious war.

In terms of pure shock and awe, however, nothing in the Iraqi adventure compares to the gut-wrenching, paradigm-shattering, constitution-shredding shock and awe Americans experienced on September 11, 2001. As we watched the towers fall and the Pentagon burn we experienced shock, awe, and a powerful, inseparable admixture of fear, anger, sorrow, pride and love. But there was also something else, unseemly and almost unmentionable -- the perversely giddy rush of vicarious significance.

On September 10, 2001, as in Thoreau's day, the mass of Americans were living lives of quiet desperation but then -- as nearly every observer proclaimed -- everything changed.

A few writers took advantage of the anonymous forum provided by Salon's "forbidden thoughts about 9/11" feature to express this:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide -- lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.

-- Name Withheld

Such feelings were of course taboo, but they were hardly unique to "Name Withheld." Josh Marshall's letter-writer, like many supporting the war on Iraq across the blogosphere, expresses the very same perverse thrill:

"I felt actual excitement ... here was something meaningful ..."

"This may be the most critical time in the history of the modern world ... "

The voices are different, the sentiments the same. Both are driven by a similar need to break through banality and ennui with the vicarious thrills afforded by war.

A whiff of something similar can be detected in the strangely envious plaudits baby boomers heaped upon the "greatest generation." Look a little closer and there's a hint there of something like "They're lucky. I wish we had a Hitler we could go fight." Little surprise, then, that mingled in with the horror of our own Day of Infamy was that taboo thrill and something like an unspoken, "At last."

We Americans are the wealthiest, most educated people the world has ever seen. We are a people and a nation to whom all things seem possible and every course of action is open.

What happens to a people to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a nation lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what it is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

The great struggle being waged by President Bush and his supporters is not really about making "the world a safer, better place." It's not even really about an imperial "Pax Americana." It's about the search for meaning by a people so bored, complacent, comfortable and desperate for significance that for them war gives birth not only to terrible beauty but to terrible joy.

This is why even dispassionate, prudential questions about foreign policy provoke outraged invective. Such questions are not merely seen as a threat to a policy position, but as a threat to a metaphysical, religious belief system.

"There comes a time in the late afternoon, when the children tire of their games," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "It is then that they turn to torturing the cat."

It is late afternoon in America, and tired at last of our meaningless games, we're looking for a new source of excitement.

It's working, so stop it

Before last week, I had a mostly positive impression of Gen. David Petraeus. He seemed to me a smarter-than-average and capable military leader.

This impression was largely shaped by Thomas E. Rick's Fiasco, which still stands as one of the best early histories of America's catastrophic misadventure in Iraq. Petraeus plays a major role in Ricks' account as a capable contrast to the lethal bunglers like Gen. Sanchez and Gen. Odierno, a man who wisely dissents from the brutish foolishness of their if-only-we-could-kill-all-the-bad-people approach.

On the basis of this impression from Ricks, I was somewhat encouraged when President Bush tapped Petraeus to lead the American occupation. I had some slender hope that he might be able to steer us toward whatever the least bad of our very bad remaining options might be and bring the debacle to some kind of soft landing. It was uncharacteristic of Bush to empower someone who had been so critical of his earlier policies, so I was also worried that Petraeus was merely being set up as a scapegoat -- someone to blame for failing to unsoil the bed.

But whatever hopes or positive impressions I might have had of the general, they did not survive last week, when I saw that video making him out to be a fool and a man turning his back on his duty. I don't mean the notorious Move On ad, I mean the C-SPAN video of Petraeus' actual testimony, which was equal parts nonsense and bullshit. That's a rude term, but a necessary one.

But first the nonsense. Petraeus was sent before Congress to argue that, A) the "surge" is working; and therefore B) we should end it. Most of the discussion of his testimony centered on the factual claim A, for which he provided little credible evidence. The many reports contradicting this claim -- from the GAO, from an independent panel of military leaders, from the most recent National Intelligence Estimate -- provided a great deal of evidence, none of which Petraeus seemed able to refute.

But set aside the facts and their bias against Petraeus' testimony -- his argument simply makes no sense. One could argue that the surge was not working, and therefore ought to be ended. Or one could argue that the surge is working, and therefore ought to be continued. But to argue, as both Gen. Petraeus and President Bush did, that it is working and therefore must be stopped is just bizarre. The general and the president both came across like something out of Lewis Carroll.

I can't see how any sense can be made of this. Please try, someone. Play devil's advocate and explain to me why it's reasonable to go before Congress and argue that the new strategy is very effective and therefore must be stopped.

The explanation for all this nonsense, of course, is that the "surge" was just that, a surge -- a temporary and unsustainable increase in the number of troops deployed. It was, from the outset, a 15-month surge. That 15-month period began in January of this year and ends, inexorably, next April. The end of the surge has nothing to do with strategy or with any decision made by anyone in the military or the White House, it is simply a matter of arithmetic. January 2007 + 15 months = next spring. Period.

Which brings us to the bullshit. President Bush knew that the surge, whether or not it accomplished anything, was scheduled to end by next April. Gen. Petraeus knew this. All of the members of the House and Senate committees before which the general testified knew this. All of the media pundits offering color commentary from the wings knew this. Everybody knew this.

Yet Gen. Petraeus and President Bush decided to pretend that they didn't know this. Both of them got up and offered their incoherent "the strategy is working so we must end it" argument, disingenuously claiming that the reason for this step had nothing to do with what they both knew -- and they knew we knew -- was the real reason. Gen. Petraeus said things he knew weren't true. Usually, that's called lying, but Dr. Harry G. Frankfurt makes the case that lying is an attempt to deceive, which involves at least a backhanded respect for the truth. Shoveling nonsense with utter disregard for the truth, not caring even if those who hear it are deceived, is what Dr. Frankfurt classifies, with professorial precision, as bullshit.

Part of the original rationale for the troop surge was to "buy time" for the Iraqi government to become self-sustaining and for the Iraqi army to be sufficiently trained (so that "that can stand up and we can stand down"). But last week's ritualized nonsense had nothing to do with buying time for the Maliki administration, it was all about buying time for the Bush administration -- helping this president to run out the clock, forestalling the inevitable withdrawal so that it happens on the next president's watch in the hopes that this will provide a foothold for the stab-in-the-back legend blaming the whole fiasco on those who opposed it from the start.

This desperate attempt to redeem the political legacy of a failed administration had nothing to do with any military objectives in Iraq, nothing to do with America's national interests, and still less to do with any meaningful benefit for the people of Iraq. Yet Gen. Petraeus was perfectly willing to spend a week in service of that agenda and to say ridiculous things in support of it.

Why?