Tuesday, January 6, 2009

06 Jan 2009 09:34 pm

The Reality Of War, Ctd.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes an important point:

One story the media isn't telling, because it's impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won't allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians. Early reports indicate that Hamas mortar teams were firing from the UN School. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? 

Continue reading "The Reality Of War, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 08:36 pm

Invading Blind

Today Marc Lynch attended a lecture by Sallai Meridor, Israel's Ambassador to the United States:

Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals. Indeed, he at times seemed to offer this absence of strategy as a virtue, as evidence that the war had been forced upon Israel rather than chosen: "we have no grand political scheme... we were forced to defend ourselves to provide better security, period." With current estimates of 550 Palestinians dead and 2500 wounded, and the region in turmoil, the absence of strategy is not a virtue.

06 Jan 2009 07:34 pm

A Propaganda Wave

From the AP:

More than 70,000 Iranian students have volunteered to carry out suicide bombings against Israel, Iran's state news agency reported Monday, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not responded to their request for permission.

Volunteer suicide groups have made similar requests in the past and the government never responded, giving the campaigns more of the feel of propaganda.

06 Jan 2009 07:06 pm

Getting The Panetta Pick

A useful reading of the tea-leaves from Fred Kaplan. Then this from Les Gelb:

 

The CIA veterans may never give up their fight against Panetta, but at least the Congress and the press should not let themselves be hoodwinked into believing that Panetta isn’t as good as a pro, and for purposes of doing what needs to be done at the CIA, better than a pro.

06 Jan 2009 06:48 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You overlooked an important element in Bush's plan for funding AIDS services organizations. I think your statement that Bush made a "genuine attempt to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it," is misleading. Bush's AIDS policy was in many cases ruled by a commitment to something called the Anti-Prostitution Pledge, which denied services to all AIDS organizations that worked with or on behalf of sex workers in Africa and the rest of the world.

This moralistic approach is impractical when it comes to AIDS treatment and prevention.

Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day" »

06 Jan 2009 06:28 pm

Vote For The Dish

The Daily Dish has been nominated as a finalist for Best Blog in the 2008 weblog awards. None of this means very much in the grand scheme of things. But if you enjoyed the Dish in 2008 and the work Patrick and I put into it, we'd be chuffed if we did well. You can vote for any number of blogs here, and the Dish here.

06 Jan 2009 05:48 pm

Misinformation?

Daniel Levy weighs in:

There is also some appalling misinformation being spread – one frequently hears the claim that Israel left Gaza in 2005 in order to build peace but all it received was terror.  I appreciate the Gaza evacuation of 2005 and how difficult it was  and I in no way condone the launching of rockets against civilian targets from Gaza but the unilateral nature of the Gaza withdrawal was a mistake (and I said it at the time) and I don't appreciate this rewriting of history.  Israel at the time did not evacuate Gaza as part of the peace process.

Continue reading "Misinformation?" »

06 Jan 2009 05:16 pm

Murkowski 57; Palin 33

A new poll in Alaska on a possible Senate race. Know hope.

06 Jan 2009 05:03 pm

Proportionality And Terror, Ctd.

Law blogger Kevin Heller considers proportionality as defined by the UN charter:

Proportionality is not measured by comparing the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas attacks to the number of Hamas “terrorists” killed by Israeli attacks; it is determined by comparing the number of Palestinian civilians killed by a specific Israeli attack relative to the military advantage gained by that attack.  As Article 51(5) of the First Additional Protocol says, an attack is indiscriminate — and thus prohibited by IHL — if it “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”  Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute is worded similarly, although it requires the incidental damage be “clearly excessive,” not just “excessive.”

Whether an Israeli attack is disproportionate, therefore, is completely independent of the lethality of Hamas’s attacks. The proportionality analysis is the same if Hamas’s attacks kill one Israeli civilian or 1,000. In either case, IHL obligates Israel to respond only with attacks that, on their own merits, are proportionate.

Noah Pollak takes this to the following conclusion:

This is where Andrew’s critique conspicuously runs aground, and for a very simple reason: Hamas is still firing rockets; ipso facto, Israel is not using excessive force.

Heller helps and makes an important point about the core relationship between means and ends. Noah, I think, goes too far in suggesting that a single Hamas rocket in what would now be self-defense justifies anything further the Israelis want to do. I agree with Ross that seeing no just war distinction between unintended but still unavoidable civilian casualties and the wanton terrorism of Hamas makes just war theory untenable in the modern world.

The just war question here might therefore be better honed in the following way: does the massively one-sided violence of the past 11 days offer a chance for a real peace that could justify the death and trauma we are watching? As Ross and others have pointed out, this is, at this present moment, unknowable. But from a moral perspective, I think I should adjust my take a little and concede that you could make a weak but real case for the morality of the Israeli attack if it really changed the situation into one that made peace possible.

I guess that's my problem. I don't see, frankly, how another ever-more brutal crushing will achieve the goal Israel seeks. The familiar points about who would inherit Gaza from Hamas still operate. But the deeper point, made very well by Bob Kaplan, is that Hamas' real advantage is not military; it's ideological. Sometimes, in these asymmetric cases, clearly excessive military action can strengthen the ideological power of the enemy and actually make peace more, rather than less, distant.

To put it bluntly: dead Palestinian children, we can all agree, do not help Israel, even if you were to ascribe moral responsibility for every single one to Hamas.

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 04:32 pm

Breaking The Silence

Obama talks briefly about events in Gaza:

The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I’ll have plenty to say about the issue.

06 Jan 2009 04:32 pm

Figures

Eugene Volokh finds an old law still in use.

06 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Procrastination from TutoxNet on Vimeo.

06 Jan 2009 04:08 pm

The Evil Of Hamas

Michael Weiss makes the case that Hamas isn't just a threat to Jews:

One has heard about the cult of death that underwrites Islamic attentats, and it would certainly not strike most Western ears as newsworthy that Hamas is a fundamentally anti-Semitic movement. But that it is openly dedicated to the "annihilation of America" should hit home with sympathizers and apologists, eager to invoke sinister and histrionic moral equivalences between the current Israeli incursion into Gaza and 9/11, and eager to view Hamas as pledged to little more than national "resistance," albeit draped in colorful religious garb. If anything, Hamas' anti-American sentiments reflect Iran's supervisory role as both the party's main financier and as its imperial guardian in an ideological war that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Levant.

06 Jan 2009 03:54 pm

Quote For The Day II

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them" -- George Orwell. M.J. Rosenberg applies this quote to Gaza, but it also reminds one of events in the US these last eight years.

06 Jan 2009 03:18 pm

Dreaming Of War

Joe Klein fisks Kristol:

In the end, Kristol's saber-rattling is the death rattle of a simplistic, extremist ideology that has caused the U.S. great damage. A more sensible, centrist approach to international affairs won't have the bang or melodrama of military kinetics. It will take time to work, if it works. But it also won't have the bloodshed and torture that have stained our nation's history these past eight years.

The longer I observe the neocons the more I realize that for many of them, war is a natural state of being, even a vocation. Some actually view a martial society as more noble than a peaceful one, and believe in war as both morally good and socially beneficial. I am much more interested in conservatism as a temperament that recoils from violence, rather than being attracted to it. And while I see war as a necessary evil, I have been forced by the Iraq debacle into a much better grasp of its limits and its potential for catastrophe. Others seem emboldened by an occupation they are now declaring a "success."

06 Jan 2009 03:04 pm

Not Safe For Dogs

Or any other creature with a spidey sense:

Your video of Terry McAuliffe just popped up in my Google Reader.  My dog is laying behind my chair.  As soon as I started the video, Charlie (a hound mutt from the shelter) started growling at my computer.  I've never seen him do that before.  I've always been kinda blasé about Terry, but I think my dog just judged him better than I ever could have. As soon as I turned off the video, he stopped growling.

06 Jan 2009 03:03 pm

Proportionality

Bret Stephens proposes:

For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of "proportionality" is just the endgame that Israel needs.

How is that an "endgame" exactly? Isn't it actually a formula for the war never ending?

06 Jan 2009 02:49 pm

Alaska News

Claims that the case against Sherry Johnston was slowed for political reasons have been withdrawn. Levi Johnston has quit his new job because it requires a high school diploma:

Levi figures it's best to leave the job and pursue his education, Keith Johnston said. Levi's not eligible for the apprenticeship program without the diploma, he said.

"You guys are watching him so tightly," Johnston said, referring to the media. "He's being treated different than an average 18-year-old kid. He has to do everything by the book now."

       

06 Jan 2009 02:44 pm

Children With Epilepsy

A helpful and moving piece about the agonizing choices parents often have to make.

06 Jan 2009 02:42 pm

Quote For The Day

"Scientology is unalterably opposed, as a matter of religious belief, to the practice of psychiatry, and espouses as a religious belief that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in nonreligious fields.

Continue reading "Quote For The Day" »

06 Jan 2009 02:30 pm

Bringing DiFi Around

Elana Schor:

Feinstein seemed to acknowledge the Obama team's desire to find a CIA director who would signal an end to the abusive interrogation tactics of the Bush years. "We all want a break with the past," she told the reporters milling around her in the Senate. "I was the one who went into the conference committee" between the House and the Senate last year with an amendment that would use the Army Field Manual as the universal standard for detainee interrogations, she added.

Meanwhile, Roberts is fine with it. Scott Horton thinks the Blair-Panetta combo is inspired. Me too.

06 Jan 2009 02:25 pm

Cutting Deep Powder With Jesus

This is for Trey Parker and Matt Stone:

06 Jan 2009 02:14 pm

The GOP's Number One Priority

Ruffini dreams:

Right now, I yearn for the legislative acumen -- and in this case, the spine -- of Bob Dole, who rallied even John Chafee -- Lincoln's father -- to oppose the 1993 Clinton stimulus... The GOP's number one priority politically is to set into motion a series of events that will make Obama look more ineffective, partisan, and unpopular than he is today. Playing hard-to-get on the stimulus is one way to do it. And we need to set the stage for a unified and effective Republican opposition that will actually fight from top to bottom.

06 Jan 2009 02:09 pm

A Single Giant Button

Apple's new "key-board-free" laptop.

06 Jan 2009 01:55 pm

Block That Metaphor

"Suppose a dozen clowns die in a circus fire. Not funny. Now, if a dozen clowns burst into flames while attempting in unison to program their VCR: funnier. Now suppose a dozen clowns beat each other to death with whole, unfrozen bluefin tuna: goddamn hilarious. (Let it be said, for the record, that I am indifferent to clowns, except that I have it on good authority that circus clowns have no souls.) Watching the legal wranglers of torture, "preemptive" military action and Unitary Executive-ism pen an ode to the proper encumbrance of executive power? It is at least clown-and-tuna funny," - Hunter at Daily Kos.

06 Jan 2009 01:39 pm

Paralysis

Jeffrey Goldberg explains why he isn't writing more about Gaza.

06 Jan 2009 01:25 pm

Colorado

Not so redneck any more.

06 Jan 2009 01:18 pm

Fart-A-Friend

The iPhone's most popular and least celebrated new app.

06 Jan 2009 01:07 pm

The Other Gitmo

It's called Bagram. The very name makes one shudder at this point.

06 Jan 2009 12:51 pm

Gender Difference And Marriage

Helen Rittelmeyer has a couple of interesting posts up on marriage questions. As Helen may know, I've long been a believer in the biological power of gender. (See my essay on testosterone from a while back.) I think gender differences are obviously culturally created to some extent, but not all the way down. There is a profound biological difference between men and women that affects our behavior and minds in ways that are irreducible and unchangeable. It is also quite clear, it seems to me, that a marriage between a man and a woman, and between a man and a man, and between a woman and a woman, is each going to have distinct characteristics. They will each be experientially different experiences, and find different ways to endure, and have different problems to tackle. What love brings together gender complicates. I don't need to tell heterosexuals that.

But, for that reason, I don't believe this change will reinforce theories that gender is entirely a social construction. Nothing exposes the power of gender than seeing a subculture or an institution that is of one gender alone. And, in fact, you will find no greater manifestation of gender's reach beyond culture than examining the differences between gay male life and lesbian life. (To throw one true cliche around: Men are generally horndogs; women generally more emotionally mature; in the US most same-sex marriages are therefore unsurprisingly lesbian and a high proportion of gay male marriages occur -again unsurprisingly - among the older and more settled - less testosterone to fuck it up.) All of which is to say a male-male couple will doubtless have a different core dynamic than female-female marriage and male-female marriage (although the demands of commitment and responsibility tug us all in the same direction). But, to return to Helen, bringing this out into the open does not disprove gender difference; it may well actually help illuminate how men and women do actually differ in terms of some core issues, such as intimacy, love, commitment, sex, and so on. (There is, of course, enormous diversity within these categories too - I'm not denying that, merely saying that the deeper, gender issues are at play as well.)

Does this mean that somehow gay marriages will alter the gender dynamics of straight ones? If you believe in gender difference as biological at its core, the answer is no. The power of gender in the lives of 97 percent of the population is never going to affected deeply by cultural acceptance of the homosexual minority. That's why it's odd to find conservatives so frightened by the prospect. Could the emergence of dramatically equal forms of marriage strengthen the model of male-female equality within straight marriage and undermine slightly the fundamentalist insistence on the subordination of wives? Yes. But only in so far as 1 percent of marriages change the 99 percent.

And this is surely one of the biggest blindspots of the Christianist right.

Continue reading "Gender Difference And Marriage" »

06 Jan 2009 12:46 pm

Feinstein and Rockefeller

The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the snub of these two was a deliberate signal. Their oversight of Bush's war crimes was pathetic. Ditto Harman. Obama is telling us he is serious about both improving intelligence and drawing a clear line - for the entire world to see - between the United States and the war criminals who will soon be leaving office, and those who enabled them. Meanwhile, more support from the smart right.

06 Jan 2009 12:21 pm

Tim Roemer and Panetta

Ambers has the interview:

Somebody with Leon Panetta's public experience, his national security experience as chief of staff, his ability to build trust between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, and his openness to be able to communicate with the public. All these skills will be needed in this new job.

Ambers rates the chances of confirmation at 80 percent.

06 Jan 2009 12:15 pm

Bob Gates And Leon Panetta

Crowley discovers a clue to the puzzle.

06 Jan 2009 12:11 pm

Robert Baer On Panetta

Another supporter who sees the key rationale:

Leading Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein have already criticized the choice of Panetta, claiming the CIA needs to be led by an experienced intelligence professional. But right now political clout, and the ability to be a strong advocate for the CIA, far outweighs the virtues of being a professional spy, someone who knows the difference between a "live drop" and a "dead drop." A professional from the ranks would be eaten up by Hillary Clinton at State or Bob Gates at Defense. Or end up like Bill Clinton's CIA Director Jim Woolsey, shut out of the White House, ignored and irrelevant.

06 Jan 2009 11:47 am

Iraq's Free Press

Alive In Baghdad reports on the explosion of newspapers in Iraq.

06 Jan 2009 11:30 am

The Panetta Pick

Laura Rozen talks to various intelligence insiders:

The Panetta choice makes sense to him, said Philip Zelikow, a former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and Foreign Policy writer). "The issues of presidential trust and clean hands are, at this moment in history, most important," Zelikow said by e-mail. "And even an 'intelligence professional' would have to rely on others in many ways. ... So Obama and his team have made a certain kind of tradeoff."

06 Jan 2009 11:25 am

The View From Your Window

Moscow, Russia, 3 pm.

06 Jan 2009 11:03 am

When Tanks Meet Humans

Reports are coming in of a particularly grisly encounter at a school in Gaza. Maybe 40 dead in a U.N. school. For a glimpse of how these images are being seen in the global media - very different from American sources - check this story out. The carnage is a cable news 24 hour story:

The cycle begins with rooftop-mounted cameras, capturing the air raids live. After moments of quiet, thunderous bombing commences and plumes of smoke rise over the skyline.

Continue reading "When Tanks Meet Humans" »

06 Jan 2009 10:50 am

Neocons For Panetta

First Ledeen, now Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Obama is scrambling things ideologically again. In a good way.

06 Jan 2009 10:41 am

Into The Van

Jett Travolta's body has been turned into ashes. No details of the autopsy - monitored by Travolta's own physician - have been announced. Travolta himself piloted the plane as it landed in Florida with his son's remains:

The plane was met by a large van with logos and insignia from the Church of Scientology on the tarmac, and a source said everyone who disembarked, got into the van.

06 Jan 2009 10:38 am

Purple Reign

Weigel studies the initial numbers from the Swing State Project's tally of congressional districts' voting habits:

In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a "blue" district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

Continue reading "Purple Reign" »

06 Jan 2009 10:20 am

A New War

Petraeus gives an interesting interview to Foreign Policy. The interviewer asks whether Iraq and Afghanistan are fundamentally different from prior wars. Petraeus replies:

We looked at this issue closely when we were drafting the counterinsurgency manual. And we concluded that some aspects of contemporary extremist tactics are, indeed, new. If you look, as we did, at what [French military officer] David Galula faced in Algeria, you find, obviously, that he and his colleagues did not have to deal with a transnational extremist network enabled by access to the Internet. Today, extremist media cells recruit, exhort, train, share expertise, and generate resources in cyberspace. The incidence of very lethal suicide bombers and massive car bombs is vastly higher today. It seems as if suicide car bombs have become the precision-guided munition of modern insurgents and extremists. And while there has been a religious component in many insurgencies, the extremist nature of the particular enemy we face seems unprecedented in recent memory.

(Hat tip: Crowley)

06 Jan 2009 09:50 am

Children, Sickness And Parents, Ctd.

A reader writes:

In your post, "Children, Sickness and Parents," you asked what rights children have when their parents seek to deny them medical care for religious or ideological reasons.  As the author of an article on this topic that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in April, 1995 ("Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church," ) and a subsequent book, God's Perfect Child:  Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (Metropolitan Books, 1999), I can answer that question. 

The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts, which concerned a Jehovah's Witness convicted of violating state child labor laws after insisting that her religious beliefs required her child to distribute Witness literature at night, that "the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death... Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves.  But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children." 

Continue reading "Children, Sickness And Parents, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 09:20 am

Bush's AIDS Legacy

Jay Lefkowitz provides a fascinating insider's account. What's impressive about it - and what the outgoing president should always be respected and admired for - is the combination of moral clarity and pragmatism. They genuinely tried to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it. Fauci and O'Neill also helped avoid some dead-ends, like the chimera of a vaccine, and focused on treatments that could and did save and restore countless lives. In the balance against the countless lives that ended because of decisions made by George W. Bush in wartime, these lives lived must also be taken into account. He was a torturer and a man who cared about the victims of AIDS.

06 Jan 2009 09:14 am

The Opposition To Panetta

Josh is onto something:

I'm not certain what I think about this appointment yet. But on first blush, the nature of the opposition makes me more inclined to support it.

That strikes me as exactly right. Feinstein and Rockefeller sense a real individual with real clout at the agency, whom they cannot control. There may have been a lack of foresight here in not phoning Feinstein ahead of time. But it is also indisputable that many leading intelligence Democrats were deeply complicit in the Bush torture program and his illegal wire-tapping. It was just as important for the president-elect to pick someone not beholden to them either.

Some are now citing Panetta's appointment as somehow "political" rather than substantive. But it's obvious that Obama has actually found someone both capable of running a bureaucracy as complex as the CIA, of a stature to be approved by the Congress and maintain good relations, and with the good sense to know how interrogation based on torture is never right and much less effective than legal methods.

It remains an inspired choice. And the critics help show why.

06 Jan 2009 08:51 am

The Logic Of Quagmire

Max Boot explains:

The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future. This is the definition of a quagmire, yet Israel has no choice but to keep doing what it's doing. Unlike the French in Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, it cannot simply pack its bags and go home.

And where on this scale would Americans in today's Iraq fall? Are we Israel in Gaza or France in Algeria? Or do we not really have as good an excuse as either?

06 Jan 2009 08:34 am

Fighting The Good Fight

Ross tackles just war theory:

My own view, though, is that just war theory has always been in crisis, and that modernity has only heightened the contradictions - because almost all of the standards the theory sets are so malleable in practice, and so difficult to apply consistently to the complexity of war and statecraft. Consider the Catechism's definition: Who gets to define what sort of harm is "lasting, grave, and certain" enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict "have been shown to be impractical or ineffective"? Doesn't almost everybody enter a war convinced they have "serious prospects of success"? ...

This doesn't make the theory useless by any stretch, but it's useful primarily because it provides a broad framework of restraint: If you're thinking about questions of justice, you're less likely to commit an injustice, even if no perfect consensus exists on the distinction between a licit campaign and an illicit one.

And if you need to win an election ... ?

06 Jan 2009 08:33 am

The Question At Hand

Sydney Freedberg asks whether Israel is a liability to the US:

Yes, Israel and America cooperate on counterterrorism, but how many of the groups on which Israel provides intelligence would be gunning for the United States if it wasn't supporting Israel? Setting aside for a moment the emotional and religious anchors of the U.S.-Israel alliance, what is its value to the United States in practical, realpolitik terms?

Michael Scheuer, Patrick Lang, Bruce Hoffman, Dov S. Zakheim, and James Carafano respond.

06 Jan 2009 08:01 am

Total Asshole Runs For Governor

Terry McAuliffe announces:

06 Jan 2009 07:52 am

A Hack Blockade

How do we know what's actually happening? Journalists are still unable to get into Gaza. Dion Nissenbaum reports:

For the moment, the only comprehensive coverage coming out of Gaza is from Al Jazeera English, the young channel still not available on US satellite channels.

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