Andrew Sullivan on the big headline GOP objections to the stimulus bill (Funding for Contraception! Funding for STD Prevention!)L
[W]hy is it the GOP is so easily galvanized by sexual panic? Weird, if you ask me. This is the budget we’re talking about here. Even there, they reach, like the exhausted tacticians they are, for the culture war.
[digg-reddit-me]One of the big issues many kossacks had in responding to my post was that they objected to the term, “war” being used in describing efforts to combat terrorism.
Peter Feaver over at Foreign Policy nicely parries at least one of the points made – what he labels the “specious claims like the idea that calling it a war narrow options down to only military tools.” Feaver’s response:
On the contrary, of course, calling it a war actually has the opposite effect of expanding options: It admits the use of military and other war-like tools, but it also encompasses the rest of the non military tools in the toolbox, as I’ve argued here. Those who want to label it as something other than a war are the ones who want to limit the tools available.
What Feaver seems to support is what he calls a popular straddle that unites the semantic warriors:
Obama intends to say that we are really at war, but we will voluntarily not use all of the tools of war because we do not need to.
Although at the present, this is fine – it seems to offer the worst of all worlds should another attack occur. Politically, Obama will have boxed himself in by admitting that we are at war and at the same time, by saying that we do not need to use every tool at our disposal to win that war, a kind of anti-Powell doctrine.
The approach that I think bears the most promise – both as a solid grounding for understanding the struggle against terrorism and for creating a politically defensible position – is what I’m calling the Philip Bobitt approach. More on that in a moment.
I think it’s obvious to see why the Feaver approach ((It’s unfair to label it the Feaver approach as he actually attributes it to Obama, but for the moment, this is the least confusing way to go about explaining.)) would probably cause political damage to any candidate that embraced it if there is another attack. (Think of the mothers of the victims of an attack saying, ‘You said we didn’t need to do this, but my son died!’) At the same time, the policy of holding back would be discredited by a spectacular attack – or perhaps even a minor one. There would be a backlash. The delicate balance that would need to be struck between the war we are fighting and what we are holding back “because it is unnecessary” would necessarily come undone at the first loss of life.
Alternately, some claim we are not at war and that the struggle against terrorism is a law enforcement matter, and that politicians should embrace this view publicly. If there are no future attacks, then this position will work out fine. If there are only a small number of minor attacks, this also might work out fine. If there are a series of minor attacks, it’s possible that this position might get us through – both politically and substantially. But this doesn’t seem a smart bet to me. I’m not sure that anyone would deny that our society is vulnerable to catastrophic attacks – and that with technological improvements, increased travel, the increasing density of our urban areas, the spread of information, the worldwide and instantaneous nature of the media, and the growing importance and fluidity of markets – non-state actors are more empowered today, to do good or harm, that at any time in the history of the world. I’m not sure anyone would deny that there are significant numbers of individuals who seriously wish harm to America. Terrorism then – terrorism more serious than before – is inevitable.
Ron Suskind, whose critical books on the Bush administration earned him the ire of the former president, reported that an Al Qaeda agent accomplished a technological breakthrough and was prepared to launch a chemical attack on the New York subway system several years ago. The operation was within 45 days of being launched when it was called off by Ayman Zawahiri. Although we have no definite intelligence as to why this attack was called off, the most plausible explanation based on other statements Bin Laden and Zawihiri have made is that Bin Laden feared this attack would not surpass September 11. Societies throughout history have shown that they can acclimate themselves to a constant low-level of violence – even terrorist-created violence. Which is perhaps why Al Qaeda seeks spectacular attacks on their primary target, or none at all – because a spectacular attack is more likely to generate an overreaction.
If history is to be a guide, we can bet that if a terrorist group does enough damage, people will care little for triviliaties such as freedom – such is the effect of the fear of death. (At the same time, history must also inform us that a society’s fear of death can be manipulated by the state as well as by the terrorists.) It seems to me that the law enforcement approach is not especially suited to combatting the terrorism we now face because:
The efforts to combat terrorism then don’t seem to fit into our traditional ideas of law enforcement. Neither of course, do they fit into our modern definition of war – as a military engagement between states (or within states) that ends with a treaty. The efforts to combat terrorism don’t fit into any of these preexisting categories neatly. We could invent a new term – but if we did, that would suggest that if this threat escalates, then war would be the next step. In other words, I don’t see any approach to terrorism short of “war” to be sustainable – because I believe it is likely that regardless of what steps we will not be able to prevent another attack.
So I suggest we adopt the term “war” and couple it with the main aim of this war – a preclusive victory against strategic terrorism. This victory would be the protection of the ability of citizens to consent freely to their government. ((I believe we must aim as a society for more than mere consent to government action – to actively shape it, etcetera – but that’s not the goal of this war.)) Any time the government violated the rule of law, it would be violating the war aim – it would be, as I described it in a post long ago, a “preemptive surrender of American values.”
This seems to me to be a sturdier construction for the protection of American values than either the law enforcement approach, the Feaver approach, or (and especially) the Bush approach.
…[T]his nominalism [is not] confined to the U.S. administration’s critics. In his conduct of the war in Iraq, George W. Bush has cast considerable doubt on whether he actually does consider operations there as part of the Wars on Terror, for he has chosen to fight in Iraq as if it were a theater of conventional operations. It is as if he, too, has been using a word for practical political reasons – to rally the public, to gain support for appropriations – without regard for the reality the word is supposed to reflect. Had the president really believed that the use of the term “war” was compelled by reality and not just by the instrumental purposes to which he put the word, he would surely have raised taxes (not significantly lowered them), brought Democrats into the cabinet, enlarged the army, and ardently sought American alliances abroad. These steps have invariably characterized the measures taken by U.S. presidents who have led the U.S. in war since 1917.
Philip Bobbitt on page 174 of Terror and Consent.
I just wanted to point out that it’s not merely liberals who don’t properly understand the threat of terrorism. I’ve been focusing on that aspect because that’s where I started, and since I’ve been dealing with the blowback.
“There is nowhere to hide,” Roubini, an economics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who predicted the financial crisis, said from Zurich in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We have for the first time in decades a global synchronized recession. Markets have become perfectly correlated and economies are also becoming perfectly correlated. This is not your kind of traditional minor recession.” [my emphasis
Nouriel Roubini was one of the economists whose analysis I latched onto in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. His writing makes a lot of sense, especially recently. But I’m sure I’m not the only person tired of hearing people identified as someone “who predicted the financial crisis.”
Many of these people who “predicted the financial crisis” have been predicting the financial crisis we are now seeing every year since the 1980s. Specifically, I’m thinking of Michael Lewis and Nassim Nicholas Taleb – both of whom were in the finance industry in the 1980s and got out while the going was good – and then went on to write about it’s unsustainability. They were right that the Wall Street boom was unsustainable and built on shakey foundations. But they obviously missed something in what was going on as the boom continued for many years. In other words, they were right in the end, but wrong for quite some time. Their insight allowed them to see moral problems that would come back to haunt us but had little practical effect in terms of predicting the future – including this crisis.
All this is less true of Roubini though who famously did predict with some precision what has happened – and did so in a timely fashion. As the New York Times described his 2006 presentation to the IMF:
On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
What Michael Lewis and Nassim Nicholas Taleb did was correctly point to an unsustainability in our system – but their insights haven’t had the same predictive value as Roubini’s.
[digg-reddit-me]I discovered John Updike when most people should – when I was about 13. Updike explained in an interview that he wrote his books aiming towards this existence as:
books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a …teenaged boy finding them, having them speak to him.
And that is how I discovered them. His books were depressing and yet exotic with a sad sexuality that I was enticed by but did not understand. I read through the Rabbit Angstrom series as well as a number of other minor works. Later, I rediscovered Updike in a novel which has scarcely been mentioned in his eulogies, Toward The End of Time, which seems to me to be exceptional. It takes place after the end of civilization and the fall of the American government due to a war with the Chinese. I still vividly remember the casual indifference of the narrator in what is, I think, a quintessential Updike quotation:
One advantage of the collapse of civilization is that the quality of the young women who are becoming whores has gone way up.
For me, this quotation demonstrates both the author’s humor, the misogyny of his characters, the world-weariness, the carnality, the enforced normalcy and mundaniety.
As a man who would go on to write 61 books, Updike had an almost pathological need to write as his obituary in The New York Times made clear:
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
Given this compulsion to write, it’s no surprise that Updike wrote in every form – short story, poetry, novel, criticism, nonfiction. The New York Times called him:
a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words
Updike seemed to finding what meaning he did in life from his art:
But the work, the words on the paper, must stand apart from our living presences; we sit down at the desk and become nothing but the excuse for these husks we cast off.
As his obituaries attempt to categorize his work, I’m not sure anyone can do better than his near-contemporary, the similarly prolific, Joyce Carol Oates:
John Updike’s genius is best excited by the lyric possibilities of tragic events that, failing to justify themselves as tragedy, turn unaccountably into comedies.
At his best, Updike described his work as giving “the mundane its beautiful due.” These quotations below are either from my collection or in the various collections of Updike quotes online and in his obituaries:
Kevin Hassett in an opinion piece for Bloomberg calls on Obama to rein in Pelosi and try to bring in the spirit of bipartisanship that Obama talked about so much. He even compares Obama’s calls to civility (while running a civil campaign) to George W. Bush’s calls for civility (while running an exceptionally dirty campaign, especially against his Republican opponents.) Hassett is outraged that Nancy Pelosi said – to the Republicans who were threatening to vote against the stimulus bill:
Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election.
How uncivil of her! Hassett continues:
If [Obama] wants to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric, he should take Pelosi to the woodshed and insist that she include Republicans, collegially, in the process. He should stand up to his party and threaten to veto a bill if it fails to make reasonable concessions to his friends across the aisle. He should advise his own staff to begin returning the phone calls of senior Republican aides.
Contrast Hassett’s hissy fit about how the Republicans in Congress are being marginalized with the comments of these Republicans themselves:
“If [the] President carries this on it does open door for a new tone!” – Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.)
“Sharp differences are muted.” – Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas)
“President Obama is speaking to House Republicans right now on Democratic stimulus bill. Good sales man, bad product.” – Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.)
There are complaints about how the Democratic majority is running the process on the Hill – and Obama should look into that. I think an open and fair process should be the standard no matter which party is in control. But the situation is nothing like Hassett’s piece suggests – as Rahm Emanuel’s outreach to Republicans also demonstrates. It makes it seem like Hassett is just trying to build a meme to use against Obama later.
Meanwhile, Congressman Tom Price has told Rush Limbaugh to back off:
…it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing….
[digg-reddit-me]Yesterday, I posed this blog entry on my Daily Kos account.
After my disastrous entry into the kosphere in which I was attacked as a “Republican in disguise” a freeper and a troll back in 2004, my posts in the past year have been very well received. Markos Moulisantos, the founder of the Daily Kos, has linked to this site approvingly twice in his entries. One of my diary entries at the Daily Kos adapted from a blog post was linked to by a main poster there as an unheralded but interesting story generating a lot of traffic. My piece on “How the War on Drugs War Making America Less Safe from Terrorism” was well-accepted as well, even if it received little attention. Various other pieces have been positively received.
Which only made me more frustrated at the response my latest piece received: “Why Liberals Must Embrace the Wars Against Terrorism,” only loosely adapted from a blog post of the same name from yesterday. It was evident that many of the commentors did not find the time to actually read the article before commenting. The title itself was enough to set them off. Quite a number of the commentors went on to “criticize” my piece by reciting some of the very points I emphasized – for example how the Bush administration had done a poor job in it’s ‘War on Terror’. Others made great presumptions about what I meant – for example, presuming I was attacking Obama’s recent actions which I actually think are essential and which a close or even sympathetic reading of the piece would reveal. Then there were the more substantial disagreements: Some commentors condemned war entirely. Some belittled the threat from terrorism. Some made the case that terrorism was blowback for America’s sins. A number of responses centered around calling the struggle against terrorism a war – asking when this war would be over; who would sign the peace treaty to end the war; how one can have war against a method.
Some of these responses raise points I intended to discuss in the piece, but instead shorthanded due to it’s length – specifically, the facts dealing with the seriousness of the threat of terrorism and the questions about the nature of this war, should it be called a war. This lead one commentor to say that the piece wasn’t thought out – when in fact they meant that it did not fully convey an entire worldview in a manner that could not be misconstrued. To that I plead guilty.
To give an idea though of what I think a liberal approach to the Wars Against Terrorism would be, where my thinking leads me to end up, here’s a partial list of some things Obama should do:
This isn’t a complete strategy. This only a list of steps – and some of them are still vague. The overarching idea though must be to take seriously what I believe is the existential threat of terrorism to our way of life – to a system of open borders, open markets, free exchange of technology and information, civil liberties, and unprecedented opportunity. This war must be a war to protect a free state and a free system – which means that counterrorism measures can be as contrary to the war aim as much as terrorism itself.
At administering the presidential oath that is. (Yet another random webcomic from xkcd.)
Joby Warrick in the Washington Post:
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group…
Friday, a new al-Qaeda salvo attempted to embarrass Obama, a day after the new president announced his plans for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Appearing on the videotaped message were two men who enlisted in al-Qaeda after being freed from that detention center.
It kind of puts things in perspective.
[Bill Gates] is now trying to do to malaria, AIDS, polio and lethal childhood diarrhea what he did to Netscape, and he just may succeed.
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times perfectly capturing the dual images of Bill Gates the bullying businessman and Bill Gates the philanthropist.