Category: Foreign Policy

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Domestic issues Foreign Policy Morality Politics The War on Terrorism

What Rights Should We Give Terrorists?

[digg-reddit-me]Behind the debates, votes, and bureaucratic battles of the past few years over civil liberties, torture, Guantanamo, terrorist tribunals, the Patriot Act, and domestic wiretapping, are two different views of how to respond to the threat of terrorism. Republicans and liberals each frame the question differently, asking two basic questions that lead them to diverging answers about the same issues.

A. Republicans

  • Question: What rights should we give to terrorists?
  • Answer: It doesn’t really matter. We need to do what is necessary to keep people safe. You shouldn’t care what we do unless you are a terrorist. (See footnote.)

B. Liberals

  • Question: How can we best reduce the risk of terrorism while preserving a free society?
  • Answer: There is no simple answer. It’s a complicated process necessitating many trade-offs and compromises and the process needs to be as transparent as possible.

While Republicans have often deflected Question B by answering Question A, their response to Question A indicates that they do not believe the two questions are related. I don’t know how many times I have been told in debates on the issues that I shouldn’t worry about them unless I am a terrorist. To consider the effect of our government’s actions gets you called a “fellow traveler” with the jihadists or more charitably is labeled “pre-9/11 thinking”. This is the essential idea of the books published by Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, of countless columns in the National Review and Wall Street Journal, and of a large part of the Republican’s electoral success in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

Politically, Question A confers great advantages. It offers easy answers. It comforts us – “If I’m not a terrorist, what do I care?” It seems a tougher approach. Most important though, it emotionally charges the issue. “Why should we confer the rights our society guarantees on those who have no respect for these rights and who will exploit them?” It separates them from us. Question B leads to a rational, reflective discussion and no easy answers. It’s a much harder sell and has been portrayed as a sign of weakness.

Despite the political rhetoric, both questions are merely different ways of phrasing the same problem. In fact, the disagreement between Republicans and liberals centers around a single point of controversy:

Do terrorists have rights?

  • Republicans have resoundingly answered “NO!” They have even gone so far as to indicate that even if you are only suspected of being a terrorist, you have lost many if not all rights.
  • Liberals believe terrorists do have rights, although many liberals do acknowledge that terrorism presents such a challenge to our way of life that we must make some changes to our system to deal with the issue effectively.

Within the Republican framing of the issue is a single, absolutely frightening idea that undermines the very basis of our nation and freedoms: that the government confers rights upon people rather than that rights being inherent in each individual. This is a profoundly unconservative idea – a radical one more generally associated with Communism than with any American ideology. You can see this idea at work listening to the chief prosecutor for Guantanamo defend his treatment of prisoners there, in Cheney’s defense of the terrorist tribunals, in Rudy’s defense of “enhanced interrogation”, in Bush’s defense of domestic wiretapping.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”

The problem with the Republican position is that it denies the very basis for American government, one of the cornerstones of our Constitution. If you believe in the ideals encapsulated in the first collective document produced by the American nation, in the reason for the revolution that created our country, in the ideals that animated the Founders in creating the Constitution, then terrorists have rights, inherent, inalienable, and God-given. If you reject this idea and believe instead that the government grants us rights which we can then exercise – to a fair and speedy trial, to a jury of peers, to not be tortured, to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, to free speech, to freedom of assembly, to an expectation of privacy – then you have negated the very basis of our founding. This is self-evident.

What then is the rationale for the Republican position?

Simply, the Republican position is this: the terrorists have won. The terrorists’ ideas and actions make America’s liberal democracy irrelevant. We must take what steps are necessary to protect the public safety; civil liberties are only for those who deserve them. Although the President took an oath to defend the Constitution, he now must defend American lives at the expense of this old document.

Clearly all Republicans do not believe this; and many who have mouthed these lines are merely reacting emotionally and have not thought through the clear consequences of their rhetoric. This is why I believe there is still hope for this country. There are many details liberals and conservatives can work out about the balance between protecting the public and protecting each individual, between liberty and safety. But to frame the issue as the Republicans have is truly radical, and it should be recognized as such. And to act as the Bush administration has done, based on the assumption that rights are granted rather than inherent, has clearly undermined everything America stands for.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Iraq Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

Obama on Iran

In this piece in the New York Times tomorrow, Obama discusses what his approach to Iran would be. Not much news made in the interview in my opinion. Along with some criticisms of Iran’s actions of late, Obama stated that he would:

“engage in aggressive personal diplomacy”…and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues.

His conciliatory approach to Iran seems like part of a smart strategy at this point given the Iranian people’s overall anger towards their own governement and affinity for American culture, as well as general demographic trends and tactical considerations in the region. I think his approach would be similar to Hillary’s – with the Senator from New York moving more slowly and putting in less effort, and probably posturing to try to ward off attacks from her right – but I truly appreciate the fact that he is telling the country now what he plans to do instead of running a campaign based on fear of Republican demonization.

Continue reading “Obama on Iran”
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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics

Live-blogging the MSNBC Debate…

First reaction, seeing Hillary respond: She is way too over-confident. She’s going to lose. Someone on that stage is going to beat her. What is that maniacal smile as she listened to Tim Russert describe her vote on the Kyl-Lieberman bill.

As I’ve told people: I think this is the first make-or-break moment in the campaign. If Obama doesn’t “beat” the expectations of the press or impress a large number of Iowans and New Hamphirites, he’ll have missed his biggest opportunity so far and demonstrated a lack of ability to go for the jugular. And without that ability, he will never be able to beat Hillary or most of the top Republican nominees.

Continue reading “Live-blogging the MSNBC Debate…”
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Election 2008 Iraq Politics Roundup The War on Terrorism

Worth Mulling Over

  • Noam Scheiber over at TNR on how the media controls politics, specifically Huckabee’s campaign.
    His cynical theory which strikes me as highly plausible:

    1.) The beginning of what should have been a Huckabee boomlet in August happened way out in Ames, Iowa, while the beginning of the actual Huckabee boomlet this past weekend took place in Washington, DC, making it a lot easier for journalists, pundits, and bloggers to cover–and, er, create. (Though, in fairness, a lot of journalists trekked to Ames.)

    2.) Perhaps more importantly, the results of Ames weren’t announced until fairly late in the evening–8 o’clock or so if I recall–which was well after most MSM reporters had written their stories for the following day. (Many simply went back and inserted a few lines or a paragraph about Huckabee into stories that trumpeted Romney’s first-place victory, which was easily foreseen.) On the other hand, Huckabee’s speech last Saturday at the Values Voters summit happened around 11, and the result of the event’s straw poll were announced just after 3, leaving reporters with plenty of time to write about the reaction to Huckabee’s speech and his performance in the balloting.

    3.) Finally, because the first event was in Ames, which most reporters promptly departed, and the second was in Washington, where many reporters, pundits, and bloggers either live, work, or both, the media was able to soak in the afterglow of Huckabee’s performance this weekend, to chat about it with others who had witnessed it, and to therefore magnify it in their coverage in subsequent days. That wasn’t the case with the straw poll in August.

  • Andrew Sullivan pointed us to this relevant quote from 1866:

    “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism …” – The Supreme Court, Ex Parte Milligan, 1866.

  • Andrew Sullivan also wrote this great post describing how the decision to torture leads to the decision to invade Iraq, and how people who aren’t evil can end up committing great evils.

    Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger – the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. And since they have utter contempt for the role of the Congress in declaring war, we and the world are helpless to stop them. Every day we get through with them in power, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the worst hasn’t happened. Yet. Because we sure know they’re looking in all the wrong places.

Categories
Election 2008 Foreign Policy Iraq Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

Barack Obama on Iraq

Just impressive. I missed this as I didn’t catch the Petraeus testimony in September, only picking up highlights on the news.

Categories
Foreign Policy History Politics

“We didn’t start the fire…”

Big Shot at Mulcahy'sThis past weekend, I was out watching Big Shot, a Billy Joel tribute band, play. They came to one of the classic Billy Joel songs, “We didn’t start the fire…” Listening in the crowded club while drinking a jack and coke, I thought to myself – “This makes me want to write a blog entry. This song is a profound statement about politics. This is about what those on the far left and far right have in common, and about a fundamentally conservative (meaning in this case cautious) view of the world, America’s place in it, and of foreign policy. This is beyond Kissingerian realism, past Wilsonian idealism, deeper than the Clintonian third way.” And then, of course, I drank until such thoughts were drowned.

But, here I am, writing about Billy Joel and his fundamentally sound view of history as presented in a pop-rock song.

Billy Joel’s understanding of history

Billy Joel presents history as a fire, out of control, creating beauty and destruction. Change and destruction, he insists, are not decided from above and implemented, but are spinning out of control as those in power try desperately to have some effect on this chain of events that began before history itself.

We didn’t start the fire.
It’s always been burning
Since the world’s been turning;
We didn’t light it,
But we tried to fight it.

It is easier to try to understand history as determined by the actions and words of prominent individuals, nations, and organizations, as they set agendas and implement them. And perhaps, when events seem out of the control, it is easier to assume that more shadowy forces are at work behind the scenes, implementing the levers of power and economics, manipulating the machine of history to their will. This view of history and current events is facile, if emotionally persuasive.

Contingencies

Our everyday experience demonstrates that individual events are largely the result of forces beyond our understanding, forces acting in the present and forces in the past. For example, if any of these events or decisions had changed, I couldn’t have made it in to work today: a man a hundred years ago decided to establish a railroad going out to Long Island; a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo; a motor company, flush with success, built a skyscraper in Manhattan; an engineer maintains a system of pumps that keep water out of the subways; an immigrant decided to leave his home to try a new life in America. Just the fact of my commute each day is contingent upon all these facts of history and all these conditions of the present day. Without thousands of people doing their daily jobs for the past hundred years, I would not have been able to make it into work today. Millions of decisions, tens of millions of people, mixed together with the largest portion of chance – and that is how I come to be here.

How is it that we assume history is so different from our own experiences? If current events are driven by individuals masterminding large-scale events, and we assign responsibility to this or that person in power at a given time, we are asserting a very different kind of reality than that we live with each day. In fact, the events of history and the present are every bit as contingent, as prone to chance, as out of control as the events of our own individual lives. The leaders of our world do not possess some secret which allows them to control events. Rather, the best leaders, move with the events and try to shape them gradually.

The Great Man Theory

Time and again, we see that no individual, no matter the extent of their power, can manipulate the forces of history for long. Those individuals that are most successful are those that have ridden the wave of history and, ever so gently, tried to alter its’ course. A dictator such as Hitler could harness the anger and despair in a post-world war Germany, but as he began to impose his will more forcefully, other entities rose up against Hitler and his Germany and destroyed him and his vision of the future. For a more successful example of a leader, you can look to Abraham Lincoln, who sought to preserve the status quo at every step and only took radical measures after calamity made them seem reasonable. In the end too, the forces that opposed Lincoln murdered him; but his legacy lived on, because he rode the wave of history, guiding it rather than forcing his will upon it.

America clearly has more power than any other nation on earth at this point. Because of this, we bear more responsibility for the state of the world than anyone else. But the lesson to learn from Billy Joel is that we are not responsible for the fire, the change, the destruction. If you combine this acknowledgment of the complexity of the world of Billy Joel’s with the lesson of the current administration, you learn that American power has rather definite limits, as we are unable to impose our will upon two militarily weak countries despite billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

While many on the left are suspicious of American power and see it as responsible for most of the world’s ills; and many on the right believe in the goodness of American power and believe if we were to apply it, we would be able to cure most of the world’s ills, both have in common a single fallacy: that American power is sufficient to change the course of history and the world. It simply is not.

Conclusions

The best and the worst we can do, and the most we should try to do, is affect change at the margins and adopt a modest and patient foreign policy, trying to encourage the trends we see as positive and discourage those we see as negative. We do not have the power to re-make the world in any image, but we do have the power to affect the course of event if we are judicious.

Note: There were two references I wanted to make in this article that I could not find:

  1. a Tom Friedman column from (I think) sometime in the period after 9/11 in which he makes the point that for many in the world, their daily lives are more affected by who wins the American presidency than by who wins their own local elections; and
  2. a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin explains how the sweep of history has led to the pinnacle of all creation: him.

If anyone knows what I’m looking for, please post a link or email me at [email protected]

Categories
Election 2008 Foreign Policy Politics

A Libertarian Perspective on Clinton

Over at Reason, an insightful article about Hillary Clinton from a libertarian perspective. Key quote:

As a libertarian, it will at least be entertaining to watch the left squirm while defending Hillary Clinton’s “right” to employ the same executive powers and engage in the same foreign policy blunders they now argue that President Bush has superceded his authority in claiming. And it’ll be equally fun to watch the right cry foul when President Hillary claims the same powers they have so vigorously fought to claim for President Bush. The problem, of course, is that entertaining as all that might be, an increasingly imperial presidency isn’t good for our republic.

Categories
Foreign Policy Pakistan The War on Terrorism

Terrorist Attack on Bhutto

According to the BBC, an apparent terrorist attack killedBhutto supporters of returning Pakistani ex-PM Benazir Bhutto while she was touring the country as part of her campaign for her party, the PPP, to win the parliamentary elections and to regain the position she lost due to corruption charges. The news now is sketchy, but the attack was apparently close to her convey but it is believed she is safe. Bhutto just returned to the country today.

The BBC reports that body parts were strewn across her truck as it sped away. The Telegraph reports that the bombs appear to have been detonated by suicide bombers just feet away from Ms. Bhutto’s truck, shattering the glass. The attack took place despite what was reported to be a huge security presence.

The BBC reports at least 30 dead. Wikipedia in a poorly written update to her page reports 80 dead. The Associated Press includes eyewitness reports of over a hundred wounded. The Telegraph reports at least 50 dead with the death toll expected to rise.

Pakistani security services had requested Bhutto to travel to Karachi by helicopter because of security concerns.

Bhutto had previously stated that she believed she would be killed if she returned to Pakistan. Numerous islamist groups had made death threats.

“I am not scared. I am thinking of my mission,” she had told reporters on the plane on her way into Pakistan. “This is a movement for democracy because we are under threat from extremists and militants.”

Background

As an educated woman accustomed to power who seeks to modernize Pakistan, Bhutto is reviled by the Islamists. At the same time, she is one of the most popular figures in Pakistan, even after her popularity has taken a huge hit after she accepted a deal with newly re-elected and unpopular President Musharraf. Bhutto was removed from office due to corruption and embezzlement charges. A Swiss investigation into the charges (the money was allegedly transferred to a Swiss bank account) is due in the next few weeks.

Bhutto’s main base of support comes from loyalty to her father and her modernizing position. Hundreds of thousands gathered in Karachi and around the country today to welcome her back from exile and show support.

Wikipedia has a solid but brief bio.

Categories
Foreign Policy Morality Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

Under the Weather..

Sorry for the extra-light blogging these past few days.  I’m a bit under the weather and have no stomach for deep thoughts to intermingle my metaphors.  In lieu of actual thoughts on a page, here are some thoughts by others:

Categories
Foreign Policy Morality Politics The War on Terrorism

Columbus Day

As we remember the beginnings of Western civilization on this continent, we almost must look to our legacy:

“Tell the world why you’re proud of America. Tell them when the Star-Spangled Banner starts, Americans get to their feet, Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, East Europeans, Jews, Muslims, white, Asian, black, those who go back to the early settlers and those whose English is the same as some New York cab driver’s I’ve dealt with … but whose sons and daughters could run for this Congress.
Tell them why Americans, one and all, stand upright and respectful. Not because some state official told them to, but because whatever race, color, class or creed they are, being American means being free. That’s why they’re proud.

As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but, in fact, it is transient.

The question is: What do you leave behind?”

Tony Blair to the United States Congress in 2003.