eye of the storm

something i'm confused about: is the president a thief, or perhaps the whole government of pakistan, which we are supporting with billions of dollars, a  kleptocracy? or not? i've read rumors or claims that asif ali zardari has a bilion dollars or more stashed in swiss banks. meanwhile, his wife benazir bhutto has been turned into a saint or martyr of democracy. so: is he or is he not stripping the country to enrich himself, as his people starve and die? i really haven't seen any reasonable or informed assessment.

now if he is, it is just hopeless to go on supporting him. the first factor is that the support just ends up in the accounts of zardari and his ministers. the second is that the extreme corruption is exactly why the taliban is attractive. i too could be tempted by rigid religious fanatics in a case where my country is being run into the ground by greed-soaked decadent hedonists. well, the same goes for karzai in afghanistan, and the corruption there was key in the taliban victory over the russkies.

it's good to oppose or try to destroy the suicide-bombing evil fanatics. but you'd better think about what alternative you're constructing, because if you don't you will drop a trillion dollars and not only contribute to the fleecing and oppression of the populations, but lose. and deserve to lose.

i just want to point out that joining a war on the wrong side, if any, is not terrorism. if you want to fight us troops, that might be reprehensible, depending on what those troops are doing. it might be treason, if you are a american citizen. but terrorism involves targeting non-combatants.

it seems obvious that the go-kick-al-qaeda's-ass-where-they-actually-are approach would be popular with the military people: an actual objective; an actual enemy; actual tactical planning; the possibility of actual victory, and so on. if you go to someone like mcchrystal and say: alright: we need you to secure this set of towns/villages, x hundreds of square miles, find and destroy the nerve center, erase osama and mullah omar: that has the advantage of sounding like a job for the u.s. army: a finite, definite, justified military action, as opposed to: propping up a corrupt regime, rebuilding a vast country, training an army of hundreds of thousands, all of which are also nondoable.

i was gonna try not to live-blog the afghanistan speech.but let me say this: if the basic reason we're doing all this is to crush al qaeda, then we should mount a direct, immediate invasion on their headquarters in pakistan. what the argument he's giving  justifies is a large direct attack on the "tribal regions," etc. just secure that border region and forget the rest and kill osama, already.. how can we be dicking around here and there and all around when obama says "we know their location"? he really gives no other reason we are there. ok then.  you can't tell me we can't defeat these people in a direct military clash. so do it already.

it makes you wonder, what is it we don't know? we're engaged in a decade-long dance on the periphery because we don't want to offend the government of pakistan? don't be silly. do it now. or withdraw.

gene robinson, making the good argument vs the krauthammer etc, somehow got all messed up this morning:

In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.

Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away. And our troops' military success actually helps to further the jihadist narrative about a "crusade" against Islam.

wait. is he saying that it's absurd and obscene to assert that the west has a long history of exploiting and occupying the muslim world? or that we never install corrupt lackeys, like we did this week in afghanistan? i guess the kind interpretation would be that what is absurd and obscene is the claim that these things justify atrocities (well, it is absurd to claim of anything that it justifies atrocities), but it certainly appears to say that it is absurd and obscene to assert what is obviously true.

happy day after veterans day. a couple of assertions: no one is a hero in virtue merely of belonging to a big organization, even a vast configuration dedicated to violence. if everybody in the military is a hero, then nidal hasan is a hero. if you are a hero you are a hero in virtue of actually taking heroic action, perfectly possible in the military context, but probably not all that frequent there or anywhere else. second, no one is fighting for our freedom unless they are actually doing things that actively preserve or expand our freedom. so if the conflict in iraq or afghanistan actually preserves or expands our freedom, then the people who are fighting in those conflicts are fighting for our freedom. if not, not. it's not a matter of what you or we can convince yourself or ourselves that you are doing, but what you are, actually, doing.

treating mere enlistment as an act of heroism or a defense of freedom is just disingenuous; all you're really trying to do is recruit.

dude. this "we live in stories" crap is so over. actually, if we were the stories we tell, there'd be no evil at all. your body getting riddled by bullets is not a story. at any rate, i just want to point out that the wearethestorieswetell thing originated with literary critics, who really wanted to live in stories - that is, curled up on their couch with books - and then somehow entered public consciousness in a kind of hackchump postmodernism. it sort of sounds good, or like an explanation or something. push it even slightly and you realize it's a bizarrely backwards and misleading metaphor. it doesn't help with the ethics, the aesthetics, the metaphysics, the science, the history, the psychology. it's a gigantic univocal pseudo-explanation that does absolutely nothing.

brooks: "Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged." ok. so. i freely select my story, and i select a story that leads to cooperation and goodness. (really?) what is my story, my story of the whole world and human history? ain't got one, dave. maybe you do. but if you do i can guarantee you this: it's false. but of course "false" makes no sense in a world consisting of stories, whatever that could possibly mean. actually i have a thousand stories and a thousand beliefs and experiences that don't fit into my thousand stories. it's a mess out here. but at any rate, if you wanted to explain islamic extremism, how useful is it to say that they selected a bad story? =0.

mr fun writes, re: me on eboo patel:

now while this piece is dishonest, it is also combatting an American narrative that concludes with American interference in the Middle East, since (we all know) that is where Muslim terrorists come from. now the piece is dishonest, but the case you make for the truth here is and has been used as the kernel of American entire foreign policy for the past 8+ years.

well that's true, isn't it. and serracho says "chicken and egg': a good question, as the washpost makes clear today: they hated and ridiculed him and keyed his car down there because he was a conspicuous muslim. but on the other hand, even in the midst of disasters military and otherwise (for example, the destruction of tibet), i don't think you've seen, for example, buddhist suicide bombers or random mass murderers. for that matter, precious few shiite muslims or even christians, though you get the occasional eric rudolph. but adherents of sunni islam seem to do this every single day in many different locations. you want to call that a coincidence?

of course, most sunni muslims don't fly planes into buildings etc., and i'm sure many are peace-loving sweeties with love in their hearts. but on the other hand, when the next person shrapnelizes a woman's market or girls' school someplace, are you going to be in any doubt about their religious affiliation, or about the kind of thing they would say in justification of their own acts?

i might say the problem with this particular style or approach to violence is that it is anti-tactical, bizarrely irrelevant. your tibetan monk might be in despair. might be oppressed. but he's not going to start blowing people up at absolute random; that bears no relation to his despair. all over the world, people are in grinding poverty, despair, pain. they are devalued and exploited by the west or by christians or by commies or kleptocrats, etc. it would not be strange or even perhaps wrong to respond violently. but simply to start shooting or exploding or immolating people selected at random would not appear to have any possible moral justifcation or any fucking use. there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from? because it appears to me to be pretty unusual in human history.

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward. i say that terrorism is real and well beyond stupid, and i say that 90% of it proceeds from sunni islam. that might be wrong and dangerous to say. is it false?

suicide bomb in pakistan kills 12: The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid.

offhand i would think that this gives you the worst of all possible worlds: you dick around and don't really make a decision. it's politically scary to withdraw from afghanistan. it's politically scary to commit the number of troops necessary to do the job. so you spend weeks pro and conning and really come out with no clear approach/strategy/idea of where you're going. i've got a feeling that by the time the bo admin is over that's going to be the kind of story we'll tell: soaring (albeit empty and repetitive) rhetoric and meek actual actions. eugene robinson, among others, has this right.

it's always time to worry about this, but i might get concerned that israel is about the launch on iran. here's a press release from the israel project, which offhand seems to be the pr operation of the mossad. actually, the tone of this is colin powell building a justification for war at the u.n. suddenly the time frame on iran getting nuclear weapons collapsed, and you have to wonder where the intelligence is coming from. 

of course, i can see that the israelis might feel an kind of absolute obligation to see that iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, especially while ahmadinejad remains in power with his "wipe them off the map" inyourface threats. that's not to say that the ramifications of an israeli attack might not be disastrous.

one thing that something like this - a major international crisis, world on the brink, etc. - will do is change the face of american politics. if you're thinking that the obama presidency will be decided for history on health care, you might think again.

actually i'd launch tonight while obama yaps.

richard cohen gives one of the few actually thoughtful treatments of a rich theme: the role of revenge in, let's say, international affairs.  it's there. and when people say it's not - when, for example, they try to draw some hard-and-fast distinction between vengeance and justice - and portray themselves as advocates of the latter and not the former - they lurch into extremely palpable dishonesty. "justice" in a criminal or war-type sense, is a slightly rationalized or systematized or delegated revenge, and by the same token, the sense for revenge harbors within it a feeling of a universe that rests on a balance which, disturbed, ought to be restored.

"it would be unfair to prosecute interrogators for actions they had been told were legal." thus fred hiatt. though it's not clear he endorses this as a principle, he lets it pass as obvious or trivial. but i propose to you that it is entirely and obviously absurd: exactly the sort of error that makes persons into the merest idiots and will extinguish our species. i realize that it's a tremendous burden, one which none of us, finally, can entirely bear: but no matter what you are told or by whom, you are responsible for what you actually do. and if you're letting john yoo do your moral deliberation for you, you deserve a lengthy prison sentence no matter what the result.

a moral system - such as all varieties of statism, or any political philosophy other than anarchism - which does not center responsibility in the individual, is fantastical and always the product of cowardice and a premonition of great evil.

of course, i guess it depends on who's telling you what's legal. if the voices in your head are telling you to kill, or some arbitrarily selected mental patient is telling you that torture is legal, that's an understandable reason to throw some chump into a box with scorpions. but if it's a justice-department lawyer, i say you're insane if you listen to him. a schizophrenic has no particular motive to encourage torture; a justice-department lawyer is adminstering a systematic justification for a massive spree of state sadism. if you decide to participate you are at fault, no matter what letterhead is on the memo.

probably even newspaper columnists/opinion editors could eventually be made to understand the inadequacy of 'alberto gonzales told me to' as a global moral excuse.

the blackwater/xe thing is one of the several waronterror nightmares unleashed in the cheney administration. my feeling is that the whole reason for getting them on the case was deniability, and everyone knew they consisted of special-ops nuts etc who were enabled by their connections to the admin to obtain state-of-the-art weaponry and indulge their sadistic fantasies without limitation. no admin people will ever be held responsible for blackwater's actions, though i think the murders and so on were precisely what the admin wanted and expected. you have our heroes serving their country. then you have our nuts shooting and torturing whomever they please in a vague strategy to intimidate the whole country. there is less distinction between these two approaches/armies than the pr machine would like you to believe. the idea was to hire an independent organization to commit the necessary war crimes. that they're being prosecuted is more or less what the admin had in mind when they made the hire. what we need is the shredded/trashed memos in which cheney's office directed blackwater about general comportment or specific actions.

back from new england, beeches, where i made the thoreau pilgrimage. i'll blog that a bit maybe. meanwhile, this thought: sometimes a witch hunt is appropriate: namely when you have an infestation of witches.

even though i, like everyone else, am more or less inured to terrorism, i want to say that i still believe it to be incomprehensible. obviously, as a military action, it is mis-targeted: if you're in a war you ought to be exploding installations and personnel, not, you know, children selected randomly or whatever it may be. and i don't accept the idea that even a ragtag group of extremists can't take a crack at some sort of relevant target. as propaganda or publicity it surely has few positive and many massively negative effects. has any conflict ever been won through the use of terrorism? the suicide bomber is showing his total devotion to a cause by acts of completely irrelevant mindless destruction. i can respect your revolutionary movement, but not your psychotic random twitching. now this is sort of an age of terrorism. but i can't really believe it's a permanent state of affairs: it's like pet rocks or something: utterly useless.

one might think of the pakistani taliban, who are having some military successes, and must be supposed to be behind various terrorist acts. my view is that if they weren't, they'd be more successful. say you're a devout peasant in the swat valley. you might sympathize with elements of taliban ideology. you might despise your government. but you have to think to yourself: still, it's not a good idea to put the power in the hands of serial killers who select their victims randomly. maybe car bombs were helping sunnis in iraq create a civil war. or maybe the effort to do that was undermined precisely on the sunni side by the manifest useless stupidity of parking a car and blowing up a market. how's the anti-abortion movement or whatever it may be pushed forward by planting a bomb in the olympic plaza or a disco? a: it isn't.

there are a million attempts to try to make terrorism make sense, to give it a rational structure: they have purpose p; they believe that terrorist act a will help them achieve p; therefore, they do a: the aristotle practical syllogism. but i don't think it has that structure at all. it's more like this: i believe in the overthrow of the existing power structure. therefore i will...break dance, eat strawberry shortcake, run around in circles screaming.

what if it turns out that cheney was running, you know, personal death squads out the of the vice president's office, like "team america, world police," only at once funnier and more fatal? ok, well, obviously, and putting it mildly, this does not comport with the constitution etc. but what i want to know is: who did he kill wrongly, accidentally? and were the victims the enemies of our sacred way of life, or merely the enemies of haliburton? it's shocking that patrick fitzgerald is still alive. if this really is the case, then there can be no "leave the past in the past and move on." if it is the case, i want to see cheney dangling from a noose, twitching.

i think my favorite moment in this particular debate was the basic republican approach. the cia? lie? how can you say that about these great americans who are serving our country? it's outrageous! um, yeah.

and so the era of anti-latte terrorism begins.

here's some disturbing news about the new commander in afghanistan, from andrew sullivan's blog.

i truly do not understand these people: let's start with nancy pelosi and condi rice. their view is that, since the justice department assured them it was legal, it was legal. or: since it assured them it was legal, they were not responsible for assessing its legality, rightness, or efficacy. it's really an insane loop: cheney's office directs you to produce a legal justification for torture, then uses that legal justification - a horrendous tissue of idiotic fallacies produced with the intention to evade the law - as a legal justification. and everyone - everyone - just hides in that pile of crap, staying warm.

what none of these people seem to understand is that even a memo from john yoo does not relieve you of the responsibility to think, or relieve you of the responsibility for your own decisions. even if it comes on nice letterhead. i file this under "anarchy now" because this shows you exactly what's wrong, exactly what the rule of law actually means or amounts to: human decisions, indeed idiosyncratic preferences or sudden impulses or rages or prejudices, shrouded in this obscuring, weightless fog.