1. "The Death Penalty Up Close and Personal" Some good observations.
Representative Sample: There is no one, universal rule that applies to the death penalty. Each case is unique, absolutely idiosyncratic, a law unto itself.
2. "Piracy In The Age Of Obama" Another call to stop messing around with pirates.
Representative Sample: Just a thought. It may sound a little too 18th century, but that is more or less the century in which Somalia dwells, on a good day. Decades of violent anarchy has left Somalia with little respect for anything but rule of arms.
3. "Quote Of The Day" A great Reagan quote that applies now more than ever.
Representative Sample: Ronald Reagan obviously proved that the Democrat modus operandi is timeless.4. "It pays to compare: Comparison helps children grasp math concepts" My own sample size of 1 child indicates that it causes confusion instead.
Representative Sample: Comparing different ways of solving math problems is a great way to help middle schoolers learn new math concepts, researchers from Vanderbilt and Harvard universities have found.
5. "Self-Induced Demise of the American Superpower" Links to an interesting article.
Representative Sample: Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.
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Seeing a discussion the the death penalty linked near one of American superpower reminds me of a segment from episode 3 of The West Wing:
ReplyDeletePRESIDENT BARTLET
[pause] Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words 'Civis Romanis' I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.
Where was Morris' protection, or anyone else on that plane? Where is the retribution for the families and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house!? In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?
CHIEF OF STAFF LEO
We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.
BARTLET
Well our behavior has produced some pretty crappy results. In fact, I'm not a hundred percent sure it hasn't induced them.
LEO
What are you talking about?
BARTLET
I'm talking about two hundred and eight-six American marines in Beirut, I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi.
LEO
And you think ratching up the body count's gonna act as a deterrent?
BARTLET
You're damn right.
LEO
Then you are just as dumb as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that, we're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemenge, but you better be prepared to kill everyone and you better start with me cause I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!
BARTLET
He had a ten-day-old baby at home.
LEO
I know.
BARTLET
We are doing nothing. They dest...
LEO
We are not doing nothing. Four high rated military targets.
BARTLET
And this is good?
LEO
Of course it's not good, there is no good. It's what there is. It's how you behave if you're the most powerful nation in the world. It's proportional, it's reasonable, it's responsible, it's merciful. It's not nothing, four high rated military targets.
BARTLET
Which they'll rebuild again in six months.
LEO
So we'll blow 'em up again in six months! We're getting really good at it. [beat] It's what our fathers taught us.
I've never seen that show, so I'm not sure what the background is to that conversation. But if it's supposed to be some sort of argument that having your country being feared isn't useful, then it isn't very convincing. It's pretty much contradicted by most of history. Weakness breeds agression.
ReplyDeleteAs for the death penalty, certain people can be deterred by fear of punishment, certain people can't.
> if it's supposed to be some sort of argument that having your country being feared isn't useful, then it isn't very convincing. It's pretty much contradicted by most of history. Weakness breeds agression.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's a reminder that maximizing enemy fear is hardly the only consideration.
On a related note, we should be mindful that the point of terrorism is to cause fear and provoke overreactions. In this the Bush administration and other Iraq hawks failed the test.
Some, like our new president, sad 'I am not against all wars, I am against dumb wars'. They have been proven right.
But the Right can't stand to admit this. Bush, Cheney, McCain and other prominent Republicans all insist that they would have still invaded Iraq if they know then what we know now. That's an inexcusable refusal to learn.
Daniel Larison explains what's going on:
The way to tell an ideologue from a realist, and the reason realists are not simply ideologues posing as something else, is that the ideologue will persist in a course of action long after it has failed and long after everyone knows it has failed because he thinks that his “values” demand it. Instead of “let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” the ideologue says, “I am right, and the world can go to hell if it doesn’t agree.” The ideologue is terrified of having to make adjustments and adapt to the world as it really is, because these adjustments reveal to the ideologue just how far removed from that reality he has become. The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas, because he believes they have never been faithfully followed. For the realist, cutting one’s losses and reassessing the merits of a policy are always supposed to be possibilities, but for the ideologue the former is equivalent to surrender and the latter is inconceivable.
"On a related note, we should be mindful that the point of terrorism is to cause fear and provoke overreactions."
ReplyDeleteThat's only one point of terrorism. It's hardly their only aim, and isn't the most important one. Most terrorists have greater goals in mind.
And from what I've seen, Larison's as big an ideologue as any of the people he's criticizing. His ideology just happens to be different.
" In this the Bush administration and other Iraq hawks failed the test."
Not really. It's not that simple.
"But the Right can't stand to admit this. Bush, Cheney, McCain and other prominent Republicans all insist that they would have still invaded Iraq if they know then what we know now. That's an inexcusable refusal to learn."
There's nothing to admit. Some of their reasons are still valid, or at least debatable. The nation-building/spreading democracy argument as a motive for invading Iraq doesn't look good now (and I think it was a bad motive), but if Iraq is a stable, more or less democratic country 10-20 years from now, it might look a lot better.
The humanitarian argument for removing Saddam is also still valid -- although at least partially offset by the amount of damage done by the war. (again, i don't like this argument but it still stands).
The only argument that has really been completely obliterated, is the Iraq had WMD claim -- which admittedly was the main case.
Now if they still say, and I'm not sure who does -- that even knowing the way the Iraq War would turn out that they'd do it all again -- then yeah, that's pretty hard to defend.
I consider all arguments for the Iraq war to have been obliterated, and it's telling that the rationale for war kept changing. Heck Wikipedia has a whole page on the subject. Read until your eyes bleed.
ReplyDeleteLarison touches on this with: "The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas,"
> Most terrorists have greater goals in mind.
I think it's clear the U.S. reaction to 9/11 exceeded Al Qaeda's dreams. If I were a Jihadist, I'd be very happy with the damage to U.S. standing and various holes it dug into.
Bottom line: We overreacted out of fear. Had we not tortured anyone, used due process, not invaded Iraq, and only held brief operations in Afghanistan, then both the U.S. and the rest of the World as a whole would be a better and safer place than they are today.
Justifying this judgment of mine could take a lot of space, but it's the best assessment I can make. And it seems very few people outside of the Republican party disagree.
If this isn't a clear-cut case of ideology and values trumping realism and unfortunate facts, what is?
Let me clarify one point in that last comment. Let's say looking at the current situation with Iraq, and considering everything that happened since we invaded, you ask someone this question:
ReplyDeleteKnowing what we know now, and with the stipulation that nothing would be changed, would you have still invaded?
I'd say no. But the people who say yes will claim that's an unfair question. They'll say that obviously they would have done certain things differently, and that the question is irrelevant because you have to make decisions based on what things look like at the time you make them.
"I consider all arguments for the Iraq war to have been obliterated"
ReplyDeleteBut they haven't, for the reasons I already mentioned. Opinions don't obliterate arguments.
"I think it's clear the U.S. reaction to 9/11 exceeded Al Qaeda's dreams. If I were a Jihadist, I'd be very happy with the damage to U.S. standing and various holes it dug int"
I think that's complete nonsense for so many reasons it would take me a small book to write. Not only that, but I think it should be obvious nonsense.
"We overreacted out of fear"
I don't think we overreacted at all. If anything we underreacted.
"If this isn't a clear-cut case of ideology and values trumping realism and unfortunate facts, what is?"
Nothing but an opinion?
Like I said it would take a lot of space to justify my assessment, especially to the satisfaction of someone someone who operates with your narrow-minded nationalistic assumptions that are so focussed on force projection.
ReplyDeleteI'll highlight Larison one more time: The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas, because he believes they have never been faithfully followed.
That you actually believe we underreacted to 9/11 is the clear mark of an ideologue.
Call it nothing but my and Larison and roughly 80% of the World's opinion as much as you like, but this assessment won't take you anyplace interesting nor help you understand the failure of Bush foreign policy and why it is tenebly ranked as the second-worst of any US president's.
"Like I said it would take a lot of space to justify my assessment, especially to the satisfaction of someone someone who operates with your narrow-minded nationalistic assumptions that are so focussed on force projection."
ReplyDeleteWell, I reject the notion that my ideas are any more narrow-minded than yours. In fact, I would say they embrace many more possiblities, since I'm not locked into to a narrow view based purely on hindsight.
"That you actually believe we underreacted to 9/11 is the clear mark of an ideologue."
That you actually believe we overreacted to 9/11 is the clear mark of an ideologue. The very notion that we somehow overreacted to an attack on our largest city is ridiculous even on its face, and shows no understanding of how nations react to attacks, or what the U.S. might have done instead.
Not only did the U.S. not overreact, but our actions toward Afghanistan were carefully measured and designed to use a minimum amount of force.
As for Iraq, it was an open enemy of the U.S. with whom we were already in a state of quasi-war and had been since the end of the Gulf War.
Our invasion of Iraq was unfinished business. There was a reason regime change was the policy position of both parties long before 9/11. Even leaving aside the WMD debacle, the fact that the Iraq War was launched with unrealistic assumptions, had grandiose & possibly unachievable aims, and was royally fouled up in execution, does not invalidate every argument for war with Iraq in the first place.
All you are doing is making an argument based on hindsight, and claiming that anyone who disagrees with any aspect of it is an "ideologue." I'm not even sure what kind of ideologue.
I agreed with exactly one of the Bush administration's positions on Iraq -- that we should no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein's existence. I disagreed with the expansive war aims and with almost everything about the war's execution. How does that make me some sort of ideologue?
"roughly 80% of the World's opinion"
that idea isn't even close to 80% opinion even in the U.S., let alone the world -- not that it matters.
"nor help you understand the failure of Bush foreign policy and why it is tenebly ranked as the second-worst of any US president's."
I understand the massive exaggeration of Bush's foreign policy failures pretty well. That kind of thing usually comes from people who act like history started 20 years ago.
> That kind of thing usually comes from people who act like history started 20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's from a survey of US historians. Try again.
And here'san opinion piece by a professor of history that looks at how the US overreacted.
> that idea isn't even close to 80% opinion even in the U.S., let alone the world -- not that it matters.
I don't have world opinion figures for this handy and I guess I won't bother to search for them since you don't think it matters. This indifference merely correlates with the rest of your insularity.
Suffices to say that the data I'm aware of shows widespread disapproval of US actions post-9/11.
"It's from a survey of US historians. Try again."
ReplyDeletePlease. Any historian knows that evaluating history requires a lot more than a couple years distance. That type of survey could be wildly different in 20 years. Some of the events Bush set into motion haven't even played out yet.
"And here'san opinion piece by a professor of history that looks at how the US overreacted."
I read it -- pretty weak. It completely ignores every comparison that would invalidate the whole overreaction argument. His argument is based on how the threat was perceived and ignores what the U.S. actually did. Whether the U.S. overreacted in its assessment of the threat is highly debatable, but its actions were no overreaction.
I just find the whole overreaction argument hilarious, given even minimal speculation about what the U.S. might have done.
"Suffices to say that the data I'm aware of shows widespread disapproval of US actions post-9/11."
Who cares? As the dominant state, whenever the U.S. asserts itself in protection of its interests, it is going to incur disapproval. No one likes to be reminded of their own relative weakness and impotence on the world scene. And much of the disapproval comes from enemies and potentially hostile states. Disapproval from our allies stems mostly from Iraq. They'll get over it. Public opinion is a fickle thing anyway.