LINK: Johnny Cash movie! And it looks like it'll be quite good.

QUOTES: I'm just about finishing up (well, finishing up writing, anyway... editing to follow) a paper I've been working on over the summer on solidarity, and I just wanted to share with y'all probably the most amusing exchange of all the ones I've read for the paper:

Michael Walzer, "The Moral Standing of States" 212: "Foreigners are in no position to deny the reality of that union (between a people and its government, whatever the type), or rather, they are in no position to attempt anything more than speculative denials. They don't know enough about its history, and they have no direct experience, and can form no concrete judgments, of the conflicts and harmonies, the historical choices and cultural affinities, the loyalties and the resentments, that underlie it. Hence their conduct, in the first instance at least, cannot be determined by either knowledge or judgment."

David Luban addresses this best in "The Romance of the Nation-State" (395): "I find no plausibility in this…why presume we are ignorant? We aren't, usually. There are, after all, experts, experienced travelers, expatriates, scholars and spies; libraries have been written about the most remote cultures. Bafflingly, Walzer does not mention the obvious sources of information even to dismiss them."

Interestingly (or perhaps psychotically, depending on your perspective) I've acquired about 20 single-spaced typed pages of notes to myself (not including collation of quotes from sources--just potential lines of argument, most of which I've dropped). Also, every time I start writing, I think of this exchange from NewsRadio:

Dave: How do I know this isn't just 24 pages of hysterical ranting?
Bill: I thought that's what you were going for.

INSIDE BASEBALL: Oh, that Chris Gelpi...

A LITTLE FURTHER ENGAGEMENT: With John Quiggin on the question of Unite Against Terror. John was nice enough to respond to my post concerning his CT post on UAT which is somewhere below here. His comment, in full:

"Just to clarify, I didn't object to the petition because of who had signed it, but because their interpretation was the same as mine, that the main target of the petition was not terrorists but sections of the British left whose position on terrorism disagreed with their own.

If that was not intended, the organisers could have, as I suggested, asked them to remove their diatribes from the site and contribute something positive instead."

(which, I should point out in fairness to John, is not the interpretation given to his statements, for example, here. As far as the associational aspect goes, I think it's perfectly understandable be wary of joining the side of people with whom you have great differences. If Henry Kissinger were to sign the UAT statement this evening, I'd probably have to have a long hard think about how it was that we ended up on the same side, though in the end my decision to sign or not to sign would be unrelated to whomever else had signed, as John says he himself reasoned)

I'll confess to being a little unclear on the question of interpretation, though. So let me try to represent my thought process here and see if I can make some sense out of this claim. I thought immediately of Rousseau: I hold what is probably a minority view on him in the world of political theory, which is that he leaves unresolved a lot of tensions between the individual and society (and I think most of contemporary liberal philosophical debates (following Rawls, and especially in the area of public education) are trying to work out this tension in various other theoretical arenas), and I think that while his work is not in any meaningful sense proto-fascist, I think it's much easier to turn Rousseau's system into an autocratic or totalitarian one than it is to turn it into a democratic one. Lots of people disagree on that. We can go to various Rousseau texts and argue about what the right sort of way to interpret him is (we can argue, for example, what the meaning behind 'forced to be free' implies) and, at least in part because Rousseau is dead, we'll probably never have totally satisfactory answers to this one way or another. I know that even though mine is a minority view, there are other people who share it, some who want to make certain claims of mine more strongly, others more weakly. But my view is, ultimately, my view, and so long as I have enough textual support for it, I feel okay asserting it, and I (this is probably bad for my future career prospects) don't worry overmuch about hostile interpretations.

This ports over to the UAT case in, I think, relatively straightforward manner, with two exceptions: 1. the people who wrote it aren't dead (unless they're really sophisticated artificial intelligences, but I doubt that possibility), so we can actually repair to what they themselves said about why they wrote what they wrote and why it took the form that it did.

Now the part I'm confused about: why is the interpretation of people who did not themselves write the statement important here? I understand how this would get weight in the Rousseau example (some people have spent much more time on him than I have), but you have all the statement of intentionality one might need straight from the horses' mouths, as it were.

But I also understand Quiggin to be positing a counterfactual conditional: if it were the case that the organizers of UAT would take down the statements which attack some on the left more than the terrorists, then he would be willing to sign (or think about signing). But if the significant thing about the interpretation these people offer is that accords with Quiggin's own, how can it then be that removing these statements somehow rescues the meaning of the text in such a way that it can then be open to other, more favorable, interpretations?

Now, I also recognize that what I'm about to write could be seen as tendentious and baiting, but I want to emphasize that I mean to ask this seriously as a question, not to score a rhetorical point:

Ted Barlow here mentions the following:

"A few years ago, some idiotic war protestors, who no one had heard of and who represent no one, made a sign that said “We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.”"

and suggests that it is unfair to categorically impugn the entire antiwar movement on the basis of the actions of a few disagreeable elements (a view which seems fair enough to me). If the meaning and seriousness of the antiwar movement as a whole can be divorced from people who take it too far (and I think it can; I'm not convinced the antiwar position was the right one, but I'm willing to concede that most people did it out of a sincere set of convictions), why can't the UAT statement have the elements which go too far similarly divorced from it?

LINKETH: Prithee and forsooth, methinks this poste from Asymmetrical Information doth pointeth outeth a remarkably amusingeth beliefeth that those of us who resideth in the stateth of Northeth Carolina mighteth haveth an easiereth timeth understandingeth Shakespeareth. But perhapseth this be apllicableth onlyeth to those who were born here-eth. Eth. Eth.

UPDATE: I thought I should also add one of my favorite language-related misunderstandings: in the grad seminar I took on Medieval art theory, we read an article which said that there was an African language which made a linguistic differentiation between their words for 'matte black' and 'shiny black,' and that this was a sign of how they were more culturally sensitive to the possibilities of light than we were. I tried to point out that we do, in fact, have words which make that distinction ("matte" and "shiny"), but this was apparently different for reasons that remain unclear to me.

LINK: All normal Sox-Yankees animosity aside, here's hoping that Matt Clement is fine and recovers quickly.

LINK: (Can you tell I'm supposed to be doing writing today?) From Marc Cooper on Cuba:

"Do the math and see that Fidel has been in power for...um...more than 46 years. It's a staggering and ultimately shameful notion. A revolution that promised a "New Man" has instead produced an Old Man dictator who jails his opponents and governs by decree.

Give me all the jibber-jabber you want about the unfair way Cuba was and is treated (and all that's true) but nothing justifies four and a half decades of one man rule. Indeed, Castro's personal power monopoly is an insult to the Cuban people as well as to anyone who identifies with the revolutionary, humanist principles in which the regime so cynically continues to cloak itself."

And he makes a point of mentioning the latest roundup of dissidents, which, apparently, France has been at the forefront of trying to get them freed. And also apparently getting a hold of some of the people suspected to be behind 3/11. Now, I dislike France as a political unit as much as anyone--the centuries of aggression, nationalism, and appeasement, at turns--but, as with everyone else, we ought to be willing to welcome them fully when they do what they ought to be doing. And so I do. Good work, France!

LINK: Harry and Alan Johnson have an excellent reply to John Quiggin.

LINK: At Brendan's, Atrios appears to accuse Brendan of being homophobic*. He's too nice to point that out. I am not.

"Once an idiot, always an idiot"? I suspect this is not the best way to keep political discourse civil.

*I am not sure how else the following could be interpreted: "In any case, I don't find gay people to be revolting. Do you? Apparently. That's what's revolting."

THAT DOG JUST WON'T HUNT:

John Quiggin tries to take the moral high ground against Unite Against Terror. I'll admit I'm slightly confused by this. He says, for example:

"The implication of the statement, read as a whole, is that unity against terrorism requires unquestioning support for the Bush Administration, and denunciation of its opponents."

Here's the 'political' portion of the statement:

"Terrorist attacks against Londoners on July 7th killed at least 54 people. The suicide bombers who struck in Netanya, Israel, on July 12 ended five lives, including two 16 year old girls. And on July 13, in Iraq, suicide bombers slaughtered 24 children. We stand in solidarity with all these strangers, hand holding hand, from London to Netanya to Baghdad: communities united against terror.

These attacks were the latest atrocities committed by terrorist groups inspired by a poisonous and perverted politics that disguises itself as a form of the religion of Islam. The terrorists seek a closed society of fear and conformity. They are opposed by Muslims the world over. Muslim community leaders have condemned the London attacks unequivocally. We reject the terrorists' claim that they represent authentic Islam. They do not.

We remember the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 and in Madrid on March 11, 2004. But we know that al Qaeda and groups that are inspired by Bin-Ladenism have carried out atrocities in France, Pakistan, Israel, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, North Osetia and many other countries.

The vast majority of the victims of al Qaeda's violence have been Muslims. Those who have suffered at the hands of violent Islamic Fundamentalist movements in Iran and Algeria have also been ordinary Muslims.

This terrorist violence is not a response by 'Muslims' to the injustices perpetrated upon them by 'the west'. Western democracies have been responsible for some of the ills of this world but not for the terrorist murders of these deluded Bin-Ladenists.

These attacks did not begin in 2003. The first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center took place ten years before, in 1993."

So far as I can tell, the only things which are not, as such, facts and are thus open to argumentation are the identification of who is responsible for the latest terror attacks and the belief that the people who do these things in the name of Islam do not actually represent it. Quiggin objects thusly to the first of those two points:

"I don’t know the details of the Netanya and Baghdad attacks, but many terror attacks in Israel have been the work of secular Palestinian nationalist groups, and many terror attacks in Iraq have been organised by secular Baathists"

Which is to say, so far as I can tell, that it's somehow wrong or irresponsible to point out the fact that some people commit terrorism in the name of Islam because some people also do it for non-religious reasons. I'm not entirely sure what the force of Quiggin's objection is intended to be, because I think identifying the at least potentially 'Islamist' nature of the terrorist threat is actually meant to point out that even if people who call themselves Muslim use terror, they tend to use it against fellow Muslims and in the name of something other than Islam, and the statement further says:

"We stand firmly against the racists who seek to exploit the current tensions for their own agenda."

(I pass over his argument based on the statements of people who signed as to why they signed. I would presume that the rightness of a position isn't dependent on who else is taking that position, but then, I've always been heavily deontological in that way)

Quiggin has another objection, which he takes it is a coded reference to Iraq:

"And, while terror attacks did not begin in 2003, it is clear, at the very minimum, that recent terror attacks in Baghdad are a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq in that year (whether or not you think good consequences outweighed the bad ones)."

Granted, but I rather take it that this is not the point. The line is not intended as an apologia for war in Iraq, but rather to note that the use of terroristic tactics by people with their approximate set of political and social aims (even by at least some of the people acting in Iraq) did not begin in 2003. But, of course, Quiggin says this is "the very minimum;" one wonders what the "maximum" would be.

Then Quiggin offers the frankly bizarre charge:

"The emphasis on the specifically Islamist characteristics of the attacks we are asked to unite against suggests (if it is relevant at all) that other forms of terrorism, in support of other causes, might be morally justified."

But I'm unclear on how anything, say, here:

"These terrorists do not hate what is worst in the societies they attack, but what is best. They despise individual liberty, critical thought, gender equality, religious tolerance, the rights of minorities and political pluralism. They do not criticize democracy because it sometimes fails to live up to its principles; they oppose those principles.

In areas of conflict, the terrorists have damaged attempts at peaceful and political solutions to problems. They choose killing and reject mutual recognition, accommodation, negotiation, understanding, and compromise.

In the face of such an enemy, we believe it is vital that democratic political forces in all countries unite. We need a global movement of solidarity linking together communities threatened by terror. United we stand against terror."

...could not be applied fairly equally to any other kind of terrorist group. The specific peg of the statement hardly prevents wider interpretation.

And, well, let's take a look at some other parts of what Quiggin calls "the tendentious analysis" of the statement:

"We can find our inspiration in the behavior of ordinary people in the immediate aftermath of terrorist atrocities. Always the story is the same. A fractured world is mended by the kindness of strangers. We see, amidst the pain and anguish, in the rubble of the Twin Towers, the wreckage of a London bus, the bloodied glass across a Tel Aviv street, and among the Mothers searching for their children in Baghdad, that a common humanity asserts itself. Extraordinary acts of courage and selflessness become commonplace. The impulse of solidarity overwhelms fear and help comes from strangers.

With every healing gesture between strangers we feel a candle of hope has been lit in a dark world. On 7/7 a London tube worker rushed towards the blast, running down a smoke-filled tunnel, torch in hand, to lead out the survivors.

These ordinary yet heroic rescuers teach us the ethic of responsibility. It is time to assert our common humanity against all who would divide us. It is time to forge communities united against terror, respectful of the dignity of difference, and organised to extend active solidarity to each other across the globe...

We offer our support and solidarity to all those within the Muslim faith who work in opposition to the terrorists and who seek to win young people away from extremism and nihilism, towards an engagement with democratic politics.

We believe that democracy and human rights are worth defending with all our strength. The human values of respect and tolerance and dignity are not 'western' but universal.

We are not afraid. But we are not vengeful. We believe the kindness of strangers has lit the way and this light will drive away the darkness. We want to join light to light to show that evil, injustice and oppression will not have the final word. Through these acts of human solidarity we will mend the world the terrorists have fractured."

Yeah man: hope, democracy, human rights, respect, tolerance, dignity: the Bush Administration has brainwashed us good if it has us believing in those things.

LINK: Interesting article from Stylus, by a guy who spent most of his formative years listening to primarily Christian rock-type music, but, against type for this sort of story, says very wonderful things about how the experience was for him, and concludes, I think, quite excellently:

"I never intended to bury CCM, but over time, it happened. Any third party would’ve held it to be inevitable. Much of what Mr. Sullivan said in GQ about the tepid musical bounds of most CCM is true; but it would not have behooved his article to trumpet the numerous exceptions. To be sure, my journey into secular music has been quite the lesser salvation. The core principle informing my adolescent faves remains constant: Jesus Christ is the son of God whose willing death enabled the eternal life of a human race irredeemable otherwise. And if I shake my head wanly at a lot of my first choices in music, I still must salute the beliefs that informed both the product and my purchase. Yeah, the secular peaks of* quality are higher. Yeah, there’s so much areligious stuff that lays bare the soul. Yeah, you can be a believer and operate outside the lines of CCM. Yeah, those were some resonant, joyous times."

I never, of course, really 'did' the Christian music 'thing,' and I can't say that I feel very terrible on having missed out on that (though much of the very high quality stuff has been forwarded to me in the last few months, and I feel confident that an All-Star United can probably stand with anything short of the very best in secular music, and they probably managed more in the way of consistency than most bands; and my experience kicking around Presbyterian churches for the last few years has given me over again a tremendous appreciation for why those hymns have been around as long as they have, and my recent experiences in looking for a new church have convinced me that there's a lot to be said for more contemporary forms of worship music, so I don't think myself entirely off the reservation). But there's something in the feeling of this particular article that really resonates with my experience nonetheless.

And, in a slightly asymmetrical spirit, things which have been at the top of my ipod's rotation lately:

"The Day We Hit the Coast" -Thrush Hermit; they tend to sound a lot like Thin Lizzy (sometimes A LOT like Thin Lizzy), but they're a little more mellow here, and the song makes for an effective 6:32.

"So Weit Wie Noch Nie" -Jurgen Pappe; German microhouse: need I say more?

"Fleur de Lie" -Slow Dazzle; if it's been approaching 100° for most of the last week where you are, as it has here, this might not make for bad background music.

"Heard About Your Band" -Brakes; any song which namechecks Karen O, Sleater-Kinney and Electralane is pretty impressive--the 'whatever dude!' ending is also quite good.

"Valeurs Personelles" -Cornershop; I think it's fair to say I love everything even vaguely associated with France, except for anything having to do with their politics.

*says 'or,' but I assume 'of' for grammatical simplicity

LINK: Interesting post by Ivo Daalder on the Bush Administration's deicison to allow India to develop its commercial nuclear energy capabilities. Ivo lists a number of reasons to find the move to be a generally good one, but he does seem to omit the one that seemed most obvious to me on first reading about this move: it's really intended as a regional balancing against the potential hostility of emerging Chinese power. I think this is actually a fine example of how realist and idealist interests can coincide, as Ivo suggests:

"Third, and most crucially, India is the largest democracy in the world. Its leaders represent -- and I mean represent -- one in six people in the world. Maintaining good relations with the world's other democracies is the key to a successful foreign policy...

As I have noted before, Bush has challenged the reigning non-proliferation orthodoxy in important ways: Instead of focusing on weapons and technology, he's focused on the nature of the regimes that acquire them. Relaxing the rules for India -- a democracy -- is consistent with insisting on stricter rules for rogues like Iran and North Korea."

It's a really nice gesture of support for India (in implying that they can be trusted to develop new technology in acceptable ways), which happens to also make everyone a little better off than they were before. Not a bad move.

LINK: Megan McArdle has an excellent reply to John Quiggin's argument on consequentialism and war. To wit:

"When it comes right down to it, consequentialist arguments are generally arguments about what the consequences are, and how the value of, say, getting rid of a loathesome dictator and his troglodyte descendants compares to the lives of innocents who inevitably die in such invasions. Surely, a good liberal would not argue that merely sustaining life is the only important value; are not freedom, prosperity, security almost as important?

Mind you, I don't say that on such an expanded scale, Iraq would be a good idea; we're doing pretty miserably on the "security" part, and freedom and prosperity look far from secured. But Mr Quiggin's post seems incredibly superficial, for something that purports to be reasoning from first principles, rather than to the pre-determined conclusion. Of course, there may be some deeper philosophical and/or semantic subtleties that I'm missing."

I think Quiggin is probably just plugging into the standard quasi-communitarian/noninterventionist/pacifist* line on any kind of fighting in general. Certainly, his argument looks similar to some of the stuff Michael Walzer peddles in Just and Unjust Wars. Nevertheless, it seems to me like there's a problem with proceeding here out of a strictly consequentialist analysis: you simply can't know ahead of time. Even if you could, in game-theoretic terms, fully tree out all the possibilities, and the reasonable range of possibilities, you'd still get something that would give you only a potential idea of your payoffs given what you know at the outset. Of course, no one can actually handle that level of calculation, so you surrender another measure of certainty and start prioritizing the things you think will 'matter more.' But, ultimately, no one really knows**.

In the face of that, it seems like you have two alternatives: either you can oppose every possible foreign move, or all of them except the ones where it's blindingly obvious that your side will win, or else you accept that there are some rules which you can reasonably follow. And it seems like quite a lot rides on which side you take on that question.

*these all being measurably different categories, but happening to agree in large part on this particular area of foreign policy and international relations

**I also find this sort of calculation vexing because it suggests that its entirely possible that the rightness or wrongness of an action will be dependent on something that may or may not happen 25 steps removed from the initial decision. This seems like an inversion of Aristotle's argument in the Nichomachean Ethics that the happiness of dead people is relative to the honorableness of their descendents: perverse to consider, but logical enough if you follow a certain train of thought.

'THESE THINGS': There's a lot to find hopelessly un-serious in Matt Yglesias' post on Sudan, not least of which his concerns over the lack of a good plan for how to go about intervening (Matt seems to be, so far as I can tell, assuming from the current absence of such a plan that no reasonable plan could ever be created). But what's really offensive is this part, listed among his reasons to oppose intervening in Darfur:

"The record of past humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo suggests that these things always wind up requiring more time and money than their advocates first state."

Now it's hard to pick out exactly which part of that statement is more repugnant: it's perhaps the fact that it breezily assumes that calculations of time and cost should go into figuring out whether or not we should bother to stop an ongoing slaughter (presumably, Matt's never heard of a moral imperative before--I can't figure out why else he would say this, because he does seem to at least accept the notion that we could, in fact, do something if we so chose), rather than, say, concretely doing what we can to stop the very worst and then worrying about how long it'll take to get the Sudan back on its feet.

Or perhaps its the way his treatment of humanitarian interventions seems to condescend to and 'otherize' the people who were helped. He seems very unable to muster even a basic amount of affinity (to say nothing of solidarity) with the people who ended up, you know, not dying because of what little we were willing to do. One wonders exactly what one has to do to be worth dealing with in the international realm in Matt Yglesias' conception of US foreign policy (pose a threat to national security--ed. Ah yes, well, it does all eventually have to be about me, doesn't it?*).

Or hey, if the US is too busy doing other things, why not have the UN do it? Ah yes:

"It seems that other major powers would, at the very best, grudgingly acquiesce in such a policy. They certainly won't take the lead in implementing it."

Well, obviously, something not being popular is a great reason not to do it.

Is this not just a really obvious instantiation of realism in foreign policy?

*not that national security reasons aren't valid, but claiming that as your foreign policy guiding principle is like saying having the economy grow will be your guiding domestic principle--completely uncontroversial, but not actually saying much of anything substantively

LINK: PoliBlog does a much better job than I can manage keeping up with the Rove-Plame-Wilson thing. I can't say I care all that much about it, and I have to think this is a widely shared view, so I think it's a very, very good thing for the Republican party if Democrats and Democratic activists continue to harp on this issue: no one will really care unless the end result uncovers something massively criminal (and they may not care even then, e.g. Iran-Contra), but mostly it makes Democrats look like crazy loons who will tilt at whatever windmills they can find to out Bush's (or Bush's associates') 'criminal' behavior. Did these people learn nothing from Monicagate?

LINK: We here in the States cannot, of course, boycott the Guardian as such (for reasons elaborated here, though the short version is that they are apparently aware that they employ someone to write op-eds who has openly advocated a world-wide caliphate and the destruction of the world Jewry), though we can maybe agree to refrain from linking to them and looking them up for news. I tend towards The Telegraph for news anyway (unfortunate though its politics can sometimes be), though I'll admit my familiarity with the British press is not what it once was (suggestions for good alternatives are, of course, always welcome). In any event, another opportunity for solidarity rears its head, so we should do what we can.

LINK: The Unite Against Terror website (pointed out on Harry's Place). Hitch's statement, in part:

"Association with this statement and with many of its fellow-signatories involves two commitments. The first is the elementary duty of solidarity with true and authentic resistance movements within the Muslim world, such as the Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, who were fighting against Ba'athism and Talibanism (and the latent alliance between the two) long before any American or British government had woken up to the threat. It should go without saying that, though the suffering of their peoples was intense, neither Jalal Talabani nor Ahmed Shah Masoud ever considered letting off explosive devices at random in foreign capitals. I have my political and ideological differences with both groups, but these differences are between me and them, and are not mediated through acts of nihilistic murder."

LINKS: They've all been posting much, much faster than even I can read and comprehend it all, so I'll direct you generally again (if you're not already visiting all the time) to Norm, Harry and co., and everyone's favorite Drink-Soaked Trots. One can't help but find it all impressive.

LINK: I'm totally with Chris on numbers 1 and 4 (and probably would be on #5, as well: I'm your typical Joss Whedon nerd-fan, so I can't imagine that I wouldn't like it). In particular, I recently was given the first two seasons of Newsradio on DVD, and it's very reassuring to discover that it's exactly as good (if not better) than I remember it. "The Cane"? "Bill's Autobiography"? Pure genius.

Also, in the comments, Sports Night is mentioned. Again, pure genius, but I really can't imagine thta particular show having managed much more in its run than it did; but maybe that's just me.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: Edmund Burke Letters on a Regicide Peace (emphasis mine):

"Speculative plunder; contingent spoil; future, long adjourned, uncertain booty; pillage which must enrich a late posterity, and wich possibly may not reach to posterity at all; these, for any length of time, will never support a mercenary war. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind.* The rest is vanity; the rest is crime."

LINK: They'll migrate to the blogroll when I get the next opportunity, but you should be reading them already anyway: Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR

WELL: Interesting post on Iraq and the neoconservative rethinking thereof by Daniel Nexon. He says:

"Nevertheless, I do wish Cohen hadn't written this: "the Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction." The Bush administration did not, principally, do itself a disservice; it did the American people a disservice. By justifying the war on grounds that were, at best, not very compelling (Hussein was not about to give nuclear weapons to terrorists to attack New York) and, at worst, dishonest, the administration undermined democratic decision-making; it may also have, in the long term, undermined popular support for staying the course in Iraq.

More importantly, however, the Bush administration undermined American credibility. Remember Powell's presentation at the UN? Remember the reaction of the other members of the Security Council? The French were right that it was nonsense (scroll down to the February 5 box). From a foreign-policy perspective, that's not the outcome the US really wants, now is it?"

Now, of course, as one of those people who supported the war for broadly humanitarian interventionist reasons, I certainly would have preferred that my particular reasons had been at the top of the Administration's list of justifications. However, I think it's also reasonably clear that there weren't really better options available because,

1. So far as I am aware, no intervention has ever been permitted for humanitarian intervention reasons alone: it always has to be supported by some national-security interest pretext, no matter how flimsy (and thus I think back to what I quoted of Michael Walzer and his claim that even invasions which could clearly be justified for humanitarian reasons would have been unlikely to receive any kind of international support). It seems like the only real difference is that the United States, in trying to do this, takes on a higher profile than, say, Vietnam invading Cambodia.

2. I'm not going to take the position of arguing that the Bush administration's difficulties in the last few months (and periodically before that) articulating what exactly the goal of being in Iraq is hasn't hurt the long-term viability of staying until things are reasonably back to normal. I do, however, generally disagree with the implied counterfactual: that if Bush had based his arguments primarily on humanitarian motivations, this would generate more public support for 'staying the course.' My experience with public-opinion-and-war literature is somewhat limited, so I can't really speak ex cathedra, but my suspicion is that more prosaic reasons might have prevented the war from ever being really popular in the long haul. Also, despite arguments about the need to respect the norms of the democratic process, I can't really see how it's the case that what is right to do, or continue doing, is actually related to what people want to do (but that's the philosopher in me talking).

Sigh. At least they've had the sense to recind it.

LINK: Prospect Theory and Homeland Security

LINK: David T at Harry's Place on a good opportunity to show some solidarity.

THE TWO MICHAEL WALZERS: I'm in the midst of working on a paper on the concept of solidarity (having just completed the section on Richard Rorty and his odious views on human rights and solidarity), and I'm currently working my way through some of the smaller works of Michael Walzer. It's truly infuriating to read him, because (for example) in his writing on social criticism (and also, as memory serves, in Spheres of Justice) he takes such anti-universalist and anti-transcendent views, to the point of advocating a very bizarre form of parochialism. But when he writes about actual political problems, all of that seems to fall away and he starts making sense again. To wit (from "The Politics of Rescue," Social Research, Spring 1995):

"...That is why American politicians and military officers have insisted that there must be an exit strategy before there can be an intervention. But this is effectively an argument against intervening at all. Exit strategies can rarely be designed in advance, and a public commitment to exit within such and such a time would give the hostile forces a strong incentive to lie low and wait. Better to stay home than to intervene in a way that is sure to fail...

And yet, sometimes, [interventions] ought to be supported and endured. Consider: if some powerful state or regional alliance had rushed troops into Rwanda when the massacres first began or as soon as their scope was apparent, the terrible exodus and the cholera plague might have been avoided. But the troops would still be there, probably, and no one would know what hadn't happened...

Multilateralism is no guarantee of anything. It may still be better than the unilateral initiative of a single powerful state--though in the examples with which I began, India, Vietnam, and Tanzania, local powers, did not do entirely badly; none of their interventions, with the possible exception of the last, would have been authorized by the UN. In practice, we should probably look for some concurrence of multilateral authorization and unilateral initiative--the first for the sake of moral legitimacy, the second for the sake of political effectiveness--but it's the initiative that is essential."

And what is all of that, after all, but a willingness to announce the universal application of one's own moral beliefs, in a way not at all open to argumentation as duties or obligations (though the entailments of those duties or obligations being open to discussion). I've not yet made it to Just and Unjust Wars, though Walzer informs the reader that this particular essay is meant to be narrowly tailored exceptions to his general support for nonintervention, so I imagine it will be frustrating going.

Oh, and then there's this little bit, instructive for what I take to be obvious reasons:

"(A friend comments: you would stress the wariness more if there were a Republican president. Probably so.)"

UM: so there's a new "best places to live" list out, and the only thing I find more implausible than Saline at #43 is Durham at #92: maybe it actually is time for "Durham is Overrated."

LINKS: The Tele on Srebrenica, and SIAW (at Drink-Soaked Trots for War) as well. I may take partial issue with SIAW on something, though:

"Let Ms Kandic speak for them, so that it’s clear that what happened at Srebrenica wasn’t a crime committed by “Serbs” (or even Serbians) against “Bosniacs” (or even Muslims), it was a crime committed by psychopaths, representing nobody but themselves and their boss Milosevic, against humanity:"

I think that's all well and good, so long as 'psychopath' is meant to stand in for the notion that these people were radically outside and reasonable person's ethical range and, as such, need to be opposed by everyone altogether, but I think it's important (especially when contrasting such people with 'humanity') to make sure that we remember that they're still human themselves, that is, people who intentionally and culpably rejected all that common standards of morality reject.

NOTE TO DAVID: I think it's called the US flag.

LINK: I read this criticism of Sarah Vowell's NYT column on Homeland Security Dept. funding per state with some interest, though it seems to me to miss the most obvious criticism to make of the per-person numbers Vowell uses: New York has a lot more people than Wyoming does. So Wyomingians get about seven times as much money per person, but New York has forty times (or so) more people: New York still gets more money. And given facts like the placement of nuclear weapons in Wyoming and the fact that there's probably a floor one has to hit to have anything resembling a HS apparatus in place, this is maybe not unreasonable. It may well turn out that more money needs to be spent on particular threats--but then again, it may turn out that this number is just something like block grants distributed to states and doesn't include aggregate federal spending, or something like that. Anyway, just another example of the need to be wary about numbers.

LINK: There are many reasons to like Dan Drezner, but bringing back the term "Joementum" has to go straight to the top.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Sara Butler:

"As a general rule of thumb, don’t type anything you wouldn’t actually say to someone’s face. Unless you’re a jerk in real life, too. In which case, stop that."

LINK: Also, it needs to be said: Amen, Red Ken!

WHAT NOW?

Londonist, pardon the, um, colorful language, but I think it's appropriate:

"Yeah, they hit us. But we didn't go down. Londonist's sympathies go to the victims, and we like to think of the hot sweat that is breaking out across the brows of a fair few terrorist nutters right now - we're coming for you, you fuckers."

As it says underneath my blog name up there:

"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it, that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment to wrong causes."

And that's it, right? You have to have the anger: that shows that you're having the right reactions. But it's not enough to have the anger alone, because it's at best just a means to an end. Undirected anger, as Christopher Hitchens points out

"It will be easy in the short term for Blair to rally national and international support, as always happens in moments such as this, but over time these gestural moments lose their force and become subject to diminishing returns."

And that feels like it's been missing lately, right? We have arguments about some or another topic, but even those of us who really believe in global democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention and all of that other stuff have felt beat down latety, engaged in merely political arguments. And even we forget, just a little bit, about the anger, which is the impetus for all of this. Look at Andrew Sullivan today. Say what you will about the man's politics in general (and I've been less than impressed in the past), but there's a man who knows how to get angry about things he thinks he should be angry and stay angry about them. I don't mean to speak in favor of anger as such, but rather mastered anger. Brownie at Harry's Place quotes Winston Churchill (the king of mastered anger, perhaps):

"This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration which he has caused London have been removed."

And so get angry and do something about it.

WELL: it's hard to know what to say, really, so links first:

Norm's providing excellent updates on the situation in London.

Jeff Jarvis is managing links quite well.

TigerHawk has a live-blog of Tony Blair's speech, as well as more reactions.

And:

Gene from Harry's Place:
"My thoughts and my solidarity are with everyone in London and the UK. Stay strong."

Spirit of 1976:
"Well, I'm sure you're all just as horrified as I am. I've just been hurriedly sending out text messages to make sure all my friends in London are okay. Fortunately they're all texting back.

Some will call this the result of the rise of Islamofascism. Others will call it blowback from US/UK foreign policy. I'm not interested in a debate about motives right now. I hope that we can all agree that, whatever the reasons for today's attack, these things might be considered explainable, but they are never forgivable.

God bless you all, and be safe, wherever you are."

Asymmetrical Information opts for the Book of Ruth

For my part, I should say that there's no place in the world I've been that I've liked better, and even were that not the case, my thoughts and prayers would still be with Londoners as they try and sort through and deal with what happened.

NO KIDDING: Greg Djerejian points to a statement by President Bush to the effect that things in Iraq may last for a good long time yet.* I'll admit that, unlike a lot of people, I've been less disturbed by the sometimes slow progress in Iraq (I think I pitched it as at least 10 years before the war began), and so I haven't paid a ton of attention to the various statements about how long it'd take, but aside from the unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" moment, I always thought Bush had been rather clear on this (this is not to say anything about what Dick Cheney or Rumsfeld may have said). Perhaps I was wrong.

In any event, the thing this particularly brings to mind is an issue of The New Republic I ran across when organizing some of my books and magazines, which had a cover story about how Bush was going to pull out of Iraq really soon and cut short the transition process in that way. The magazine, of course, was from the spring of 2003. I suppose it's reasonable to argue we should've left after the elections in January (though I don't hold that view), or that we should start thinking about leaving (though I oppose timetable logic for all the usual reasons), but was there ever a period in which Bush got any credit for not abandoning things the moment they got slightly difficult? Or did the conventional wisdom just shift instantaneously from "he's going to leave as soon as he possibly can, because he obviously doesn't care about the Iraqi people at all" to "he's so incapable of seeing the situation for what it is, which is why he doesn't have the sense to leave?"

*and none of what I'm about to say applies to him: he just provides the peg

LINK: I would, of course, never condone anything like schadenfreude at the prospect of the British beating the French out for something the French were certain they would get, but if you're into that sort of thing, you could do worse than to go here.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY:

"For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war; and in multitude of counsellors there is safety."

-Proverbs 24:6

LINK: Daniel Nexon at The Duck (is this an acceptable abbreviated form of the name? I think it's kind of catchy) has a nice application of James Fearon's "Rationalist Explanations for War" in the context of the question of why states go to war when it's almost always objectively worse for them. Now, speaking as the only person really willing to defend the rationalist approach in my IR core this last term (and being one of the few defenders of any use for formal theory, game theory, etc), I find this sort of explanation to be perfectly satisfying, insofar as it goes, but somewhat incomplete. It seems pretty obvious that

"the presence of an indivisible issue, incorrect information about a rival's objectives, or the inability of one (or both) sides to make a credible commitment to upholding the settlement all may lead rational states to opt for war."

but it still seems to leave open the question of why these things lead to war (rather than, say, to more negotiations or further attempts to gather information about the opponent's preferences, though I suspect that this all becomes clearer when one looks to conflict in IPE, where there are more cases and the causal structure should be easier to identify). Now, of course, my favored explanation comes from first-image realism (that is, people have these preferences because the will-to-power is built into humanity, which leads to both perverse preference structures and the willingness to forego rationality when convenient), but I realize I'm pretty alone in having that preference. In any event, you should read Fearon's article if you haven't already, because it's really good.

(waits to get verbally pelted by any of my IR friends who happen upon this blog)

ALSO: ironically enough, Blogger's spell-checker does not recognize the word 'blog.' As Bart Simpson once said, "the ironing is delicious."

QUOTE: I never cease to find this Richard Rorty quote amusing:

"This substitution would let us disentangle Christ's suggestion that love matters more than knowledge from the neo-Platonic suggestions that knowledge of the truth will make us free."

I find it amusing because I'm aware of no spot in the Bible in which Christ suggests anything the the first statement. I also find it amusing because the suggestion he takes to be neo-Platonic actually comes from Jesus.

Richard Rorty: reads a lot, doesn't really pay attention to it.