David T. Beito
Unfortunately, the chances for peaceful partition (to the extent they ever existed) are rapidly receding. The best window of opportunity was shortly after the defeat of Saddam when the situation was in flux. Today, partition would be much more difficult to achieve because leaders of the Shi'ite majority are so puffed up with dreams of monopoly power (either through all Iraq elections or by force) in a unified Iraqi nation state.
As Iraq spirals into renewed factionalism, violence, and increased distrust of the U.S. (all worsened by the continued presence of our troops), any option is riddled with numberless potential unintended consequences. The best remaining hope for both Iraq and our national defense is for the US to withdraw as soon as possible from this mess.....though I suspect that Tyler (who supported this war) is not ready to agree!
William Marina
Art, films and literature often offer insights which help to explain human situations perhaps better than does history. This Easter season, “The Passion of the Christ” provided us an example of the way in which imperial occupiers, and some of their Quislings, treated dissidents.
My favorite, however, on the integral interaction between occupiers and those being occupied, is John Steinbeck’s 1942 book, The Moon is Down, shortly thereafter made into a film starring Cedric Hardwicke, Lee J. Cobb and Henry Travers. I first saw the film in the 1950s. Since the Vietnam era it has been little shown, if at all.
It is a story about the German invasion of a small town in Norway in 1940, and the developing reactions of the inhabitants as the Nazis seek to insure that the mine nearby continues to send coal to the Third Reich's war machine.
Readers this year may be tempted to replace the term “Norway” with “Iraq,” “coal” with “oil,” and “Germany” with the phrase “Coalition.”
The story even has a “fifth column” Ahmed Chalabi like character, who sets up the town for an easy occupation, imagining he will be dearly beloved by the people.
The central confrontation, however, is between Mayor Orden, and the German officer in command, Col. Lanser, a Wehrmacht veteran of occupied Belgium over two decades earlier, who urges cooperation rather than violence, which will lead, he warns, inevitably to more violence on the part of the Germans.
Woven through all of this are the increasingly violent acts of “the People.” Early on, Lanser’s mind wanders back to a friendly, little, old, gray-haired Belgian lady who killed 12 Germans with a 12 inch hat pin, before she was caught and shot. He still retains the hat pin at home.
Of course, the violence begins at once, and the Germans retaliate on a much larger scale on the Norwegian people. At the same time, many of the German troops, yearning to go home and for some companionship, begin to develop various symptoms of psychological stress.
The Germans, like imperial conquerors back to the Romans and beyond, seek to legitimatize their occupation in the eyes of the people. They understand that Quislings won’t work in the long run. John Lukacs devoted a large part of his book, The Last European War: September, 1939 - December, 1941, (1976) to demonstrating how they failed in a attempt to establish legitimacy over the nations of occupied Europe.
“Legitimacy,” to paraphrase, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Ah, there’s the rub!” Incidentally, the movie version of the book opens with a quote from Roosevelt about the example of the resistance of Norway explaining the meaning of W.W.II.
At the end, the Quisling, having obtained authority from the Nazi command in Oslo, orders Col. Lanser to execute the old Mayor and the town doctor, if the people begin to use the dynamite, dropped by parachute by British airplanes, to destroy the mine. As the explosions begin, the two are executed as the Mayor repeats an old speech he used many years before, the last words of Socrates to the Athenian people.
It is clear the occupiers, despised by the people, are in for a long and bloody time ahead.
In a New York Times (4/11/04) op-ed piece, “Nasty, Brutish and Short,” Thomas Friedman, mentions the word “legitimacy” four times, and flip-flops on whether it can be bought with cash or compelled with force, before finally concluding that the U.S. cannot do so, and that with all of the retaliatory killing, “we have a staggering legitimacy deficit.”
I wonder if legitimacy is something you can have in gradations as he suggests? Either one is a bastard, or one is not!
As reported in The Telegraph (4/11/2004) among our major partner in the so-called Coalition, the British, senior officers, speaking anonymously, have already expressed a growing sense of"unease and frustration," about American tactics in the occupation. Part of the problem, a British officer said, is that Americans tend to see the Iraqis as “untermenschen,” the term for “sub-humans,” -- Jews, Slavs and Gypsies --used by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
British rules of warfare allow troops to open fire only when attacked, and to use the minimum force necessary, and at identified targets, not a massive use of firepower in urban areas, as do the Israelis on the Palestinians, and now American troops on the Iraqis.
In short, The Moon is Down, again.
David T. Beito
BE:"But the security question, will that take more troops?"
BM:"We probably have enough troops to regain control of the national capitol and the lines of communication. But at this point there are no more troops essentially to send....8 of 10 army divisions are in movement into the theater or out right now. Essentially 70% of our combat power has been deployed. We've called up--from this deployment 40% of that deployment is national guard or reserve. We're down to 3 to 5 brigades of the army and marine corps strategic reserves, and we are at and beyond our elastic breaking point.
Hat tip: Historians Against the War listserve.
David T. Beito
Sheldon Richman
Huh?
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Yes, David Beito and Jonathan Dresner, our Volokh Conspiracy colleagues are way behind the times. I too presented the possibility of the three-state solution on November 26, 2003. At this point, I doubt that anything will solve the mess that the U.S. has created.
I do like the fact, however, that a number of people who supported this fiasco of a war, are now grasping the insanity of it all. Perhaps someday the Volokh people will take their heads out of the Iraqi sand and come up for a much-need dosage of Liberty (& Power). Richard Cohen, whose essays I've cited here a number of times, once supported this war too. He writes in today's NY Daily News that this desire to use Iraq to" change the world" (something that has led Justin Raimondo to call the President, the"Neocon Napoleon") is Bush's Pipe Dream. Cohen writes:
Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere - in a North Pole of his mind. What matters more, is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another:"We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Saddam of his WMD, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's"mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world."I also know that there's a historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. The next sentence was even more disquieting."And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for one man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable.
Cohen concludes:"This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade."
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
It's reported by the NY Times that the"Islamic terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings financed their plot with sales of hashish and Ecstasy ..." This article, by Dale Fuchs, tells us that the terrorists used"traffickers as intermediaries," swapping"the drugs for the 440 pounds of dynamite used in the blasts ... Money from the drug trafficking paid for an apartment hide-out, a car and the cellphones used to detonate the bombs, an Interior Ministry spokesman said."
There is also this article about Afghanistan's opium poppy crop, which is skyrocketing to levels"twice as large as last year's near-record crop." The country is responsible for three-quarters of the world's opium production. The US has talked routinely about"eradication" of the crop, because the profits are used to prop up"an undemocratic narco terrorist-controlled state," benefiting warlords and a resurgent Taliban. But it is under the US watch that opium production has become the chief means to stabilize the hand-picked"Northern Alliance" regime. That profits from the sale of narcotics are now making their way into Al Qaeda coffers is therefore no surprise.
Remember those anti-drug commercials that drew a direct connection between drugs and terror, laying the blame for the funding of terrorism squarely on the plate of drug users? Those commercials told users: Stop using! Terrorism is your fault (driving many of them to drink, no doubt)!
Of course, few are suggesting that the criminalization of drug use has created a world-wide network of illicit drug producers, whose profits are derived from the very fact of government drug prohibitionism. The original Mafia itself was born in the days of alcohol prohibition. Why should current developments be any surprise?
Instead of decriminalization, we are offered, year after year, a new front in the"war on drugs," which only continues to destroy civil liberties at home, while doing nothing to diminish the profits abroad that are funneled to terrorists. Indeed, Attorney General John Ashcroft was so obsessed with prioritizing the drug war (and various" civil rights" issues) in the first seven months of his tenure, that terrorism barely registered on his radar. Now, of course, with the powers bestowed on him through the Patriot Act, he gets to use his office to eradicate drugs and civil rights all in one fell swoop.
As Nebraska attorney Don Fiedler, former director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has put it:"This fanning the flames of narco-terrorism is something that has some merit. ... Narcotics are one of the tools that terrorists use to fund their operations, but the other question that should come out of it, other than increasing the penalties for use, is to go and re-examine the policies in the first place."
Amen. Perhaps drug legalization should be proposed as a means of combatting terrorism, taking the profits out of the industries that fund terrorists. But this would require an extraordinary act of mental integration: Politicians would have to start thinking about the interconnections among the various aspects of a system that they continue to support. Terrorists emerge from the context of US intervention overseas; they are recruited en masse because of increasing intervention overseas; they get funding from various current (and former) US allies and from industries whose profits are derived partially from prohibitionist controls. The whole system of interventionism, from top to bottom, domestically and abroad, is reinforcing cause and effect.
Boy, it is very difficult to be a political radical. Radicals, by their nature, seek to go to the root of social problems; they trace the connections among social problems, and think in terms of fundamentals and principles. The system that they oppose is one that has been built piecemeal, brick by brick, over decades of political machinations. But the system itself blocks comprehensive reform; it promotes political tinkering as surely as it promotes atomistic thinking.
It is time to start thinking comprehensively, dialectically, as I would say; it is time to start thinking about all the things that must be done to change this system fundamentally.
David T. Beito
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
What's the sense of saying anything about the President's press conference? He's just going through the familiar motions and will never admit to any mistakes. Well, at least you have to give him points on stubborn commitment.
Everything he said and everything I could have said is summed up here. But for a look at some unfortunate future possibilities as the U.S. stays the course in Iraq, it is always good to look at history.
Gene Healy
Doves: Vietnam.
Hawks: No, Munich.
Doves: Vietnam!
Hawks: MUNICH!!
Longer Iraq War Debate:
Some interesting historical examples of "successful" counterinsurgencies from Tacitus, the thinking man's hawk. Scare quotes are mine, not his, for reasons you can probably figure out for yourself.
Roderick T. Long
During last night's press conference, when asked about the similarities between the Iraq and Vietnam quagmires, our Commander-in-Chief replied:"I think that analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."
The point of this answer was obviously not to give grounds for thinking the analogy false (something he made no serious attempt to do), but rather to suggest that invoking such an analogy is disloyal.
Of course, Bush has never shown any grasp of the distinction between grounded belief and motivated belief.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
A very nice piece by Richard Cohen on"The Iraqi Quagmire" appears in yesterday's New York Daily News. Cohen is careful to distinguish between the Iraq and Vietnam situations, but he sees that in both cases, there is the same operative principle:"We don't know what the hell we're doing. ... The lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right."
Roderick T. Long
Geekery Today reminds us of the following marvelous quotation from George Orwell's 1946 essay"Politics and the English Language":
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright,"I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:My only quibble with what Orwell says here is the qualification"In our time." Though admittedly the vague, mushy sort of writing that Orwell criticises here is quintessentially contemporary, euphemism of some sort is a pervasive and universal feature of (nonlibertarian) political speech -- and not accidentally so. Government, by its nature as a coercive monopoly, necessarily violates the norms of peaceful cooperation and reciprocity whose approximate observance is a precondition for social existence.While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
As Ludwig von Mises writes in Human Action:
It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.This is why in political speech it is always necessary to"name things without calling up mental pictures of them." Admittedly, however, the rise of democratic and egalitarian ideologies has made the state's need for obfuscatory language all the more urgent, since such ideologies have largely disabled traditional appeals to natural social hierarchies. Even less than its predecessors can the modern democratic state afford to acknowledge its essential role as instrument of the ruling class.
Yet in the end it is not quite in the interests of state power for its basis in violence and exploitation to be entirely obscured. After all, the state's being known to command vast coercive means is crucial to its influence in the first place. Hence the need for language that mystifies the violence of the state. As I wrote in Equality: The Unknown Ideal:
On the one hand, statist ideology must render the violence of the state invisible, in order to disguise the affront to equality it represents. Hence statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.
Yet on the other hand, the effectiveness of governmental edicts depends precisely on people being all too aware of the force backing up those edicts. Hence statism can maintain its plausibility only by implicitly projecting a kind of grotesque parody of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: just as bread and wine must be transformed in their essence into the body and blood of Christ in order to play their necessary spiritual role, whilst at the same time they must retain the external accidents of bread and wine in order to play their necessary practical role, so the violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence. (This sacralization of state violence explains how proponents of gun control, for example, can regard themselves as opponents of violence whilst at the same time threatening massive and systematic violence against peaceful citizens.)
But to ignore or mask the violence upon which socioeconomic legislation necessarily rests is to acquiesce in the unconscionable subordination and subjection that such violence embodies. It is to treat those subordinated and subjected as mere means to the ends of those doing the subordinating, and thus to assume a legitimate inequality in power and jurisdiction between the two groups.
William Marina
The Nation has an interesting review on Tocqueville.
Sy Hersh, in The New Yorker, discusses the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan.
And, Theodore Dalrymple, in the City Journal, explores "When Islam Breaks Down" just as we see the growing nationalism in Iraq.
David T. Beito
As a solution, King cites the effort of Princeton to limit the proportion of"A's given at 35% of all grades given." He speculates that"it might indeed take a committee, dean's office or an entire administration. Collective effort might be needed. My libertarian tendencies chafe at the thought, but is there another way?" The collective action problem King describes is very real...though it worth noting that it is oddly uneven in its impact. It seems to be chiefly a departmental, not an individual faculty, problem.
At the University of Alabama, for example, our survey of grade distortion (the combined phenomen of grade inflation and disparities) found that some departments are holding the line on excessive A's (at least in relative terms). Faculty in history, philosophy, and anthropology give an average of about 14 percent A's every year in their introductory courses while those in women's studies award nearly 80 percent. English is around 35 percent A's in introductory couses while faculty in the College of Education give about 60 percent.
Faculty in all of these departments use essentially the same method of student evaluations. Why the difference in the percentage of A's in 100 and 200 courses? I am not entirely sure. Whatever the reason for these vast disparities between departments and colleges, they seem to be tremendously difficult to reverse once established.
King wonders if it is time to impose a percentage rule on the percentage of A's. While I would prefer this to the status quo, I think there are still better solutions. One is to require that the grade distribution of every professor be posted on the web thus hopefully shaming some of the departments and faculty who had out A's like candy.
Another solution is more ambitious (but speaks more to structural causes of the problem): a ranking system. It would require faculty to rank each class as well as give letter grades. For example, if the class has twenty students, they would be ranked 1 to 20. Ties could be averaged. If students are tied for number 1, for example, each would be ranked 2 (the average of the ties). Ranking would not replace grading. Because the ranking and the letter grade for each class would *both* appear in the transcript, however, this reform would introduce greater truth in grading. Thus, a student receive an A in this class of twenty but still be ranked twenty in the class.
In addition, ranking, perhaps combined with letter grades could be used to determine such awards as class validictorian and campus-wide scholarships.
A combined ranking/grading system would protect the"academic freedom" of faculty to give grades in the way they see fit. At the same time, it would provide a corrective to the massive grade disparities that now exist between faculty and, more importantly, between departments and divisions. Can ranking allow"libertarians" who chafe at outside mandates to have their cake and eat it too? Perhaps it can.
David T. Beito
"It's very...very clear that we've got to get more senior Iraqis involved - former military types involved in the security forces...In the next couple of days you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defense and the Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands."
King Banaian
David T. Beito
To the Editor:
We are the chairs of the Ad Hoc Committee to Revise the Alabama Course of Study which has worked in cooperation with Margaret Brown of the Eagle Forum on this issue since February.
Your editorial of April 8 gave several examples to illustrate the"balance and thoroughness" of the Course of Study. It cited the following: the mention of John Locke as an influence on the Declaration of Indepedence, loyalty oaths under Truman, and Reagan's"tear down the wall speech."
Unfortuantely, the editorial neglected a crucial detail. It did not mention that our Ad Hoc Committee was responsible for the inclusion of each and every one of these facts. These and over two hundred pieces of additional changes only appeared because of pressure brought by our committee and Eagle Forum in February and March and the intervention of Board of Education Secretary Joseph B. Morton on our behalf.
Sincerely,
David T. Beito, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Alabama and, Co-Chair, Ad Hoc Committee to Revise the Alabama Course of Study.
Charles W. Nuckolls, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Co-Chair, Ad Hoc Committee to Revise the Alabama Course of Study.
Pat Lynch
Last weekend I was at one of our conferences directed by Tyler Cowen on the Blank Slate theory promoted by Steven Pinker in his well-known book on the topic. While I think the book leaves something to be desired, and I'm not at liberty to go into great detail about the discussion, I did think it was most interesting to link to the numerous bloggers that Tyler invited.
In no particular order, these folks all lean towards freedom politically and have a lot of good things to say. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok do a great job discussing how markets are promoting (or should be) freedom throughout the world in numerous ways. David Nishimura talks about art, markets, and history in a really refreshing way for those of us who are current affairs junkies. Randall Parker's Future Pundit gives his informed commentary on scientific news with a sympathetic view of markets. I don't always agree with Megan McArdle's alter ego Jane Galt, but she does make me think. Finally Dan Drezner's untenured perspective helps me sort through foreign policy. I recommend all of them highly.
Steven Horwitz
