While the Kerry and Bush campaigns trade charges of who is the ultimate flip-flopper, one thing these two gents agree on is to stay the course in Iraq. Today, James Dao in the NY Times asks:"How Many Deaths Are Too Many?." Dao recalls:

In the fall of 1965, the death toll for American troops in Vietnam quietly passed 1,000. The escalation in the number of American forces was just underway, the antiwar movement was still in its infancy and the word"quagmire" was not yet in common usage. At the time, the Gallup Poll found that just one in four Americans thought sending troops to southeast Asia had been a mistake. It would be three years before public opinion turned decisively, and permanently, against the war.

Four decades later, the passing of the 1,000-death benchmark in another war against insurgents has been accompanied by considerably more public unease. Polls registered a steady increase in the number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq was not worth it, peaking at over 50 percent in June. Americans, it seems, are more skeptical about this conflict than about Vietnam at roughly the same moment, as measured in body counts.

The difference, historians and experts agree, is that the"stark experience of Sept. 11 and the belief among many Americans that the fighting in Iraq is part of a global conflict against terrorism have made this war seem much more crucial to the nation's security than Vietnam ..." Death and destruction on continental American soil, coupled with the fact that there is no military conscription, have made Americans much more patient with the Iraq situation. There are other differences too. Dao writes:

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began a huge escalation of the Vietnam War that eventually brought American troop levels to over half a million. By 1968, the weekly death toll was over 500. No such escalation is envisioned in Iraq, where the deadliest month was last April, when 134 troops were killed. And though the 1,000-dead milestone was reached faster in Iraq, it seems unlikely the toll will keep pace with Vietnam, where it exploded after 1965, reaching over 58,000 by the war's end.

But the death tolls don't tell us the whole story. As I was reminded by the McLaughlin Report and other Sunday morning talk shows today, in addition to the 1000+ Americans killed in Iraq, and the 20,000+ US medical evacuations from that country, the possibilities for civil war are real. Tikrit, Fallujah, Karbala, Ramadi, and Najaf are effectively under the control of insurgent forces. Kurds in the North, who have had de facto"self-rule" since the 1990s, are now battling for control of oil-rich Kirkuk, outside Kurdish territory. The Shi'ite majority, which suffered under the Sunnis during the reign of Saddam Hussein, will not stand by if the Sunnis try to reassert power. The Sunnis, however, remain the predominating influence in the central and northwestern regions of the country. Baghdad, of course, is in a class by itself.

A civil war in Iraq could be a devastating blow to US"nation-building" efforts. (On the various scenarios of"Iraq in Transition," see this periodical put out by Chatham House, formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs.) It is for this reason that presidential historian Robert Dallek suggests,"the crucial point" in Iraq will come when the US"feels it is not going to achieve its goals." But pursuit of those goals does not take place in a historical vacuum; this is a post-Vietnam generation, after all. Should the feeling become widespread that the situation is unwinnable, leading to less patience among the American electorate, and fewer military re-enlistments, a dramatic shift in the US approach will be forthcoming.

Dao reminds us, however, that

there has been significant public opposition to virtually every war America has waged, except World War II. One-third of the nation did not back the American Revolution, historians say. Congress chastised President James Polk in 1848 for starting an"unnecessary and unconstitutional" war with Mexico. New Yorkers rioted against the draft during the Civil War. The Socialist Eugene Debs went to prison, and ran for president while there, for opposing the draft in World War I. A plurality of Americans thought the Korean War was a mistake during much of that conflict. But in virtually all those cases, dissent did relatively little to prevent bloodshed. Only in Vietnam, which caused the nation's largest and most sustained protests, can it be argued that an antiwar movement hastened the end of a war.

This has had an effect on both sides of the divide:

The government has sought to sustain public support for war by encouraging positive coverage of American soldiers while prohibiting photographs of returning caskets. And antiwar groups have treated returning soldiers with immense dignity - hoping to avoid the kinds of reports about abusive demonstrators that once embittered Vietnam veterans. But one lesson neither side could have gleaned from Vietnam was the impact of 24-hour cable television and the Internet, which have brought death in Iraq closer to home than network television did in Vietnam. In the process, they have amplified the horrors of war and, perhaps, speeded up reaction to it ...

All this points to the issue of those pesky"unintended consequences" that I alluded to here. But"unintended consequences" are not always unforeseeable ones. Many of us on the antiwar side of the divide warned of these very real effects for months prior to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. For me, at least, it was never a question of Hussein's moral legitimacy. His regime, which had benefited from US support and sanction back in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, was immoral. But as the winds of war were gathering strength in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq, I thought then, as I do now, that it would have been possible to contain any Hussein terrorist or weapons threat. That the threat was not as"grave" as the administration proclaimed makes containment, in my view, all the more preferable.

But that is now a moot point. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq now threatens to unleash unruly antidemocratic cultural and political forces that might yet make the Hussein regime a picnic by comparison.

It's time someone in this administration picked up The Road to Serfdom. Consider this piece in today's NYT on Colin Powell's testimony about Sudan yesterday. If you set aside the annoying inconsistency and hypocrisy voiced by U.S. officials, you'll note an interesting passage on the second page of the piece. Why have Bush administration officials been reluctant to be firmer with this government that has killed and raped tens of thousands of its citizens?

"The administration is also concerned that threats and punishments against Sudan would antagonize the Arab world, which already sees the Bush administration as being too eager to punish it. The conflict in Sudan is waged by an Arab-dominated government against non-Arab people in Darfur."

Iraq has led the U.S. to underman our efforts in Afghanistan (and I know there is significant aversion to that conflict for some in this blog) and now tied their hands in Sudan, a country that harbours terrorists including Bin Laden in the 1990's. Would this administration have cared one way or another about Sudan even without Iraq? It's hard to say since the neo-cons have always cared very little about the plight of black Africans. But it serves as a powerful example of what we cannot because of our commitments in Iraq.

Imagine say 75,000 of the troops we're currently using in Iraq helping hunt for Bin Laden? Imagine what might happen if terrorists were to strike using Sudan as a base of operations? Our ability to legitimately defend ourselves is severely happered by the occupation of Iraq supporting a puppet government in a badly divided state. Non-interventionism does not mean avoiding all armed conflict. It means defending yourself - full stop. The reason you follow George Washington's warning is simple, you never know what these messes can lead to.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the Borders piece, but neither was I satisfied with the Will Wilkinson piece David just mentioned, plus one of my colleagues here at BSC was on this subject today, so I guess I’ll have to reply to everyone all at once.

I’ve been known to express hawkish sentiments from time to time, but I would dissent from Borders’ analysis. My main disagreement with Borders is the insistence that rights are contractarian fictions, which is established partly by contrasting social-contract theory with a straw-man version of natural rights: “We get rights by virtue of some sort of social contract, not from our Creator….’rights’ as such, are not some Cartesian substance that animates the body in the manner of a soul.” Well, sure, if “natural rights” means that, I guess contractarianism looks pretty good. But this analysis ignores another approach to natural rights, the neo-Aristotelian. On that view, the “natural” in “natural rights” refers to human nature, the requirements of a human life and the necessary conditions of human flourishing. However, perhaps the argument for hawkishness doesn’t hinge on which strategy one employs to derive a theory of rights.

I’d also be a lot more comfortable if Borders would not be so fond of the definite article. Libertarian hawks aren’t one single thing with a monolithic view. “The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke” Huh? I don’t. America’s most famous libertarian hawk, Thomas Jefferson, didn’t either. Jefferson’s arguments in the Declaration of Independence, and in his essay on“the Necessity of Taking Up Arms”, are wholly within the Lockean perspective. My long essay on this will appear in December or January, along with Roderick’s contrary piece, from the symposium I mentioned above, but the short version might go something like this: We have rights prior to any political structures. Political structures maintain power through force, which much be justified by consent. Consent can only be legitimately given if the power-structure which is being consented to protects rights. A regime which is rights-abusive has no legitimacy, which means that its use of force to protect itself is also illegitimate. That means that it may be overthrown, by force if necessary. That was the rationale for the use of force by the colonists against Great Britain, and that might also serve as a rationale for overthrowing any dictatorship. Wilkinson’s main objection (and this seems to be the view of some of my co-bloggers) seems to be that American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pony up the cash to pick up the tab for overthrowing someone else’s dictator. Well, that’s true – but then, from a radical libertarian perspective, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pony up the cash to pick up the tab for anything if they don’t want to. Saying the overthrow of Saddam wasn’t obligatory doesn’t mean it was unjustified. (Deontic logic, people!) An act may be permissible but nonobligatory. A subcategory within that group is the supererogatory. Maybe the Iraq war was one of these. It didn’t violate the rights of American taxpayers any more than anything else they spend our money on. It certainly didn’t violate the rights of the Baathist regime there. Ditto terrorists: Wilkinson writes “the fact that there are terrorists, murderers, and illegitimate regimes out there who have forfeited some or all of their moral standing does not begin to imply that the United States of America may swoop in and see that justice is done.” Sure it does – anyone may. Whether it’s mandatory, or prudent, are separate questions. But libertarians who prefer the “letters of marque” approach need Wilkinson to be wrong here just as much as the Pentagon does.

My colleague here criticizes Borders for implying that “the new White Man’s Burden is to coax (with pre-emptive tough love where appropriate) those outside our charmed circle of civilization and contractual liberties into sharing our worldview.” But who’s being the neocolonialist here? A human rights view must by definition be a universalist view. If there’s any such thing as natural rights/human rights, then Iraqis have them too, which means they are just as entitled as the American colonists to be rid of a tyrant and to institute small-d, small-r democratic republics. One difference between the American colonists and the Iraqis under Saddam, though, was the whole extensive terror/secret police/disarmed populace/mass graves/poison gas thing, which King George hadn’t thought of. Under those conditions, it’s plausible that they might need help to be rid of the tyrant (as, to be honest, so did we).

My colleague further expresses skepticism about libertarian hawkishness on the grounds that it’s “freedom for me but not for thee.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Were the Japanese more free in 1938, or in 1948? The Germans? It’s “freedom for me but not for thee” with respect to Baathists and Nazis, just like it’s “freedom for me but not for thee” for any criminal. The general population in Iraq and in Germany, though, are just as entitled to freedom as we are.

Is the current administration entirely committed to maximizing individual liberty? No. Is it actively subversive of liberty via the Patriot Act? Yes. Is it predominantly interested in maintaining and expanding its own power (as would be the opposition, if elected)? Yes. But it doesn’t follow from any of that that everything it does is illegitimate, broken clocks and all that.

Now let’s see whether this comments thread can break the record set by the sci-fi thread.

However, I do not believe that this concentration on marijuana as a medicine is as problematic as they do, because medical marijuana will not remain the foremost issue for very much longer. I offer this very persuasive article by Dr. Nadelmann published in the National Review along with this ad, which the DPA ran in the New York Sun during the GOP convention, to support my belief.

If the discussion moves to decriminalization and that is achieved then the medical issue is mute. If you believe tomatoes are healthy you do not need a doctor’s permission to grow and eat them. Yes, the laws will remain on the books but there will be little incentive to enforce them. They will go the way of, say, laws against adultery.