Month: May 2003

I’m not sure if this is ironic or not, but Bush’s appointees have made a strong pro-gun control statement. In Iraq, of course. Gun ownership is, for the nonce, illegal there.

“Rise up against Saddam! Then drop your weapons.” It’s aimed at looters, of course, but I find I’m still amused. Gun ownership is only a sacred right if the people who own guns agree with you, I guess.

More cheerful news: Umm Qasr was turned over to a local council the other day. Good for the Brits. They did have the advantage of working with a relatively small town. I’ve heard that they brought in actual policemen to train a local police force, which seems clever to me.

Just for reference, this map shows the proposed Texas federal districting, and this map shows the current Texas federal districting. I can see some pretty weird looking districts in the latter (check out 15, for example), but the former certainly doesn’t do any better. In fact, 15 is worse. You can’t see it at this scale, but the proposed district 15 has a mile wide strip along the bottom of the state that connects it to a little bubble of territory under district 23.

If you’re inclined that way, you may want to buy one of these Killer D’s T-shirts, which commemorate the current Texas Democrat House of Representatives walkout. (See, the last time anyone did this in Texas, they were called the Killer Bees. Get it?)

Did what, right. 50-odd Democrats just walked out of the Texas House of Representatives in order to block a redistricting bill proposed by Tom Delay, which would have gerrymandered Texas federal districts in such a way as to increase the number of Republican Congressmen from that state. By leaving, they deprive the Texas House of quorum and since Thursday is the last day to introduce new bills (edit: not the last day of the session), the redistricting bill will not get passed. (Thanks to Ginger for the correction there; she has a good piece on this too.)

This is, make no mistake, an abrogation of responsibility. Or, to put it somewhat more kindly, it’s an act of civil disobedience. It is not strictly speaking illegal — nobody’s risking jail time — although they could be returned to the House by force if they hadn’t gone to another state.

However, I believe that if we claim that every lawbreaker is in the moral wrong, we become unable to morally work against totalitarian states or tendencies. (Not that the US is one of those; it’s a statement of principle.) Civil disobedience is a valid tool of political action. So what they are doing is not clearly wrong.

They need to be willing to face the consequences, which in this case are probably failure to be re-elected. That’s how the voters can express their opinion on the matter, and in a democratic system, the voters ought to be the ultimate arbiters.

None of that speaks to the moral consistency of the Representatives in question. I don’t think they’d be doing this to protest a Democratic gerrymander, frankly. So I can’t claim they’re moral in motive, but I can claim that the effects of their actions are a net good and I can say that the voters will have the ultimate say as to whether or not they did the desired thing. In the long term, if the voters disapprove, they can elect candidates who will accept the redistricting. Or, for that matter, elect candidates who won’t redistrict like that.

(This all presumes that one buys into the democratic method. Since our winner-takes-all voting system produces unavoidable distortions of preference, best summarized by asking a devoted Democrat about Nader in 2000, the truth is that the voters can’t effectively express a preference on this issue. A pity that the Founding Fathers weren’t much on game theory, huh?)

T-shirt discovery and general information about the walkout from Burnt Orange Report, which is your source for in depth if somewhat partisan reporting about the matter.

Phil Carter reports on an important piece of news out of the Army War College. Essentially, to quote Phil, “America’s strategy of pre-emptive defense might lead to pre-emptive strikes by terrorists and rogue nations around the world, possibly with weapons of mass destruction. Asymmetric warfare — striking at U.S. weakpoints with unconventional tactics — will also become the norm by which our enemies fight us.”

I’m a little surprised that this is seen as surprising; we have already entered into that era. What else was 9/11? Still, if this raises awareness, I’m glad.

We should also remind ourselves of the lessons learned from General Van Riper’s war game. He managed to pull out something close to a victory for what was essentially the Iraqi side, and some of us were very quick to point at his results during the second week of Gulf War II. Our bad. We need to recognize that the potential for such tactics does not constitute the inevitability of such tactics.

On the other hand, we’d best be ready for ‘em. So, yeah, good exercise.

Tim Dunlop makes a totally unsubstantiated report on terrorist recruiting. (Via CalPundit.) I do not believe or disbelieve it, I just think it’s worth noting. The interesting bit is the increase in MI6 recruitment. One could take it as evidence that the terrorist threat is increasing, or one could take it as an indication that public fear drives hiring in certain government agencies. Both are rather distressing.

Speaking of which, the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002. Much trumpeted, since the number of terrorist attacks went from 355 in 2001 to 199 in 2002. Woo! However, if you look at the numbers, you’ll find that most of that drop is because of a sharp drop in Latin American terrorism.

The much maligned Western Europe is the area which is showing steady decline in incidents over the last four years, by the by. Africa’s doing pretty well too, which probably does reflect a drop in terrorism sourced from the Middle East. But man, Europe has its act together. Might be the IRA getting out of the terror business, dunno. Oh, and “France has provided outstanding military, judicial, and law-enforcement support to the war against terrorism.” Also, “Germany is an active and critically important participant in the global Coalition against terrorism. The country’s efforts have made a valuable contribution to fighting terrorists inside and outside of German territory.” Booyah.