Category: Politics

“There’s a hell of a lot of suffering and ‘injustice’ in the world, but no one besides Muslim Arabs (and non-Arab Muslims they’ve recruited) seem to be responding in this way.”

Ah, Steven.

Shining Path, Aum Shinrikyo, FARC, the Basque terrorist groups, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Tigers of Tamil, 17 November, and of course our own homegrown militia groups.

Oh yeah. And I heard there was some kind of terrorist group operating out of Ireland these days.

The rest of the piece is pretty goofy too. Every time someone condemns another country for not being committed to the war on terror, they ought to consider the American attitudes towards terror before and after 9/11.

OK. this post is just beyond the pale.

The backstory: Kelley Ferguson is a stupid idiot who faked a terrorist threat in order to get out of a cruise with her parents. Missed her boyfriend. Totally stupid.

But how do you get from there to blaming Bush? “And many people, wavering between fear of the unknown and the all too casual attittude eminating from the White House, can treat a terrorist attack as a prank.”

I don’t think Bush is doing a good job setting the national mood on terrorism. The aftereffects of Gulf War II are going to matter; people can’t help but notice the lack of WMDs in Iraq and the recent Al Qaeda bombings will erode trust. Bush said that regime change would reduce terrorist threats, and that clearly hasn’t happened.

A digression: the last wave of Al Qaeda attacks came while we were debating the wisdom of war on Iraq. I said at the time that I suspected Osama wanted the US attacking Iraq. I think recent events make that even more likely; psychologically, he’s demonstrating that all that US effort (which was encouraged by the October 2002 incidents) didn’t stop him. And, come to think of it, the chances that Iraq will be run by Islamic extremists are somewhat higher (not a lot, but a little) than they were before the war — Osama’s gotten rid of his rival Saddam at very little cost to himself. Nice work. Sigh.

Back to the point. Bush is not doing a good job of anything except making us feel tough. However, you can’t bloody well blame Kelley Ferguson on that. She has parents, does she not? They are presumably not deaf and dumb; presumably they have occasional communications with their daughter, if she’s going on a cruise with them.

So how about we stop pointing fingers at the Administration, and start taking some responsibility for our own actions? Her parents fucked up. They did a bad job raising her. It is not OK to — permit the metaphor — make jokes about guns when you’re boarding a plane. I learned that lesson as a kid, and I learned it while Reagan was President. Somehow my parents managed to shield me from the awful consequences of a Republican President and taught me some common sense, miracle of miracles.

Blaming Bush for bad parenting is inane, and it speaks to one of the sadder tropes of the left wing in this country. Personal relationships have far more of an effect on children and our morals than what the government says, and individuals are not helpless. We do ourselves a disservice when we pretend otherwise, particularly when it’s for partisan reasons.

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.

Bush really nailed it in his tax relief speech yesterday:

“And in our society, when somebody demands a good or a service, somebody is going to produce that good or a service…”

Not bad. Now, apply that logic to abortions and drugs.

From a pre-war speech by Robin Cook:

Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

Boy, I thought his reasoning looked good then. It looks incredible now.

The US announced a new arms inspection team to replace the team which is now departing. Condoleeza Rice has explained that this was a planned rotation, which is why they’re only announcing it after we heard that the old team was leaving. She’s also asserted that we never expected to find the WMD easily, which continues to puzzle me, given that we were told that many Republican Guard units were issued chemical weapons.

For the detail oriented, the Center for Cooperative Research put together a chronology of Bush’s movements on 9/11. (Via the Dead Parrots.) I can’t get very upset about Bush going in and doing his photo op — I know that on that day it took a while for me to react. It was, after all, incredibly shocking. What does strike me as strange is the reaction of the Secret Service. As is pointed out in the timeline, evacuating Bush should have been as high a priority as evacuating Cheney.

Also, of course, the rewriting of history bears examination. But that’s a partisan issue; everyone rewrites history.