Category: Politics

Orin Kerr nails it over at the Volokh Conspiracy, which is as good a time as any to launch into a discussion of my own anti-war feelings.

This post summarizes my opinion on a lot of the arguments we’ve seen on both sides. I believe that Bush wants to invade Iraq in order to expand American presence in the region. I think he also believes, quite accurately, that Saddam is a very bad leader and that regime change in Iraq will be a net good for the world — but that’s not the primary reason, it’s a nice side effect.

I don’t think the United States should be imperialistic. Despite my anarchistic leanings, there are things about this country I’m very happy about. Lots of ‘em, in fact. I think those things are worth defending. One of them is that we don’t go to war for the sake of improving our own lot. We defend ourselves, but we do not go out and preemptively invade other countries.

Why’s that so important? Because any rational moral calculus must make sense no matter which sense you’re on. In other words, moral arguments that rest on the privileged place of America among other nations are doomed to fail. This isn’t just a philosophical point. It’s a practical necessity, because there is absolutely no guarantee that we will always occupy the practical privileged place. It’s in our best interests to construct an international consensus that doesn’t depend on our superior military position. I don’t want my children to be facing a world in which China is the preeminent military power, and in which the US established the precedent that the preeminent military power can do whatever the hell it wants.

Therefore, while I think Saddam’s overthrow will be a net good for the world, I think it would be intensely stupid for the United States to go too far in the direction of unilateralism.

Now, I also think that in the end it won’t be unilateral. So far, while Bush has talked a good game, he hasn’t done anything without UN approval. This isn’t really a surprise. He can’t wage war on Iraq without support, and in particular Turkish support, and he’s not going to get that without another United Nations resolution. (Yes, another one.)

While his tactics in the UN will, in the long run, work, they’re also burning good will among our fellow nations. That’s a bad idea not because of fear of retribution, but because sometime in the next ten years we’re going to have to deal with the serious problem of India and Pakistan. I don’t worry much about Iraq’s nuclear weapons, or even North Korea’s. I worry about what the admitted nuclear states of the Indian subcontinent are gonna do. That really sorely needs attention, and it’s not going to be solved with force of arms. Brinksmanship works, but the price is diplomatic flexibility later, and we should be concerned about that.

Consider that everyone in the UN is aware that, as Bush says, failure to follow through with the resolutions concerning Iraq will be severely damaging to UN credibility. But Bush is deliberately ignoring the other half of the equation: giving in too easily to US demands will also damage UN credibility. He knows perfectly well that the UN can’t appear to be simply an arm of US policy. The UN knows that Bush wants war on Iraq in order to strengthen the US position in the Middle East. When you get right down to it, Bush has the UN between a rock and a hard place — which, again, will get him his short term ends but may cause problems in the long term.

OK. So, I am personally in favor of overturning Saddam’s regime. I am not in favor of doing so in order that the United States might extend its influence in the Middle East. We do not gain any safety from this; the long-term threat to the United States is not from any state or army, but from in-country terrorism which does not rely on long range missiles or the backing of nations. It’s a war of conquest, and up until now, that hasn’t been part of United States policy.

I always approve of primary sources. Here’s a great place to get them: DoD News. It’s the central page for Department of Defense news items, and most interestingly includes email lists for DoD press releases and so on. I get the transcripts of all the DoD press briefings. It’s always interesting reading.

I’m not sure why Blix’s latest comments haven’t gotten more play. I think that when Blix says “We feel that Iraq must do more than they have done so far in order to make this a credible avenue,” that it behooves us to take note. He is in fact agreeing at least in part with the US claims that Iraq has not demonstrated that they have disarmed.

This is, in my book, exceedingly good news — we want the various parties interested in the sanctions to agree on the current state of affairs. If it’s generally accepted that Iraq is ignoring UN sanctions, the matter becomes much clearer, and you have common ground on which to base any further discussion. It’s hard to have a rational argument about what happens next when you can’t even agree if the milk is spilt.

Mind you, there is still discussion to be had subsequent. C.f. John Le Carre’s op-ed, in which he explicitly says he wants Saddam gone even though he disagrees with Bush’s methods. The dissension on method but not on goals is perhaps overly complicated; certainly Lileks missed it. (Hint: when the man says he would love to see Saddam’s downfall, that’s probably an indication that he doesn’t like Saddam’s policies, including the ecological diaster’s Saddam’s caused.)

This does sort of make people who predicted Blix would never find fault with Iraq look silly. That’s the risk of partisan punditry, though.

People occasionally accuse me of being a sensible liberal, or likely to lose my liberal blogger badge. This is pretty warming, since I don’t really think of myself as a liberal; I think of myself as an anarchocapitalist hampered in his desire for untrammeled freedom by the practicalities of realpolitik. I.e., if I could push a button and remove all government from the world, I wouldn’t do it. I think that, unpaired with some serious education about enlightened self-interest, the results would be very bad. In the interim, I tend to lean towards the left, because I think the left is somewhat more likely to preserve the freedoms I care the most about without imposing the restrictions I find most distasteful.

However, now and again I feel obliged to say something really contrarian, so here goes. I am utterly, 100% serious about this:

James Lileks is the conservative Michael Moore.

This post does an excellent job of summarizing and linking to various reactions to Lessig; I recommend keeping an eye on it over the next few days.

Lessig has posted the opinions in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Here’s the majority decision, here’s Stevens’ dissent, and here’s Breyer’s dissent.

Lessig reports that the Supreme Court has rejected the Eldred challenge to the Sonny Bono law, 7-2. John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented. More details as this develops.

Another interesting DoD briefing yesterday, this one on the all-volunteer armed forces. Obviously, this was prompted by Rangel’s draft proposal. Worth reading, for some interesting statistics.

The most interesting point is that black Americans join the military in a proportion roughly equivalent to the proportion of blacks in society as a whole; the 30% number we’ve heard a lot about is due to the fact that blacks tend to remain in the military at a higher rate than do other ethnicities. Seems to me that the question to ask, therefore, is not “why are there so many black people in the military” but “why is the military such a superior alternative to the rest of society in so many cases?” Maybe it’s something the military is doing; maybe the rest of society just sucks harder. Probably a combination of both. I’d like to see more investigation of this, in any case; I bet there’s something to be learned there.

Also of interest: “Now, college graduate or higher, 22 percent of our enlisted recruits — this goes directly to some of the issues Mr. Rangel is raising, have a father who has a college degree or more, versus 30 percent of the recruit age population. And I’m quite confident once we add the officers in, you’ll see those numbers — that gap between those numbers close. Bottom line, look at this classic measure of socioeconomic status, and enlisted recruits alone, before we even add the officers in, don’t look all that different from the recruit-age population at large.” Actually, a 25% difference does look pretty different to me.

“Now, in terms of median income, for whites — now again, this is enlisted versus – and this is against the entire civilian population, so it’s not quite the right comparison. But for whites, the median total gross household income in 1999 for our enlisted population was about $33,500, versus $44,400 for the civilian population.” Again, pretty substantial difference. This is without the officers included in the figures, though, which as he mentions is important for this comparison. Hopefully they’ll get those figures out soon.

The Instapundit comes out in favor of racial internments: “The wrongfulness in the World War Two internments, after all, wasn’t that they happened, but that they were unjustified. Had significant numbers of American citizens of Japanese descent actually been working for the enemy, the internments would have been a regrettable necessity rather than an outrageous injustice.” He also quotes reader email, which includes the sentence, “The citizen/alien line—so crucial to the wrongfulness of the Japanese American internment—has now been breached.”

Two things. First off, said reader email also includes the comment “And we often hear that there was not a single documented incident of pro-Axis subversive activity by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry during the war. (As it happens, this is not quite true, but it’s very close to true.)” But then he goes on to claim that a single incident of pro-Al Qaeda subversive activity by an American citizen of Arab ancestry would —

Well, let’s face it. He’s saying that this breaches a line which is crucial to wrongfulness of mass Arab American internment. Is it the only line, in his mind? I dunno, he doesn’t clarify. I would certainly like to know.

So, OK. But it still doesn’t scan. We’ve got one documented example of subversive Arab American activity. He acknowledges that there were few (but at least one) incident of subversive Japanese American activity during WW II, but those incidents did not justify the internments. Why does this one cross the line, while those did not?

Second, and I must acknowledge the reader for making this clear, it’s still bogus. The email makes this clear; Professor Reynolds skips past that in his response. We’re Americans, damn it. We do not sign away the freedoms of some of our citizens in order to gain greater safety for the remainder. Is this somehow unclear? It’s not about being safe. It’s about maintaining our basic values.

Would you meekly submit to internment, knowing you were not a criminal, and also knowing that some small subset of American citizens sharing your ancestry were? If not, why would you expect anyone else to do so?

Addendum to the below: the direct trigger point was in fact a US diplomat pushing the issue; we called North Korea on their nuclear program. OK, that’s fair.

I think that the essential conclusion is the same, though. I’m honestly not sure why Bush isn’t standing up and saying “This happened because we pushed them, and it’s a perfectly acceptable price.” At this point I think that’s a reasonable stance.

Instead, we’ve got what appears to be some pretty messy back and forth, going from refusal to talk to Bush-sanctioned negotations.

Also, you gotta wonder whether we’re better off with North Korea possessing but not actively building nukes, which is a stable situation that can always be addressed when we’re not about to invade Iraq, or with North Korea actively gearing up to build nukes while we’re engaged in preparations for war in the Middle East. There’s middle ground between aggressively pursuing every problem in the world at once and letting things slide forever.