–Sebastian
One of my key watchwords is "balance". For instance I believe that temperamental conservatives and temperamental liberals both have excellent things to add to society and that they need each other to be most effective. I’m not all about splitting the middle, I’m often quite sure that there is a right and wrong answer, but I’m sure that there are multiple fruitful approachs to a question. This post by Joseph Britt (guest writing for Daniel Drezner) reminded me of one of things about foreign policy analysis that tends to get out of balance: the alleged duality between "realist" and "idealist" concepts of foreign policy. Now I realize that international relations professors use the two terms in highly specialized ways that are not closely related to how everyone else uses them. I think it is a mistake to choose your jargon in such a way as to make such confusion easy, but that is a rant for another day. In common parlance (and that may actually have more of a political effect than the international relations jargon anyway) the discussion seem to treat "idealist" foreign policy and "realist" foreign policy as opposite. Carter is usually cast in the role of "idealist" and Nixon as "realist" for instance. The problem is that the terms, especially as loosely used, are not opposites. The reason they are sometimes seen as in tension is that realists often offer a pragmatic check on what idealists want to do. It isn’t a bad thing to try to know what you can and cannot do. But focusing exlusively on means doesn’t tell you what ends you ought to be striving for. It is perfectly proper to be driven idealistically and let realistic assessments of the situation influence your methods.
It isn’t wrong to be an "idealist" unless you just ignore pragmatic concerns. It isn’t wrong to be pragmatic so long as you are willing to let idealism guide your general direction.
Interestingly enough (because I’m sure the comparison will offend almost everyone) both Carter and Bush II offered policy directions which seemed to be largely idealistic, and also unwilling to adequately address the pragmatic concerns of their critics. The key problem with both presidents is that they knew where they wanted to go, but didn’t spend enough energy figuring out how to get there in an imperfect world. Bush’s key problem in Iraq is that he saw where he wanted to go, and (in my view correctly identified the first step) but did not plan further than that. His strategic aim was correct (with Saddam presiding over a festering Iraq in the Middle East, the likelihood of needed change happening was slim) but he approached the problem from a purely tactical consideraton of getting rid of Saddam without implementing a strategic vision of what to do after Saddam was gone. He did not address the concerns of cautionary realists. It is possible to have a successful foreign policy without convincing the realists around you to do what you want, but that is very different from not even addressing their concerns. Instead of saying "I will address the limitations you worry about in the following ways, and though you think it isn’t enough to make it worthwhile, I am definitely addressing the area of concern", he basically said "I’m not going to worry about it". Interestingly enough, the flip side of the problem is found in Bush I and Clinton. Neither could get past momentary pragmatic concerns enough to really lead in foreign policy . They might start on a problem, but would get so bogged down in technical concerns that they were often paralyzed into inaction or gave up too quickly. Bush I gave up on crushing Saddam far too quickly. Even if he didn’t want to conquer Baghdad, he could still have supported the revolutionary attempts (which he had encouraged) when they finally came or at the very least destroyed Saddam’s armies while they were fleeing (as opposed to the ones that were surrendering). But both choices would have involved making things difficult for the ‘coalition’ of the First Gulf War. Instead of trying to move forward and change coalition goals into a more idealistic vision, he basically gave up and let Saddam become the Arab hero who was able to successfully stand up to the US and walk away from it (leading to the dangerous myth of US lack-of-will which contributed to Osama bin Laden’s miscalculations later).
Idealistic foreign policy visions and realist concerns ought not be considered separate schools of thought which are distinct methods of forming policy. Both are crucial ingredients to a well formed foreign policy.
Not all complaints about the limited vision of self-identified "realists" are wrong, nor is it evident that the current administration’s "idealism" is the wellspring of its policies as opposed to an ex post facto justification for them. Effective foreign policy requires an understanding of what you want to do, a strategy for getting it done, and the ability both to distinguish the battles that can be won from those that cannot and to distinguish the situations where America can impose its will from those in which we must respond to events. It is not an accident that the period of greatest American success in foreign policy have come when the people running it — Marshall, Acheson, Nixon, Kissinger — have had these things and something else that is mostly lacking today, an understanding that a foreign policy made with one eye on campaign politics is bound to run into trouble regardless of what doctrine it proclaims. The people, not their doctrines, make the policy.
(From the danieldrezner link above.)
Bush’s key problem in Iraq is that he saw where he wanted to go, and (in my view correctly identified the first step)
He wanted to invade Iraq no matter what the rationale, cost, or consequences, and the first step was convincing a gullible public and press that Iraq was more of a threat than it was in reality. How is that “correct”?
They might start on a problem, but would get so bogged down in technical concerns that they were often paralyzed into inaction or gave up too quickly. Bush I gave up on crushing Saddam far too quickly.
Bush Sr:
That is not “technical concerns”, Sebastian. That is, again, called “reality”.
(leading to the dangerous myth of US lack-of-will which contributed to Osama bin Laden’s miscalculations later)
4 years down the road from the 9/11 attacks bin Laden is still free, Al Qaeda can still carry out terrorist attacks on an international scale, US forces have been forced out of Saudi Arabia, Israel has left Gaza, and Sharia law is being implemented in Iraq after a more secular regime was overthrown.
Who the hell miscalculated? What else could bin Laden have wished for when he planned his attacks, the West Bank and a pony?
Anyway, you need to define your terms correctly. “Realist” means you suck up to dictators when it is politically convenient while paying lip service to human rights. You know, Nixon, Reagan, Bush. Those guys. “Idealist” means you stand up for human rights everywhere, even if it means you are a one-term president rather than a two-term torturer with a “mandate”.
I don’t know if you read Body and Soul regularly, Sebastian, but Donald Johnson wrote a guest post recently on the topic of “idealists and realists”: he based it on a New York Times op ed from 18th August.
How about the possibility that instead of being idealistic but flawed like Carter, Bush II is simply marred by venality? In 2002, it was common wisdom that it would be nice to be rid of Saddam, or find better ways to marginalize him. So what to do? Bush and crew decided that the way to accomplish this was by warmongering, and that the imposition of wider policy goals by force was the way to go. And that the way to rope a democracy into this program was through deceit regarding the bogus WMD and Saddam’s alleged Al Queda links.
Those are the attributes of venality — not flawed idealism.
Nominally, a Bush policy goal was spreading peace and democracy, but you have to be a fool to think that peace and democracy are spread by wars and the imposition of policy by force or threat of force. And a fool to think that you spread such values by rooting your cause in deceit concerning the reasons for going. So just maybe that rhetoric is not the underlying motivation — maybe its just another part of the marketing campaign. And that the subsequent inability to match actions to rhetoric springs from indifference in the first instance to those goals. And that the misuse of the rhetoric is another mark of venality.
It is correct that the Iraq post-war has been bungled, but is it correct that the mess is the result of actions by bunglers? I think not.
The policy has been shaped by men who think it appropriate to leave government as soon as possible to set up shop cashing in by consulting with business on how to cash in on the reconstruction. While those in government shape policy for the benefit of their profiteer soul mates. The contrast between the values of the men who shaped US post war efforts in WWII and those today in Iraq could not be more startling. Even rock-ribbed conservativers like MacArthur understood that unions in post-war Japan were essential to democracy. Bush and crew sent unschooled ideologues to man the CPA in some sort of Ayn Rand effort to remake Iraq into… what? America in the late 19th century when unregulated capitalism reined supreme in all its ugly glory?
Get real about the motivations of those who are shaping this policy. It is neither idealistic nor realisitc. Unless Bring Back the Era of Robber Barons counts as an ideology.
A fine post. I think you’re not being particularly fair to either Clinton or Bush I: both acheived very significant gains for the interests of the United States. Neither was thrown out at home, trying to stretch out a double. I agree that the failure to support the ’91 Shia uprising more quickly was a tragedy, but still think we don’t know whether an Iran-friendly, jurisprudent-friendly Shia dominated state is going to be in our long term interests.
You don’t identify Clinton’s failure. I’m not sure what you think it is. He pushed Arafat and Israel as far as he could to get a deal, but the gap couldn’t be closed. This was not a failure of Clinton’s will or vision, but a problem that was, on the facts then extant, not solvable. If you think quicker involvement in the Balkans, or any involvement in Rwanda is the issue, I think you need to postulate the possibility that doing something different, in the context of the times, would have been better than what was done. Clinton’s vision on Northern Ireland can hardly be disparaged. Or Haiti, certainly a project more idealist than realist.
I think Bush II and Carter are orders of magnitude different. In fact, I remember that at the time the knock on Carter was that he was personally wrapped up in all the details. In any case, I think the contrast between the transformative effects of Camp David and the transformative effects of Gulf War II look pretty favorable to Carter, especially if you put yourself in the position of one of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who cannot under any circumstances be said to be better off for the removal of the Baathist regime. Carter’s body count was pretty low, iirc. Wilson is a better match, but too far outside our personal experience, I guess.
I don’t know who, if anyone, actually believed Saddam’s line about being an Arab hero for standing up to the west. My perception is that nobody liked him, and only listened quietly to his bragging out of fear of what would emerge from his absence. If Saddam ‘won’ though, you’d have to call UBL’s victory positively smashing. Instead of calling him a criminal and a mass-murderer, and hunting him down like a dog, he was appointed the head of a quasi-State with which a superpower could be, and was, at war. He survived Tora Bora, and who knows how many near misses before and after, and his forces have fought the Crusader to a near standstill in Iraq.
Again, good post.
dm, I think venality is a fair charge. I also think, though, that they really did believe that Iraq would fold quickly and easily, that they would be greeted as liberators, and that a transitional regime could quickly give way to a stable democracy.
They thought all the realists would be proved wrong, and that the objections and lies would be forgotten, in the glory of the results. There are still a hard core of people — 30% at least, who believe this, and that we’re (a) winning in Iraq and (b) not now far off from where the President said we’d be, from the beginning.
Mr. Holsclaw–
Thanks for an excellent post.
I have a few disagreements here and there, and if I have time later I may try to offer them, but first I want to thank you for the time and thought you put into this.
This post is a fine example of what keeps me coming back to this site. (A balanced meditation on balance, on a site devoted to balance).
Very good post.
I strongly agree with the comparison between Bush the Younger and Carter, although suspect that they got to the point of being idealistic-to-a-fault in different ways (a topic for another time).
I also think that, while Carter was entirely straightforward about his aims and vision and naively assumed just setting them forth would get others to fall in behind him, Bush feels the need to attempt to convince others of his concerns pragmatically. However, when his stated pragmatic reasons turn to dust (WMD, links to 9-11, etc.), he keeps going without changing course. I am not sure which type of being divorced from reality is more dangerous.
To bad Carter didn’t have a Rove…Rove is a uber-realist.
Very good.
Steve Clemons
I link this not for the post itself, but a very long comment by Dan Kervick, on of the more thoughtful commenters who limits himself to a few boards. Scroll down until you see “tongue in cheek.”
The comment is about Wilson vs Kennedy, and two kinds of liberal idealism in foreign policy. Well worth reading.
Bush 2 is only committed to his base.
Rove’s winning plan demands this…pluralism would only offend a successful strategy.
Appealing to the nation as a whole would offend the “spiritual leaders” of the Right.
Good post, Sebastian.
Although I mayself lean more towards the “venality” explanation to account for the Bush 43 Adminstrations’ policies in Iraq (I see Afghanistan as an opportunity forced on us/them by events – Iraq was, IMO, a long-pre-planned deal) – the highlighting of the current manifest failures of “idealism” as a motivator in US foreign policy can only be a benefit.
However, I think Mr. Britt (in an other excellent post) tends to gloss over one principal factor which has underlain most of this Adminstration’s actions (in Iraq and elsewhere); a factor which he articulates as:
“…an understanding that a foreign policy made with one eye on campaign politics is bound to run into trouble regardless of what doctrine it proclaims.”
“Campaign politics” in my (admittedly cynical and highly colored) opinion has been the main (and in most cases, sole) motivation for this Adminstration’s policies for the entirety of George W. Bush’s tenure in office. Especially when it comes to the war in Iraq, there have been very few policies or programs that have not been designed or implemented without a careful analysis of how they will “play” with the “public”. And I am putting quotes around “public” since there is little likelihood that either this Administration or the current GOP cares much, if at all, about the “public’s” attitude or opinion on anything. (Except of course, for their activist and donor “bases” – those they care about a lot).
You talk about idealism without reference to what the ideals are. To me, an ideal is, we don’t invade other countries that haven’t attacked us. To Bush, an ideal was, nation-building is something we should avoid. Idealism should have kept us out of Iraq, but Bush went in anyway because of the perceived threat: realism triumphed over his ideal. Our problems there today are due to (a) too much realism (based on an incorrect perception), (b) incompetently pursued.
Bush is a visionary without competence. Disagree if you will, I think one sentence sums up his greatest strength, his greatest weakness, and his presidency to date.
If Bush really cared about democracy and liberty, he wouldn’t treat it as if it were crap.
It seems as if the words “democracy” and “freedom” are dirty and disgusting words, coming out of his mouth.
The world hears this, many of us hears this…but his Base…they seem deaf.
Neodude: If Bush really cared about democracy and liberty, he wouldn’t treat it as if it were crap
Do you recommend he follow the examples of the UK, France, Germany or Italy?
Or are you thinking more the FDR internment camps model?
DDR,
Neither, I’m suggesting someone with better “moral character”…I don’t think even the Iraqis believe Bush’s democracy talk.
I mean, let’s not forget…Bush comes from the same political culture that saw Clinton’s blow-job as sufficient for impeachment…yet this same self-righteous culture views Bush’s lies concerning war–divine.
Right-Wing nihilism is ripe among the American Fundamentalists and their fellow-travelers.
Jesurgislac linked to my guest post on this at Body and Soul–rather than repeat my whole rant, I’ll make one obvious Chomskyesque point. East Timor is the perfect example for seeing whether or not there really is a distinction between the “realists” and the so-called “idealists” in foreign policy. It was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 and subjected to an extraordinarily brutal occupation that may have wiped out one third of the population in the first five years. The invasion received very little press–there was brief flurry of interest around 1979-1980,and a little more press in 1991 because one particular massacre at that time was witnessed by the Western press, and a little bit of coverage in 1996 because Ramos-Horta and Bishop Belo got the Nobel Peace Prize. None of this made East Timor a household word. So basically the US government could do what it wanted without having to worry about bad PR at home. You have five successive Presidents from both parties, realists and idealists alike. And what you find is that they all sided with Indonesia. Clinton finally changed course when the public spotlight became a little too bright in 1999, but up to that point everyone acted like Henry Kissinger.
When it comes to human rights, there simply isn’t that big a difference between realists and idealists in the foreign policy establishment. Without public pressure, they’ll all give innocent people the shaft if it’s convenient to do so. Idealists tend to be the people who shout more loudly about the crimes of our enemies, by and large. I’d call this hypocrisy, but I can see where labels like “realist” and “idealist” would have more appeal if you’re part of the foreign policy inner circle.
I suppose there are important differences between the two on non-human rights issues, but even here the labels are misleading. The kind of people who think of themselves as tough-minded realists among the Democrats were often the ones who uncritically swallowed the Bush claims about WMD’s. Reagan was a starry-eyed idealist when he wanted to believe Gorbachev was a sincere reformer, and Reagan was right.
Oops. That was two points.
Good post.
I have to point out that Carter wasn’t completely an idealist. Shoveling out a few billion to a dictator was pragmatic at the time.
After all, if there’s no Egyptian army jumping in, the chances for a ME war are exponentially lowered.
OT – did anyone see the WaPo’s article today on Chinese muslims held at gittmo 20 months after the pentagon determined they were innocent?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301362.html
Good point, Donald.
Very good post, Sebastian. Thanks.
Charley Carp:
I also think, though, that they really did believe that Iraq would fold quickly and easily, that they would be greeted as liberators, and that a transitional regime could quickly give way to a stable democracy.
I would say it was more like daydreams than beliefs, and also assumes that installing Chalabi counts as “democracy.”
The only distinction I would make relates to the bolded language — I think that this is something they casually believed, but that as a basic matter, they were not really that concerned in the first instance in making sure these goals were met. Actions speak louder than words on this one.
One very good example relates to the post-war looting, which was absolutely devasting to the reconstruction effort. This was an issue that was expressly worked up by lower level State Dept personnel based on prior experience (Panama, etc.) but deliberately ignored pre-war, and then when it started to happen, was ignored again with Rumsfeld joking about it as if it didn’t really matter.
The second example I would give is the long tortuous run to turning over control and having elections, which was primarily the result of Sistani/UN pressure and which the Bush administration had to be dragged to against their desires. Under their timetable, elections would not have occurred until sometime in 2006. Shocking in hindsight.
This is the mark of people who just don’t care that much about making sure democracy emerges.
both Carter and Bush II offered policy directions which seemed to be largely idealistic
Um, remind me again, please – what countries did Mr. Carter invade and how many hundreds of thousands people did he kill?
How can Mr. Bush be called ‘idealistic’? Idealistic, according to the dictionary means: “of high moral or intellectual value; elevated in nature or style”. Does it sound like Mr. Bush to you, like the guy who started a war of aggression, committed the supreme crime, according to the Nuremberg Tribunals? The guys and his policies are despicable and contemptible.
OT – SH, do you have an opinion about Volokh’s recent balancing act on gay conversion and disease?
Did Carter ever lie to get the U.S. into a war?
That has got to change the comparison, somehow.
And I think the world finds Carter more credible than Bush…Bush certainly has a credibility problem on the whole “devotion to idealism and human rights” stance.
I haven’t read Volokh in a couple of days, but considering his very pro-gay posts of the past, I would be surprised if I were deeply offended by what he is saying now. (Risking a serious foot-in-mouth attack by not checking first).
Volokoh posts here and here and here. Let’s just say that my view is that these weren’t at all times up to the standard of felicitious phrasing one would like to hope for.
Particularly, perhaps, on the whole, to the whole, yes, they are trying to convert people thing: “If I’m right, the movement thus is trying to convert those who have a bisexual orientation but act purely heterosexually — or would act purely heterosexually, if we’re talking about people who haven’t started having sex yet — into also experimenting with homosexuality.”
This is also, um, perhaps not his finest: “And if that’s true, then gays and lesbians (though not necessarily each gay and lesbian) are trying to get others who have been behaviorally heterosexual, but who might be open to homosexual behavior, to try homosexual behavior.”
Perhpas inartfully phrased, but does anyone deny that an aim of gay rights activists is to make a social culture which is more welcoming, with the very likely effect that some in-the-closet people feel free to cease unhappy heterosexual relationships and take up what they hope will be happier gay relationships?
I think the problem is with ‘convert’. I would think of it as less of a conversion and more of an acknowledgment of reality.
The definitions of idealism and realism mentioned here do seem important, but in the spirit of making terms of jargon clear and distinct from the connotations of everyday usage, I think it’s worth emphasizing what others have pointed out: that idealism per se is not necessarily a good thing. Ones ideals must actually be themselves good. Putting it another way, Hitler is clearly an idealist by this definition.
(Please note that I’m not actually comparing anyone to Hitler or Nazis; hopefully that will avoid the curse of Godwin’s Law.)
When I read the first V post, I thought, well, he’s not exactly being careful in his rhetoric, but all in all it comes out in a sane place. But the dangerous-gay-sex post, in conjunction with “conversion”, and then his defensive crouch when criticized, add up to some degree of creepiness in my view.
Ending attempted threadjack.
Anyone following the Belle-squeamish-men-suck controversy at Unfogged and Crooked Timber?
Oops, back to work.
“But focusing exlusively on means doesn’t tell you what ends you ought to be striving for. It is perfectly proper to be driven idealistically and let realistic assessments of the situation influence your methods.”
See, I am not even sure how to do the calculus of means, of assets and capabilities.
We had a much larger defense budget in the 50s and 60s, I would guess a larger foreign aid budget, and a much more activist foreign policy. Also 2-5% IIRC greater percentage of federal taxes per GDP.
For example, we sign a treaty with a nation, establish a military base there, sell the nation arms, development and infrastructure, creating jobs back home, boosting the economy and tax base. This was a pattern the created American hegemony during the 50s and 60s. To a certain extent, whether it was idealism or realism, the imperium partly paid for itself. And calculus of means can be very complicated. Kinda dynamic scoring.
So when somebody says it is “impossible” to turn Iraq into a secular friendly republic, I am not sure if they mean militarily, economically; because the limitations of domestic politics, diplomatic limitations, or because of conditions in Iraq.
It is like many other items on the agenda. Do we have the “means” to provide universal health care, or do we not? One factor in calculation would be votes in the Senate; another would be some very complicated economic guesses.
I can think of any number of ways to read those Volokoh posts, and I suspect he’s let his “I Am A Contrarian Thinker” button be hit too hard. But my own reaction was not unlike Rilkefan’s.
“Anyone following the Belle-squeamish-men-suck controversy at Unfogged and Crooked Timber?”
Of course. She’s right, they’re wrong. Pretty much. Next? 🙂 (Here’s where I can fill in my usual “why does no one attempt to threadjack with a link to one of my posts?”; but let’s take that as given.)
After a brief scanning of the latest of said controversy, I have these comments:
1) Childbirth doesn’t bother me, but
2) I draw the line at doing my wife’s episiotomy. I worked with a guy that did that, and just hearing about it gave me a bad case of the heeby-jeebies.
So, either I have cutting-on-other-people issues, or I’m rude, unwashed Gaston to CT’s Belle.
or both, I guess.
The Belle et al controversy: read the NYT piece, thought ‘I must write about this, if I ever find the time’, read what other people had written, thought ‘gee, they said it all’. Ezra Klein has good advice.
Some people have the oddest reactions to stuff, reactions that are completely unpredictable. This being true, I imagine that someone, somewhere will have the reaction described in the NYT piece in a completely innocent way. And just as I’d sympathize with someone who, as a result of some unlikely chain of events, inexplicably ended up with an aversion to ice cream, I sympathize with these guys.
But the general tone of the piece — lots of men feel this way, and (the tell-tale line) maybe women should think before letting their husbands/boyfriends/etc. into the delivery room — made it seem likely to me that that’s not what the doctor was talking about. Yes: at a time of excruciating pain, when you’re in labor, you should above all else be worried about your s.o.’s likely emotional response to the sight of you all bloody and stuff, since apparently he can’t be — bothered? trusted? — to think this one out for himself. It’s insulting to men, I think, as well as making bizarre demands of women.
Slarti — I may not be recalling the comment threads correctly, but I don’t think anyone was objecting to guys who correctly predict that they won’t be able to deal with, e.g., an episiotomy.
(OT even more: back when I was younger, I used to be amused by the, um, visceral nature of guys’ response to the very thought of castration. I only really ever understood it when I first heard about episiotomies, which gave me the very same impulse to grab the relevant portions of my anatomy and protect them with my life that I had been amused by in my male friends. I mean, I had this completely physical, visceral “yeeaaargh! no!!!!!” reaction. I never gave guys a hard time about that again.)
The OB handed the husband a knife and told him to do the episiotomy? Jeez. I mean, I trust my husband and all, but anyone cutting me had better have a degree in something other than English.
There was this room of ancient, near Stone Age, well, primitive genital-operating tools that I walked into in Chicago’s Field Museum, in 1982, I think it was. It was fascinating to watch women and men enter, and as they approached one display or another, and read about what they were looking at, do the Genital Grab Of Protection, respectively.
No, I’m not planning on volunteering to do surgery on anyone; I’ve done a little nasty first aid in my time (the compound fracture with the bone sticking out was one of the harder to deal with, after the fact), but that was unavoidable, and I generally try to avoid volunteering for anything having to do with blood leaving someone’s body that’s not in a nice little tube or syringe.
But if I had to, I have no reason to believe it would have a long-term effect on my sexual desires or activities. I could, of course, be wrong. But, then, I also disagreed with Ogged’s generalizations about relationships necessarily losing sexual heat from familiarity, although I base that largely on my own subjective experience.
hilzoy–
thanks for your sympathy. I never really have figured out what “castration” means, but it has always had a vaguely painful sound to it. One of the sadder parts about episiotomy is the fact that the medical literature is pretty mixed about whether they even achieve the intended end, sc. reduce trauma and speed post-partum healing.
Having been through two child-births with my wife–a very long dead-locked delivery that went to a caesarian at the last minute, and a very quick mid-wife-conducted VBAC, I can say that both were very, very intense experiences, but not ones that left me scarred for life, or any less romantically obsessed with my wife.
(On the other hand, it did make me think that this is a *ridiculous* way to perpetuate the species, and we have *got* to come up with a better way in the next few centuries. Women die in childbirth; I remember feeling this desperate vulnerable anger that I could lose my wife in the very process of gaining a child. It all turned out okay for us; for many people it still doesn’t. In a few centuries, people are going to look back and shake their heads at the folly of incubating embryos inside of women, sort of like the way we do at the idea of wooden dentures. How unbelievably clumsy! Say, honey, do you mind rocking the tank?)
But the main point is–the guy’s reaction is just *not* something women should have to worry about. This NYT article is an amazing example of an “it’s all about me” mind-set on the part of guys. I mean, if you wanted to try to describe what it means to treat women as sex-objects, wouldn’t it be something like this? Namely, that no matter what a woman is involved in doing–whether teaching a course, or building a road, or reproducing herself, or whatever–the first and central thought that is in the guy’s mind is “yeah but how does that make me feel about having sex with her?”
IIRC it was scissors, which is even more cringe-inducing. The fellow in question happens to be a paramedic, so no big surprise. I’m pretty sure it was something they’d discussed beforehand. He’s seen a great deal worse on the job; one day on the way to work he stopped to help a guy who’d crashed into a car on his motorcycle; by all accounts he’d seen a lot of them. I never knew that fracturing both femurs was pretty much a given in such encounters, for instance.
I didn’t see that either; simply was noting that I have limits. I’m sure my limits would be exceeded well short of an episiotomy, but I do get the willies around other people getting cut. I’ve watched ER nurses scrubbing out a rather large laceration on the back of my arm (two layers of 28 stitches, IIRC) and watched them stitch me up, no problem. Stitching other people up, that’s where I get the willies.
slartibartfast–
yeah, the extreme *specificity* of the willies is very striking. I worked in an operating room, trained as a paramedic, have no general problem with seeing blood. But anything to do with *knees* and I practically lose it. I remember almost fainting at a dinner party once when the host simply *described* a skiing accident she had had.
my point is: there is no general and overall toughness quotient or squeamishness quotient we can attribute to individuals; it’s more like a structured array of this degree of coping wrt this kind of trauma in this area of the body or this bodily fluid. Some very, very tough people go weak in the knees on some pretty trivial things.
I also have a nearly disabling fear of heights, which makes rock-climbing a bit of an extra challenge.
These castration discussions are what keep me coming here. So cut it out, so to speak.
The more charitable characterization, Tad, is a concern by those men over maintaining intimacy over the course of their marriage, a lack of continued intimacy being of course a potential important contributing factor to speeding a relationship towards its end.
Is it dickish to put pressure on women to have to worry about their partners’ mental well-being and libido when they’re about to deliver children? Yes, yes it is. Does that mean the feelings don’t exist in the men? No, no it doesn’t.
Of course, it’s all academic for me, so there you go.
I am not, in general, squeamish, but anything to do with eyes undoes me. My best friend, who’s a doctor, isn’t squeamish either, but one day, about six months or so into the part of medical training in which you actually do stuff to people, someone came in with a hangnail (!) and she completely lost it. Although in that case, I think it was less hangnails in particular than the accumulation of stress plus the lack of sleep.
yeah, I have a brother who is unfazed by knee issues, but freaks about eyes. I can understand that. Clearly there are going to be some population-level generalities; people on the whole are going to be more sensitive about proximal body-parts than distal ones, well-enervated ones than relatively nerveless ones, etc.
And speaking of incredibly primitive hold-overs of the days when we didn’t know better–when are the medical schools going to stop training people in such a barbaric and counter-productive fashion?
I had never heard of anyone having a thing about knee injuries. I’m lucky I’m unfazed by knees, since it helped me to keep my head when I split mine open (took off untorn, blood-soaked jeans, and eek! there was the cartilage over my kneecap! A part of my body I had hoped never to actually see. Lucky me got to have 36 stitches in three separate layers. What a delight.)
hilzoy–
ahhhhh!….plonk.
sound of me fainting.
I told you–it’s not just *seeing* this stuff, it’s even hearing it *described*. So what do you do? You *describe* it to me. Thanks a lot. Wait till I cue up my best eye-trauma stories.
But no, that would not be considerate.
OK, I’ll make up for it: rumor has it there has been a coup in Burma. I hope to God it’s true.
and I had failed to register the ‘merely described’ part. Sorry.
FWIW I find Belle’s argument weak, appeal-to-emotional, insensitive, and lump-them-all-togethery. What seems to me to be a reasonable consensus is reached in the Unfogged comments.
one day on the way to work he stopped to help a guy who’d crashed into a car on his motorcycle; by all accounts he’d seen a lot of them. I never knew that fracturing both femurs was pretty much a given in such encounters, for instance.
It’s not. I know several people who’ve hit or been hit by cars on motorcycles, and none of them have broken both femurs. The only guy I know who broke even one femur did that on a racetrack. (Now, tying this back into the other part of the thread, I did know a guy who would have been much happier if he’d been wearing a cup when he got hit by a car…)
“I know several people who’ve hit or been hit by cars on motorcycles….”
Does anyone have a pointer to a photo of one of these cars on motorcycles? It sounds like an impressive trick, and it must be far more common than I would have imagined.
So no one is interested in the possible demise of one of the world’s truly ghastly regimes? (Admittedly, if the rumor is true, in favor of someone who is supposedly no rose, though less dreadful.)
hilzoy–
I’m interested, I’m interested.
I did a quick trawl of various news sources on the web, and found nothing. What’s your source?
Thought you were retracting the comment re Burma with “merely” for some reason.
“So no one is interested in the possible demise of one of the world’s truly ghastly regimes?”
I’m extremely interested. So far they’re just extremely vague reports. I make rather an effort to not pass on simple rumor, myself, not about anything seriously, at least.
“OK, I’ll make up for it: rumor has it there has been a coup in Burma. I hope to God it’s true.”
1. Been out of the loop today, negotiating with electricians. Appears my new mega-computers have eaten all my amps, and I need to rewire. Multi-thousands. Asking handyman Slatibartfast or whoever if they would try to add new station and main breaker boxes themselves, and run some new 30-40 amp lines.
2. Burma is interesting, and good news, but not important. However, the Badr brigade killing 20 of Moqtada Sadr’s men and burning down his office is….news.
3. Yglesias, and events, have finally convinced me. Incompetence my butt. WTF were we thinking invading Iraq?
As it happens, though, I posted a small something else about Burma earlier today.
“Burma is interesting, and good news, but not important.”
Bob, isn’t that more than a little blithe? These are human beings who happened to be “not important”? Um, you may wish to do a diagnostic on your empathy chip.
So no one is interested in the possible demise of one of the world’s truly ghastly regimes?
Meet the new boss….
I am exactly as excited by this news as I was when I heard that they were going to tear down Abu Ghraib and, in its place, build….a new prison.
Thanks for the link, Gary Farber.
Based on the IHT story, I’m afraid I have to agree with felixrayman (in fact, those very same Who lyrics came to mind….)
It’ll be great if more comes of it, but all by itself the story does not suggest sweeping change, much less improvements.
Wait & see.
Sorry, Gary, I am a horrible human being. I have not lost a lot of sleep over Burma. I empathize with Tibetans and Iraqis and all sorts of Africans and many Americans and others and all my empathy is used up. It is not unlimited. I am not ashamed to say I have not followed Sri Lanka closely either.
And of course I meant strategically important to American interests. As Don Johnson says way above we all are “realists” sometimes.
Gary, exactly what are you saying? That if I do not devote an equal amount of resources, attention and emotion, to each and every suffering human in the world I am generally callous and uncaring? Or just not good enough for you?
No, I cannot say the Burmese people were important to me personally or as a citizen, nor can I think of a reason they should be. They could be, if on a random, whimsical, or personal reason I chose to make Burma my particular cause. As may have been noticed, I am in enough pain over Iraq and the Middle East, especially the female populations.
I said it was a “good thing”. If somebody’s life improves somewhere without moral complications, it is. You are being stupidly offensive, and I ask for an apology.
Oooh…is OW about to turn into the Penthouse Forum of injury porn? I do have more stitches than anyone I know who hasn’t been thrown through a plate-glass window, so I’ve got some stories for you. If you’ll please enter your credit card number…
This guys a paramedic, so naturally he’s got no idea what he’s talking about.
Slart, window-crashing is a good job if you can get it… and live in Pynchon’s _Vineland_.
ahhh…
I should have known a rilkefan would be a pynchonfan.
Spent far too much of my own teen-age years reading Gravity’s Rainbow….
This guys a paramedic, so naturally he’s got no idea what he’s talking about.
Did I say that? No I did not. But if something is “pretty much a given”, wouldn’t you be at least a little bit surprised to find a number of counterexamples?
(This study (PDF) says that of the 1809 motorcycle accidents studied in Singapore, the most common type of lower limb injury was fracture, most commonly of the tib-fib, followed by the ankle. Only 6.8% of the lower limb fractures were of the femur. Obviously they’re not focusing exclusively on impacts with cars, though.)
Not actually a pynchonfan, sadly – man’s got chops but I only made it about 200-300 pages into _GR_ before finding it all too much muchness.
If Pynchon drew two characters less likely to mesh conversationally than Gary and bob, I missed it.
Not interested, Josh. If it were me making the claim, maybe, but given that I’m just passing it on, sorry, no. If I ever run into him again, though, I’ll tell him you disagree.
Er, Slart? Are you under the impression that I’m spoiling for a fight or something?
“but I only made it about 200-300 pages into _GR_ before finding it all too much muchness.”
Finished GR, can’t pretend to understand it all, but the feeling I got from it was that Pynchon was one of the few post-war writers who had something new and interesting to say.
About paranoia and prediction, for instance. As opposed to Gaddis or Coover or Gass. My generation of great novelist wanna-bes.
“V” and “Crying of Lot 49” are pretty readable books, if a little dark.
Speaking of nothing in particular: can any of you who frequent conservative sites more than I do answer two questions:
(a) what’s the big deal about Juan Cole having speculated that if Steven Vincent and his translator were romantically involved, that could have been what got him killed? (True.)
(b) when people write things like “Let’s be honest… The real problem is the media has brought on a constant drumbeat of bad news. The accentuate the negative, and ignore the positive.” (cite), do they actually believe it? (I’d ask myself, but I think I’d probably be banned, and honestly, I don’t really want to intrude on a site that pretty clearly was not set up with me in mind, just to ask a question that would just be taken as rude. The thing is, I am actually curious.)
Sorry — the comment in (b) was about the war, and why it’s losing popularity.
do they believe that’s the real problem?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, at least some of the people who say it, sincerely believe that media coverage is either the, or at least a major, problem.
And I think it’s because they don’t understand the Vietnam War.
They have been fed this line of nonsense which says that the US military was just on the verge of winning the whole thing in Vietnam when the US media (and the liberals and the peaceniks and Jane Fonda and etc.) swooped in and stole our rightful victory.
That bears very little relation to the reality of why we could not win in Vietnam. But if you have completely bought into that line, then you might well fear the same thing happening again this time. (Even though this time the media is largely in the hands of the WH and its allies.)
They’re still fighting the last war…
I really, really, really can’t wait for the day that the memory of Vietnam has faded so completely that it has become one of those wars, like the Spanish-American War, that most people only vaguely know exists from history books. The knowledge that almost no Democratic elected officials will come out in favor even of a plan like my sharp drop in the number of troops for fear that they will be labeled ‘defeatist’ and turned into McGovern is no fun at all.
I suspect you’re right, though. But I still wonder about the source of their convictions about what they are not being told.
Remember the Maine!
Speaking of dropping troop levels. Does one possibly sense a nascent consensus developing?
“Speaking of dropping troop levels. Does one possibly sense a nascent consensus developing?”
Has this turned into an open thread? Gary hasn’t apologized yet, but I do so care for the bleeding crowd.
As I understand it, the National Guard and/or Reserves are limited by law to rwo overseas tours, and that law must be changed summer of 2006. Is anyone willing to bet that Congress will send the dudes to Iraq for a third tour?
In addition, historically the third combat tour just kills retention. At least it did Vietnam.
Yglesias keeps saying keeping troop levels at current deployment is simply impossible, but I don’t think he ever provides a numerical analysis. I would welcome a link to a better analysis.
I think the consensus says must be 100k by summer of 2006, and 50k by 2008. Even if Iran were to invade across the border, I don’t think we could get troops over there for a couple years.
But I consider the situation volatile and unpredictable, and our leadership even more so. Want some grins, scroll down comments here for “oldman’s” predictions
American Legion
Escalation, new war, intimidation/putsch, American Civil War II, most likely all of the above.
It is also the worst Presidential collapse I have seen since 1973. Scandals, big war going badly, gas prices going up, housing starting to deflate, polls going against him…with three more years to go. It may get interesting, tho not as much as Oldman thinks.
hilzoy: what’s the big deal about Juan Cole having speculated that if Steven Vincent and his translator were romantically involved, that could have been what got him killed? (True.)
I check Martin Kramer to see if Juan Cole has made any mistakes; he detests Cole and provides a free ColeWatch service. Its’s a sort of Luskin-Krugman thing with the difference that Kramer is by no means stupid. Cole’s comments about Stevens gave Kramer a chance to sound off about Cole’s swollen ego, nastiness to a murder victim (on Kramer’s reading), Arab attitudes to women and even Cole’s years as a Bahai missionary.
No doubt RedState and the like have grabbed that material and lavishly embroidered it.
Bob, don’t sweat Gary’s comment. This is the same Gary who said he didn’t want to see news about murders or kidnappings on the networks because he just didn’t care about those people, so I’d take his approbation with a grain of salt. Of course, he then comes over here and tries to get strangers to give him money to operate his website, so he appears to have a rather curious conception of how empathy works.
Dunno; hadn’t seen that stretch. I’d only seen Vincent’s wife’s letter to Cole, which…I’d hate to be the guy on the other end of that. Cole’s speculation to the side, it’s just as much of an arguable point that Vincent brought this on himself by attempting a sham conversion to Islam followed by a sham marriage. I wouldn’t argue either one of those points without a bit more in the way of evidence, which I don’t expect to see more of, really, unless we catch the fellows that did it and they confess. And that seems rather like a long shot.
That was rather uncalled-for, Phil. I think that, our differences of opinion aside, Gary’s one of the more decent people I’ve run into on the internet, and he frequently has interesting things to say. So this particular well-poisoning isn’t going to work, methinks.
Uh…actually, even not putting our differences of opinion aside, Gary’s one of the more decent people I’ve encountered on the Internet. I guess I intended to convey that my respect for him is, if anything, sharpened by disagreement.
A further point on hilzoy’s question re Cole: he may have been unwise to base his comments on a report in the Daily Telegraph, which has a reputation for pushing stories which serve the British establishment. The real motive for Vincent’s murder may have been political. Dan Hardie made this point in a CT thread:
Cole returns to the topic today, responding to the letter from Vincent’s widow. He stresses that he didn’t say Vincent was sleeeping with his interpreter; he wouldn’t have to be – just being alone with her could be enough to get him killed. His widow believes he never was alone with her. If true, that strengthens Dan Hardie’s case.
Hardie’s committed an error, there. Just because someone has motive to do a thing, doesn’t mean they’re the only ones with motive, and certainly doesn’t actually mean they did that thing. I’ve certainly got motive to do damage to my homeowners’ insurance company, but then again so do thousands of others. If their corporate headquarters were to, just for the sake of argument, be taken down in the middle of the night by a truck-full of nitroglycerine made from fat liposuctioned from the thighs of wealthy women, am I automatically the one that did it?
Slarti, the 327th rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about the stolen liposuctioned fat. Which we used to make soap, not nitro. The frozen orange juice and gasoline was for the explosives.
Damn, I talked about it.
Frozen orange juice plus gasoline equals napalm, doesn’t it? I haven’t quite memorized the official Fight Club cookbook.
Actually, Durden’s comments in Fight Club WRT soap was something like that soap-making and explosive manufacturing go hand in hand.
Finding Bob a Pynchon fan has just vastly improved my day. The first part of GR is the toughest — the later stuff rocks.
Lot 49 hasn’t aged as well as I’d hoped.
On Viet Nam, it’s amazing how much whining there is about the media and protesters. Weinberger and Powell have since crafted the cure for this. It is (a) win fast; (b) win big; and (c) win clear. And if you can’t be pretty damn sure you’re going to do all three, stand down (unless you really have no choice).
Look, I’d love to win the lottery. Thing is, I don’t buy tickets. How much whining about how I didn’t win the lottery, again this week, should anyone be expected to put up with?
Rumsfeld Bush and Cheney didn’t want to shell out for a ticket. They thought, I guess, that they could win the lottery anyway. It didn’t work. Quit whining about it.
“quit whining about it”
Ah, but there you have the key to the Bush family world-view: entitlement. The first Bush was *entitled* to a clean win against Saddam. And he was *entitled* to a second term. The fact that he was unjustly deprived of those things by being outmaneuvered in Iraq and outvoted at home only deepened the sense of entitlement.
So to remedy that round of injustice, his son was *entitled* to his day on the throne, and entitled to a second term. And he is entitled to his own splendid little war that will put to rights the wrong done to his daddy (while also outdoing him, too).
And he *certainly* shouldn’t have to work for any of these things. I mean, it’s hard. It’s just, really, really hard.
You see, when a family feels this degree of entitlement to the control of a nation’s government, they have decided they are titled nobility. Their mere name and parentage, absent any talent or ability, should earn them glory, martial success, popular devotion, and the prayers of the masses.
And when you wake up in a world that doesn’t always cooperate with your monarchist fantasies, you don’t think you’d whine, too? It’s hard, it’s really hard!
(Of course Jeb is *kicking* himself for having gone along with that primogeniture thing).
And, yes, this is part of why I am *deeply* opposed to Hillary in 2008, or ever.
Hardie’s committed an error, there. Just because someone has motive to do a thing, doesn’t mean they’re the only ones with motive, and certainly doesn’t actually mean they did that thing.
The “thing” Hardie was discussing was the Daily Telegraph’s angle (echoed by the Scotsman and the Sunday Times) on the murder of Vincent. Who, apart from the suspects he mentions, had a motive to spin the story that particular way? The murderers, in order to make the thing look non-political? Maybe, but why would they choose British newspapers, particularly? If you are merely saying it’s just a theory, well, thanks for pointing that out. But I wasn’t planning to bet the house on it anyway.
Over lunch I was wondering what this had to do with this thread. The best connection I can make is that here is a tragic case of life imitating art. Vincent had so much in common with Pyle, the central character of A Quiet American: he set out full of enthusiasm for the rescue of a country which he didn’t know all that much about and ended up trying to rescue a woman.
When the novel was filmed for the first time Graham Greene was hopping mad because Pyle’s ruthlessness was airbrushed out. (Not so in the recent version where his involvement with terrorism is made explicit.) Greene was making the same point as Donald Johnson does above: the idealistic component of American policy is, to a large extent, a front for a realism just as brutal, at times, as earlier forms of imperialism.
“I said it was a ‘good thing’. If somebody’s life improves somewhere without moral complications, it is. You are being stupidly offensive, and I ask for an apology.”
Bob, it certainly was not my intent to either insult you or upset you. Beyond that, I’m not clear how I offended you, and if you’d like to explain further to me, I’ll certainly listen with a friendly and respectful attitude and an attempt at an open mind (easy to do with the holes in my head, theoretically).
Regarding Professor Cole, Mark Kleiman has just dressed him down, and if anyone would like to call Mark a right-winger of any sort, that would be interesting.
“This is the same Gary who said he didn’t want to see news about murders or kidnappings on the networks because he just didn’t care about those people, so I’d take his approbation with a grain of salt.”
Now, Phil, if I were uncharitable, I’d get very huffy, point out that this is a clear and overt lie, and demand that you either quote such alleged words from me, or withdraw it and apologize.
But I’ll presume that you are carelessly misremembering what I wrote, and ask you to nonetheless see if you might be so kind as to find such alleged words from me, and please post them, if you can. I’m sure that if you can’t, you’ll be a gentleman in your further response.
In case anyone else is wondering, I of course never said any such thing. What I’ve written about at times is my ever-long-standing division between the kind of news stories that affect masses of people and catch them up in long-term trends — stories about war, political developments, science, the sort of things commonly discussed on ObWi and that I discuss on my own blog (along with endless mere oddness, weirdness, silliness, or things of mere personal interest to me, of course) — and stories that primarily affect only those involved directly and their loved ones — fires, murders, tornados, weather in general, bus crashes, missing people, and so one.
Now, if you can find any instance of my ever saying I didn’t care about the latter people, I will be surprised.
If anyone finds this sort of distinction of news into two types of news strange or inexplicable or objectionable, I’d simply be curious to hear so.
I have been known to say that I “don’t care” much about the latter kind of news stories. I’m quite sure I’ve never in my life said I don’t care about the people.
And I’d like to think that the distinction between “people” and “news stories” is quite clear. It really wouldn’t do to confuse them, since news stories don’t tend to laugh, smile, cry, give birth, love, and so on. Whereas I find that people commonly do. We write and edit news stories; we don’t write and edit people. And so on.
As to my comment to Bob, I was raised, despite a generally irreligious upbringing and life, on such principles as tikkun olam, “healing the world,” and that if a single life is taken, a world is destroyed, and that sort of thing. And, naturally, I tend to view how other people view other peoples — whatever the ethnicity or nationality or grouping involved — by at least one point, considering, “now, how would I feel about that act or statement if I Xed out the [BLANKS] and filled in [THE JEWS]? It’s kind of an empathy check.
So when I see people insulting Muslims qua being Muslim, say, I think “gee, what if they were saying “Jew” instead of “Muslim.” It’s not really a necessary exercise at this point of my life, having been doing so as long as I can remember, but it’s certainly part of my automatic background test of any statement or act. What if it were the Jews in Darfur? Or Burma? Or wherever. Etc.
So I hear “Burma isn’t important” as the equivalent of “you Jews in the Holocaust: you’re not important.”
And so I tend to think that every people, every ethnicity, every religion, every sexuality, every tribe, every grouping, etc., are all, each, terribly, preciously, important. Everyone has or had a mother, a father, and often sisters and brothers and children and nephews and nieces and cousins.
And each orphan is terribly, completely, important.
So when I read anyone I think well of saying “they’re not important,” I catch my breath.
And I try not to be rude or unkind, but to merely ask them if they might want to reconsider such a remark, thinking surely they are only being careless, as we almost all are in common speech with some frequency; certainly I say plenty of careless things; it’s no sin at all.
And so I might say something I intend to be respectful and light, such as:
And if that came across as unfeeling on my own part, somehow, or as insulting, or derogatory, or harsh, or anything else unkind, then I do regret that and apologize to you for that.
(As a side-note, one reason I find time-stamping so crucial is that it at least gives some small additional information that I think helps — very slightly — to lessen unfortunate interchanges; it’s helpful to see if someone is posting in heat, every three seconds, or has taken a night to reconsider things, or what. Timing really matters in communication and making sense of it, and stripping away one more bit of information from a medium that is already going through a fairly thin tube of what can be conveyed is, in my view, destructive towards better communication, albeit in a small way. But when all we have is ASCII, even a small stripping can hurt badly.)
As for the rest of the things you translated what I said into — “I am a horrible person,” etc. — well, Bob, I never said them, and I’m sorry I said things that you could translate into such other things.
Does this help at all, or are you still feeling that I am being “stupidly offensive”? If so, let’s talk more, please.
As for Phil’s comment, it’s entirely possible we do have different ways of approaching empathy. Probably not, but I really can’t tell at the moment, from the evidence. If you thought you were demonstrating a proper sense of empathy to me in your comment, pray forgive me if I do my best to not follow your example. My only question would be: if the entire point of that comment wasn’t simply and purely nothing more than a personal attack on me (and beg pardon if it seemed directly quite nasty to me), what information would you say you were otherwise attempting to communicate?
Oh, and Phil? About this? “…so I’d take his approbation with a grain of salt.”
I don’t think that words means what you think it means. But if not, really, I do hold Bob in warm regard, no matter that our views do tend to come from rather different places, and if you were somehow, confusingly, recognizing that, thank you.
I gotta say, I couldn’t care less who this woman is, any more than I care about any of those other women I’ve either never heard of, or whose names I’ve seen mentioned as crime victims, which I’ve then gone on to, as is always the case with simple crimes that don’t affect a larger issues, completely ignore.
Advocating more, but less racist, nonsense, is still advocating nonsense, and life is to short for me to care about fires, murders, car accidents, kidnappings, littering cases, jaywalkings, mass murders, or whatever hell else local tv and tabloids care about. Focusing on that crap hurts America. Stop hurting America.
Posted by: Gary Farber | June 16, 2005 11:39 AM
If there’s some more charitable interpretation of “I couldn’t care less who this woman [or any other crime victim] is,” and “life is to short for me to care about fires, murders, car accidents, kidnappings, littering cases, jaywalkings, [and[ mass murders,” I’m happy to hear it, Gary. Maybe by “this woman” you meant “this news story,” since you vociferously claim that you could never, ever everevereverever confuse the two.
I guess maybe since they involve individuals rather than groups and there’s nothing political to be made of them, it’s easier not to care about them, or something? At least easy enough that it doesn’t trigger the “What do you mean, they aren’t important?” breath-catching.
But, hey, thanks for the catch an “approbation.”
Your failure to imagine no others with motive doesn’t constitute an actual absence of motivated others. Furthermore, motive does not equal guilt.
Actually, there is. If you’ll simply reread what he wrote a few dozen times, and on at least one of those times notice the part that says …any more than I care about any of those other women I’ve either never heard of…, and recognize that as saying something other than Gary doesn’t care about any of these people.
Not that Gary needs me defending him, but this sort of misrepresentation is a pet peeve of mine, and it’s already overweight.
Kleiman:
That’s going to leave a nasty scar.
I don’t think it’s a misrepresentation at all, Slarti. The rather clear impression was, “This does not affect world politics, so who cares?” I certainly didn’t get the impression that Gary cared about crime victims qua crime victims, and I hardly think that’s a result of my inability to read English.
“If there’s some more charitable interpretation….”
It was certainly careless, bad, phrasing on my part, and I regret that. The “more charitable interpretation,” which would be the accurate one, which is that there’s a, admittedly somewhat subtle, but nonetheless, in the context of your accusation, absolutely crucial, distinction between saying “I don’t care who X is” and “I don’t care about X.” However, I can certainly see how you could have confused my meaning. Can I trust that you now reasonably clearly understand my meaning and point? And that in that comment, I was waxing (overly) frustratedly about awful news priorities, not about the inoffensiveness of murder and death?
Yes, definitely quite bad and regrettable phrasing on my part, though.
Could you perhaps respond to my query about this comment of yours, please?
Phil bob Gary–
play nice, shake hands, and drop it.
You’re three of the best commenters on this site–interesting, responsible, and civil. Let’s just drop this early morning spat, and hope that one of our hosts puts up some new material soon.
But no more of this one, please?
“Not that Gary needs me defending him….”
In fact, life would be far more wearying and unpleasant if no one ever defended me when there was reasonable cause, and if everyone simply assumed that somehow because I’m vaguely articulate, and not completely an idiot all the time, that I don’t need ever need defending; respect may be what’s intended to be conveyed by that, but indifference is easy to instead perceive.
I’m quite wholly human, and while I don’t run off and cry at every cross comment, I have feelings that can be as sensitive as anyone’s, I quite assure you.
And I have to congratulate Phil: there’s nothing I’m more sensitive about in my life than my taking charity, let alone asking for it. Phil quite accurately perceived where I’d feel most vulnerable, and scored a bullseye. He struck at the part of me that is most ashamed, embarassed, and find most difficult to deal with, and as a result, made me feel quite terrible. Presumably this made him feel quite good. Congrats, Phil! Excellent lesson on how to display “empathy.” Good job. Be proud.
Regarding Professor Cole, Mark Kleiman has just dressed him down, and if anyone would like to call Mark a right-winger of any sort, that would be interesting.
I know nothing about his politics. Whether he supported the invasion of Iraq is more relevant to this issue than whether he is a right-winger or not. His account of the Daily Telegraph article is misleading, I think. He is also wrong to say that in English, “romantically involved with” is euphemistic for “having sex with.” At least, I speak English and it doesn’t invariably mean that to me; perhaps it does to American readers. Cole did not commit himself on that: “If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it.” (My emphasis)
Other commenters besides Cole concluded from the newspaper accounts that there was an affair involved, whether chaste or otherwise; for one, see the CT thread I linked to above.
You’re right, Tad.
Gary, I apologize for what was absolutely intended to be nothing more than a completely gratuitous swipe, something which I do far too often and which is utterly unnecessary, particularly on someone else’s website. I was a taken aback enough by the comment I quoted, which stuck in my mind, that I posted in haste rather than ask for further explanation; then let it carry through to here, and did something dickish as a result. I’m sorry.
What I meant by that, Gary, is that you do a much better job at defending yourself than I could ever reasonably hope to do. Especially given this latest episode of either A) unusual (for me) clarity deficiency, or B) unusuallly high awareness of my normal shortcomings in the clarity department. In other words, I suck at this, and you’ve earned better.
Well. My offense was exaggerated, though existent, to make a point pertinent to the topic of the thread. I suspect all the kind people trying to separate the blooded battlers could assume a certain amoount of respect and affection between Gary and myself.
The topic of the thread was realism vs idealism. Johnson used an example of virtually all American Presidents taking the side of Indonesia against East Timor. Nations or Presidents have to make these choices, supporting the dictator of Uzbekhistan or Saddam during the eighties. Does the support of Saddam by Reagan/Bush, which is brought up quite often, imply a total callousness toward the Iraqi or Iranian people, a partial callousness, a conditional callousness, or an empathy overcome with a heavy heart, or what? Were Reagan/Bush I bad people for supporting Saddam? Every President at least rhetorically puts this to question in his priorities and policies. Clinton intervened in Kosovo but not, or less, in Rwanda. Is this hypocrisy and cynicism?
I think most people find this calculus of human value uncomfortable, but practice it anyway without admitting it. Each of us actually has a number greater than zero of American boys we would sacrifice to bring freedom to the Iraqi people.
I think it was Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution who recently confronted the question of cutting a child’s throat to save a thousand. Tyler said, paraphrased, “Of course.” Every philosopher and religious leader would consider it wrong. I can’t quite see why.
Gary, I rank everyone, I have a theoretical scale involving family, country, ideology, common interests, whatever. I consider it my duty to decide that Iraqis are more important to me than the Burmese. Somebody else would have the duty to make the opposite determination. Do you think this so wrong?
Thank you, Phil and Slarti. I accept your apology, Phil, and let’s consider it put behind us. But thank you again.
“I know nothing about his politics.”
That’s a shame. Mark Kleiman is one of the most acute observers of the political/policy world currently blogging today, in my view, and it’s relatively seldom indeed that have any serious issue to take with him. I highly recommend him to all as daily reading.
As for Professor Cole, without getting into any specific issues, I find him sometimes insightful, sometimes wrongheaded, but also frequently extremely weaselly, frankly, when challenged. He’s on my blogroll, but what mixed respect I’ve had for him in the past has fallen greatly in the past year, mostly more for the way he deals with criticism than for the various points on which I find him wrong-headed (loosely speaking, I find his views on Iraq worth considering, although not to be automatically accepted; I find his views on anything Israel-related fairly ignorant and utterly non-insightful).
I particularly don’t respect his habit of, when challenged on a dumb remark, rewriting the remark in a past post without acknowledgment. It’s one thing to correct typos after the fact, or add or change an innocuous statement. But when you’re seriously challenged about a serious point, going back and changing your words so it looks like you always said something else: that doesn’t fly with me at all as a respectable way to behave.
Oh, and Kleiman gave highly tepid and skeptical early support for the invasion, but then changed his mind — I think it was before the invasion, but my memory is vague on that, and possibly it was just shortly after. He’s certainly never in any way been a Bush supporter.
(Something a lot of anti-war folk have always seemed to have a great deal of trouble noticing, acknowledging, or remembering, is that there was plenty of liberal support for the invasion, despite Bush; I mean, if everyone wants to attack Bill Clinton for his support of the war, be my guest (it’s certainly true that Clinton has never been a leader of the “left,” to be sure, no matter the hallucinations of many on the right)). But regarding anyone and everyone who thought that it was a liberal notion to support freedom and oppose neo-fascism as a non-liberal also doesn’t fly. Bush and the war were and are actually approachable as separate, although not unconnected, issues.
“Bush and the war were and are actually approachable as separate, although not unconnected, issues.”
Gary, it now appears to me that the means and resources required to win this war are not, and never were available. I had a delusion that perhaps the resources would be adjusted to meet the task. I underestimated the difficulty of the task, and overestimated the will of the American people, and George Bush, to do what was needed to win. As I defined “win.”
I’m glad that the fight has ended, and Phil has apologized and Gary clarified his meaning, before I got here. Let it not be repeated. She said, direly.
About Cole: when I read the original post, all the ‘ifs’ registered, as did the difference between ‘romantically involved’ and ‘having sex with’, and the difference between ‘might be thought to be sleeping around’ and ‘was sleeping around’. So it read like the piece of speculation it was.
On reflection, I think this may have something to do with having been in the Middle East (though not Iraq.) For one thing, what Cole said seemed to me not just true but obvious, so I wasn’t inclined to take it as a slur. For another (overgeneralizing a bit), it’s hard to travel there for any extended period of time without realizing how many, many, many things that seem to us in the US to be entirely innocent seem to people in the ME to be marks of utter depravity. So while it would have been outrageous if Vincent and Nour were ever alone together, that’s by no means required to set the outrage in motion. If it was clear that they were romantically involved, in any sense, the worst would often be assumed.
I’m basing what I say on the time I spent in Turkey, plus reading and so forth. But: when I was staying in a small hostel run by a family in Istanbul, one night we heard a great screaming and crashing and wailing from the family’s quarters. None of us knew what to do, and so, probably to our shame, did nothing. It turned out that what was going on was that the daughter of the family, who had just gone off to university (also in Istanbul, she was living at home), had gone to have her hair cut by a male hairdresser — in a public hair salon, with other customers etc. — and had been beaten up by her father for the horrendous depravity of having allowed a man to touch her hair.
This was in a relatively cosmopolitan city, in a family who had some familiarity with other ways of life, and a daughter at university.
It’s also relevant, I think, that as best I could tell the fact that sexual morality is so completely socially enforced means that no one has really had to answer the question, suppose I could sleep with anyone without fear of social sanction, what would I do? We in the US and Europe might find it obvious that the answer to that question is not: I would sleep with literally everyone who crossed my path. We might find it obvious that most people would develop some views of their own about who to sleep with and who not to, and in this way develop some sort of restraint. As best I can tell, this was not the least obvious to the people I ran into, with a few exceptions. (Those of you who are guys might be able to get this by imagining that you are 14 and asked the question: suppose that every woman in the world was willing to have sex with you: how many of them would you have sex with? My sense is that for a lot of 14 year old guys, the answer would be something like: as many as I could. Whereas probably if this really happened, they’d develop a different answer.)
This means, first, that many people in that part of the world imagine Westerners to be wholly debauched, since we do not have the same sort of social sanctions, and they haven’t imagined the alternative. So we are presumed to be completely abandoned. And second, they imagine that someone who defies those social sanctions (e.g., their daughter/sister/etc. who gets involved with a Westerner) must have shed the only thing that’s keeping them from similar depravity. And these two things in combination mean that it really does not take having actual sex, or even being alone, to cause people to infer the worst.
This was always the upside of traveling as a woman: I did of course have to endure the harassment, but if straight me ever got involved with anyone (and I did) (once in Turkey), it was a guy, and there was of course a huge double standard. (And I’d imagine that a lot of confirmation would be needed before anyone would suspect such an unimaginable monstrosity as a lesbian affair.)
Still, traveling with my boyfriend was completely bizarre, and this despite the fact that we were extremely careful not to do anything even remotely romantic, at all. (It would have been different had he been American or European: we get to do what we want, as long as it’s not completely disrespectful. But he was a Turkish Kurd, which, as it turned out, was a different matter altogether, since it brought us within the ambit of Turkish sexual enforcement. And, of course, Turkish anti-Kurd prejudice.) We were followed by the police. A lot. (This in northeastern Turkey.) We always had separate rooms, and stayed in them, but hotel owners used to sleep on the stairs that separated those rooms, to make sure. You have no idea.
All of which is to say: I think that Cole was rude, but right.
I second the reccommendation of Kleiman, though since he posts only slightly more than I do, you could probably get away with weekly reading. He is almost always interesting and though I often disagree, he causes me to at least closely examine what I do think. (That compliment seems tepid because I have the German akwardness in giving or receiving praise. Probably just as well to say that he is great.)
If we could make something good out of this somewhat bad thing, I would like to say that this is exactly the kind of empathy that I wish people were trying to get at when they say things like “We have to understand why they hate us.”
It is perfectly appropriate to try to understand our enemies better so that we can try to devastate them or kill them more effectively. But using such knowledge in such a way is best reserved for our enemies instead of for people with whom we have mere disagreements.
And the fact that this tidbit comes from someone who has been really annoyed with Gary, and said unkind things that were inappropriate, doesn’t detract from my argument–though it certainly highlights the distinction between intellectual understanding and real-life action in a fallen world.
“This was always the upside of traveling as a woman: I did of course have to endure the harassment, but if straight me ever got involved with anyone (and I did) (once in Turkey), it was a guy, and there was of course a huge double standard.”
Whoa, it took me four readings to find the “upside” (which at first read sounds like “it was a guy”–there actually available from domestic outlets, too).
I take it you mean–there was hostility, social opprobrium, and police harrassment. But–
at least your sweetie (being a guy), was not summarily executed by his male relatives, as might have happened if you were a man and your sweetie were a foreign woman.
Yeah, that’s an upside alright. When one half of a double-standard is barbaric enough, we can be thankful that it is not the uniform standard.
sigh…
for “there actually” read “they’re actually”
hilzoy:
when people write things like “Let’s be honest… The real problem is the media has brought on a constant drumbeat of bad news. The accentuate the negative, and ignore the positive.” (cite), do they actually believe it?
My take–
To have fun with exaggeration, they believe it like flatworlders believe. Its the use of self-delusion to avoid objective questioning of events or objective re-examination of one’s own beliefs.
Therefore, to the “flatworlders,” people have turned against the war because of the coverage of events, rather than the events themselves. True beleivers can always find the silver lining in anything, but that darn media just won’t report it that way.
Tad: yes, that was what I meant. Guys are allowed a few wild oats; you don’t get killed for having shamed them if you are perceived to be, um, the field in which they sow them. (For them, the constraint is less shame than the quite difficult question: who exactly are you supposed to have sex with?) Though when I was there, tourist women had rather recently been stoned for wearing shorts, not far from where I was. But that wasn’t for the honor of any guys; it was for the women’s shamelessness, and the temptation they so thoughtlessly presented.
I should also say that in my experience Kurdish areas were a lot more open and less repressive in these matters.
The other day bob suggested Billmon gets a lot of his Iraq stuff from Prof. Cole, and his attitude towards Isreael is at least parallel. (I get into a mini-spat with Billmon at the linked post.) Which I mention in part because we discussed the topic at length without my gaining an understanding of the roots of Cole’s antipathy, assuming them to be non-scholarly.
Perhaps I should say, having taken a strong swipe at Professor Cole, that his post here about why “out now!” is not just a simplistic notion, but a dangerous and irresponsible one, is worth reading. This sort of thing is why although I read Cole less frequently these days and with as much disagreement as agreement, I’ve not dropped him from my blogroll or reading altogether; he’s not, after all, a kook nor an idiot nor a complete ignoramus.
One of the tropes of the blogosphere that continues to bother the hell out of me is the overwhelming popularity of completely binary thinking (or expression, anyway) by so many. People can’t be complicated mixes of right and wrong, wise and dumb, good and evil, partially correct, but partially incorrect. Instead, people are cast as either villains or heros, all black or all white. No grey allowed! Nothing that might require thinking! Don Rumsfeld, boo-hiss! Cindy Sheehan, demoness of anti-Americanism!
Whatever. That’s not the world I know. I don’t know a single person who’s always right or always wrong, whose motives are never good, or always evil.
That’s just not the world I know.
And worst of all, it’s an incredibly boring world.
And while I don’t want to poke the subject of Gary‘s traffic and income, here’s an indirect link (so typepad will let me make it – it flags any direct link as comment spam) to my brother’s cd.
hilzoy, I just noticed that our comments timestamps disappeared on August 10th, right at your primate post. Want me to enter a trouble ticked and have TypePad folks look into it? I can’t see if there’s any troublesome HTML in your post that might have done it. I suppose it’s even possible that a trackback did it; I have no idea.
Gary, re binary thought/expression – that’s part of what bugged me about Belle’s post the other day.
On the other hand, sometimes things are just wrong.
Also, by the way, see Marc Cooper’s comments on Cole’s post. And, while I’m sure lots of people can say “I have no idea who Marc Cooper is,” well, a)I’d like to see anyone explain that he’s not not the left; and b) [deleted for snark]
Via Kevin Drum, Cooper on Rumsfeld and poker. Who I take it from Gary is not the left. (Raised my “no idea hand” by the way.)
Out of Balance
Sebastian is engaged in aggressive self-delusion today. Bush was not an idealist, he isn’t an idealist. Iraq was a pragmatically conceived idea not to promote “needed change” in the Middle East, but to nail a stake through the foot of…
“Who I take it from Gary is not the left.”
I presume that’s a result of my typoing “I’d like to see anyone explain that he’s not of the left.”
I suggest, say, examining the list of books he’s written, in his sidebar, for some Clues as to his background, other than the utterly obvious evidence of his blog. Or see here and here, please. It’s short stuff.
My deleted snark was really rather mild, but it was to the effect that any leftist unfamiliar with Cooper’s work of the past twenty years clearly couldn’t be very familiar with leftist journalism. No offense implied. But if someone has never read an issue of The Nation in the past decade, well, they’re either a kook who thinks The Nation is too right-wing, or… I dunno. I’m back to “aren’t very familiar with leftist journalism?” Not that it’s not possible to miss a name or have a bad memory, to be sure, and no offense intended.
The thing that I, and plenty of other folks who grew up in and on the left (though certainly not all such), tend to hate most about the left is the historic thread of attacking “deviationism” within, and engaging in factionalism, and reading others out of The Party (figuratively speaking, these days, save for a handful of people) for daring to not toe every inch of some non-existent Party Line, that still runs so darned heavily through so much of the modern “left.” It’s also why the real left pretty much fell apart by the Forties, leaving behind liberalism and a large fringe of factions, then primarily dividing into anti-Communist liberalism and, um, those comfy with apologism in some form; these are divides which we still live in the shadows of.
It’s helpful to be knowledgeable at least in a small way of the history of the Left during the 1910s and 1920s to understand what followed. Or to at least have seen Reds. 🙂
My mom was actually a Party member, incidentally, back in the Thirties and extremely early Forties. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact staggered her, though, as it did so many, and she ceased any activity not long after, as I understand it. (My father was also of like mind, but never formally joined the Party, as I understand.)
Well, that’s fairly annoying; my comment seems to have not posted, and disappeared.
I hate reconstructing.
Meanwhile, see here about Cooper. It doesn’t seem very plausible to say this man is not of the left, does it?
But there my disappeared post is, despite the fact that I reloaded the page four times previously. Mysterious are the ways of browsers and caches sometimes.
Gary,
Do not be surprised that many bloggers are unknown to me. Most people in Ireland haven’t even heard of Slugger O’Toole. If you want to be famous, quit blogging and write a book (if you already have, apologies). Practically everyone I know, here or elsewhere in Europe, has heard of Chomsky, Moore and Pilger. Lots have heard of Krugman, Galbraith and Stiglitz.
I was quite unaware of the existence of blogs until a couple of years ago. In the course of googling for a Paul Krugman article on international trade I came upon this which introduced me to Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Daniel Drezner. I had never heard of any of them. Nor had I heard that Krugman was “shrill” and in that respect I think his concluding remark is spot-on:
“Memo to Mr. Drezner: if you want to accuse me of being shrill, a link to Andrew Sullivan, of all people, doesn’t exactly make the case.”
Also, please note that blogospheric ideas of right and left make no sense to me. People who run huge budget deficits and undertake massive experiments in social engineering are leftists in my book, and loony leftists at that.
Oh, that Cooper.
Reading The Nation means having to read other sources that specifically argue their views and then reading other sources that etc., then remembering which of the above to espouse. I prefer to read stuff somewhat more likely to be simply acceptable, since there’s so much info out there.
But I miss reading Katha Pollitt.
DeLong arguing about the right balance in explaining-vs-explaining-away, which I’ve argued in these pages with SH.
It’s comparatively rare for me to disagree with Brad, but I score his ex-teacher Jeff as far ahead on points there, rilkefan, myself.
I read the DeLong post, and I’m not convinced that he strikes the right balance, though of course there is a distinction between explaining and excusing. I don’t have time to fully explore the problem (famous last words before launching into a 5000 word essay that doesn’t get anywhere) but I think the idea that explaining and excusing can be tightly linked concepts doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Some people explain to excuse. Some explain as an intellectual exercise. Some people explain to leverage the explanation into something.
I think quite a bit of the problem has to do with unexplored (at least by most people) philosophical problems with the deep materialism which is associated with scientific understanding. If you take a deep materialist view, to explain is to dispense with the need for excuse because such materialism denies human agency. You don’t ask if it is right for hydrogen and oxygen to join to form water, you merely explain that is what happens when you put the two elements together. Most people are not willing to consciously go that far in equating human action with materialist proccess, but that does not change the fact that many people approach ‘explaining’ things from that direction.
And by the way, I deny a deep materialist explanation for human actions and human thought, perhaps only because I’ve been taught that, and perhaps out of an evolutionary self-centeredness–but there you are.
🙂
Stirling Newberry
I guess the link is in the trackbacks above. Newberry violating all kinds of posting rules from a distance, but honoring Sebastian with length.
“Bush was not an idealist, he isn’t an idealist. Iraq was a pragmatically conceived idea not to promote “needed change” in the Middle East, but to nail a stake through the foot of the government so that it could never be liberal again, and to create the conditions for a vast river of pork to flow to constituencies that would create a permanent Republican control of the government.
As long as would be idealists continue to engage in self-deception, they are going to continue to be deceived. You can’t cheat an honest man, and Sebastian isn’t being honest with himself, or with his readers.”
Well, “idealists engaging in self-deception” makes all this analysis about idealism very tough. Without intending to directly compare, but only to show an extreme, I would say both Hitler and Stalin considered themselves acting from idealistic motives, while Noriega and Saddam likely nevertook much of their rhetoric about benevolent intentions seriously. Can we somehow say that the King of Jordan is acting out of a love of his people while Assad is only trying to protect his power? How do we measure self-delusion and failed intentions when we cannot trust the rhetoric?
I do not think Bush believes himself acting in rapacious plutocracy, tho I can’t read his heart. I can’t believe his rhetoric:he would lie to me, he would lie to himself. I can look at his actions and decisions, try to unite them in a strategy, measure their sincerity by the effort expended.
When Bush says things like:”Condi tells me women will have rights in Iraq” and looks no further, I see someone who would rather think himself good on small justification than actually try to do or be good.
How do we measure self-delusion and failed intentions when we cannot trust the rhetoric?
Bob,
I presume your answer is, ignore the rhetoric and observe the behaviour. That’s what I take you to mean by “look at his actions and decisions, try to unite them in a strategy, measure their sincerity by the effort expended.” If that’s what you mean then I agree. This reminds me of Isaiah Berlin’s explanation of what it was that made Machiavelli original:
People in power may not know what they want. They may be deceiving themselves as well as the rest of us. But they want something (even if they themselves don’t know what it is) and “they are ready to pay the price” (in blood and treasure). We should be able to deduce what they actually want, consciously or not, by considering what they finally choose to do.
But this is an empirical approach and the “ponyhawks”, as Newberry calls them, are not empiricists. So we can’t communicate our results to them.
People in power aren’t usually the ones who pay the price when wars are fought. Well, on second thought that’s not always true–I have the impression Abraham Lincoln went through considerable mental anguish during the Civil War (not to mention the assassination afterwards). So he paid a price. But Bush doesn’t strike me the same way, somehow.
I don’t think Sebastian’s link between materialism and the excuse/ explanation dichotomy holds up in practice, though I share his belief/prejudices since I’m a Christian. But anyway, I’ve read Daniel Dennett on why determinism is compatible with free will and moral responsibility and while I don’t quite understand this (anymore than I understand it when the issue comes up in a slightly different way in discussions of predestination), I think Dennett and most other materialists really believe there is such a thing as moral responsibility. Well, actually, I’m not completely sure about what Dennett means, but it’s probably true of most other materialists.
I think we all understand there’s a difference between explaining why someone acted in such-and-such a way and excusing it and we also understand that circumstances can sometimes mitigate the degree of someone’s guilt without removing it altogether. We just tend to disagree regarding particular examples. For instance, I was ranting as usual about Reagan’s support for death squads once to a conservative friend and he said “Well, that was part of the Cold War” or something to that effect. In my annoyance I took that statement to be an excuse, but it might only have been an explanation, or it could have been both.
On a related note, conservative Christians often say the difference between their view and that of liberal secularists is that liberals think people are basically good, while Christians have a more realistic understanding of fallen human nature. In political practice this often boils down to conservatives criticizing liberals for downplaying enemy atrocities, while conservatives excuse American crimes as unavoidable policy choices in a fallen world. Again, one man’s explanation is another man’s excuse.
On a related note, conservative Christians often say the difference between their view and that of liberal secularists is that liberals think people are basically good, while Christians have a more realistic understanding of fallen human nature.
What I think is funny about this is that politicians trying to get support from conservatives don’t emphasize man’s fallen nature, but instead pander to the opposite position: ‘as an American, you’re not just good, you’re better than anyone else ever in the history of the universe.’ Liberal politicians looking to win votes say ‘we could be doing better, especially for the least among us, and to do so we need to overcome the power of the bad ones who benefit from the poor conditions of those least.’ Both sides make these appeals, because, in both cases, it is what their people want to hear, because they believe it to be true.
I agree that conservatives accuse liberals of downplaying enemy atrocities, but strongly doubt that they do so because they think that liberals do so because they think people are basically good. I think conservatives make this charge — far more often based on omissions rather than commission — because they feel that liberal failure to embrace exceptionalism is tantamount to treason. And treason is a great campaign platform: nothing like delegitimizing the opponent to blunt the appeal of his non-treason-related positions.
I think, Donald, that yours is an accurate assessment of conservative self-image. I think also that it is at strong odds with reality, and thus deeply intellectually dishonest. And forms the basis for so much intellectual dishonesty on the part of so many conservatives.
To be more succinct, it seems to me that American Exceptionalism is fundamentally incompatible with:
(a) Realism
(b) Christianity
(c) The Law of Unintended Consequences
(d) A View of Fallen Human Nature
A movement that chosses to embrace AE necessarily gives up all but lip service to (a)-(d).
Slarti: Your failure to imagine no others with motive doesn’t constitute an actual absence of motivated others. Furthermore, motive does not equal guilt.
Certainly motive does not equal guilt; in other news, the Pope is a Catholic. There may indeed be others, besides the British establishment, who have a motive for promoting the idea that the Vincent’s murder was not a response to his writings. My point, which is that Cole may have been misled, is unaffected by that. Indeed, the greater the number of people with such a motive, the more likely it is that the Daily Telegraph story was planted in order to promote that idea. Hardie’s point about the media outlets chosen is also unaffected, but I leave it to him to push that.
Charley, I agree completely. There is a funny and obvious self-contradiction between the doctrine that we’re all sinners and desperately wicked and deceive ourselves about our condition, and the belief in American exceptionalism. In fact as a Christian I take the latter belief as evidence of the first, the same way that Churchill took when he said that belief in original sin is the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine.
I’m not a Christian, neither am I a materialist in the sense of having any great confidence that all human behavior can be explained as the interaction of the familiar atoms. Maybe it can–I don’t see any bar to that in principle–but it is awfully early in the day for anyone to be very confident about it. I say we should pursue the various materialist projects for a couple more centuries and then reassess–by then I may be ready to change my mind.
There are some pretty concrete tasks at hand for neurophysiology to crack, tasks which it cannot yet do and yet which are well within its capacity. Maybe you don’t think there will ever be materialist explanations of consciousness, free will, etc. But there are some simpler ones: e.g. how are memories encoded? How is it possible for me to know not just the lyrics to a bunch of Beatles songs, but even the precise texture of the guitar intro to “Something in the way she moves”? We don’t yet know how all of that stuff is stored upstairs, in the way we now know a lot more about how heritable traits are stored in DNA. It’s a hard task, but probably easier than consciousness, and also one that seems clearly within the materialists’ bailiwick. So we let them figure out the relatively easy tasks, and see if what they learn makes the harder tasks look any different.
In the meantime, I don’t see as many contradictions as some of you do. (Or as many conceptual connections, to put the same point the other way around).
I have never understood this idea that secularists think people are basically good. I mean, “basically good” seems pretty hopelessly vague to begin with, but that aside, I don’t think secularists like myself generally have a much higher opinion of human beings than Christians do. So I see no conceptual connection between secularism and “perfectionism”, nor any contradiction in being a secularist and thinking that people are no damn good and not likely to get much better.
Conversely, I don’t see why the belief that humans are deeply flawed and wicked should be incompatible with American Exceptionalism. I pretty much hate all seafood, but if I’m forced to eat some I’d rather eat salmon than lobster. Human beings and human institutions are not *uniformly* bad; there are high spots and low spots.
I believe that the American constitution, and the American culture and character that have flourished under it, have produced better behavior and better people than the average for human beings over the last few million years. Our lives have been less nasty and brutish, not to mention longer, than the lives of practically any other people in any other empire throughout time.
Now, we can haggle over details; I have a soft spot for Victorian England, and Gibbon was fond of Hadrianic Rome. Plus you have to figure out how to handicap for the plight of the worst-off under a system, how to average over varieties of nastiness, and so on.
Still–to say that America is *less* nasty and brutish than most countries have been should be no more controversial than saying that Stalin’s Russia, or Amin’s Uganda, was *more* nasty and brutish than most have been. (And in fact, my only worry is that those examples were *not* much nastier than the average of the last few million years–I don’t think prehistoric life was all that nice.)
So I don’t see why we should not combine a belief in original sin with a belief in American Exceptionalism. Is AE a belief that the US is without sin? Surely not–just a belief that it is the last best hope of earth. (And ain’t *nobody* going to tell me Lincoln had a shallow optimism about the perfectibility of humankind).
Odd that you’re arguing with me over what’s intuitively obvious to the casual observer, then.
Ah: he’s wrong, but it’s not his fault because he believed what the papers told him. Happens to everyone, I guess.
Groovy theory, right up there with the one where the US government engineered the WTC attacks to give us pretext to go off to war. Because, you know, they had motive. Halliburton!
Ah: he’s wrong, but it’s not his fault because he believed what the papers told him.
Well, he should know better than to trust this particular news source on this particular subject. But yes, we all make mistakes, so I’m not inclined to be harsh.
Groovy theory, right up there with the one where the US government engineered the WTC attacks to give us pretext to go off to war.
The idea that the Daily Telegraph might be receptive to Whitehall spin is really, really weird conspiratorial stuff on your planet?
If I understand your position correctly, you think that (a) I am being too indulgent in failing to censure Cole more severely for foolishly believing a newspaper; and (b) I am a sucker for conspiracy theories because I don’t trust the same newspaper to filter out political spin.
If that is your position it seems a tad illogical to me.
Tad: So I don’t see why we should not combine a belief in original sin with a belief in American Exceptionalism. Is AE a belief that the US is without sin? Surely not–just a belief that it is the last best hope of earth.
Really? Because my understanding of American Exceptionalism has always been that it’s a justification for why it’s okay for the US to fund terrorists, assassinate democratically-elected presidents, commit torture, deliberately maim and kill civilians, especially civilian children – because, if it’s the US doing these things, they must be justified.
This is the doctrine of the Elect: as fictionally described in The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, published 1824.
The version of Christianity behind this novel is the belief that certain people are predestined by God to be saved, so it doesn’t really matter what they do in life: a form of Antinomianism.
I suppose it’s possible to reconcile antinomianism with original sin – presumably all but the Elect (which in the case of American Exceptionalism would mean the US alone) are guilty of original sin, but whatever the US does – torture, murder, aggressive war, treaty-breaking, child-killing – by virtue of AE, is right.
Jes–
Ah. Okay, sounds like maybe I have misunderstood what AE says, or that there are stronger and weaker forms of it in circulation. At any rate, I have never heard it phrased in such strong and absolute terms–i.e. that Americans just by virtue of their citizenship get a pass on all moral laws, up to and including the 10 commandments?
Yes, that would sit very awkwardly with the doctrine of original sin. But I had thought AE was a rather more modest doctrine (the Lincolnian one I mention), under which the US and its citizens are still subject to the ordinary laws and norms.
In that weaker form, I think it has a fair number of adherents, and I am probably one of them. In the very strong form you mention, how many people actually buy it?
Very few groups claim to be antinomianist. It is almost exclusively a term of derision used by one sect of Christianity to accuse another of being too licentiousness. And none of the sects that do embrace the term (some Calvinists and the like) use it as an excuse to do evil. As such, basing your critique as if antinomianism was the accepted Christian interpretation in the United States–or that it is a dominant strain of thought, is leading you very far astray.
Very few groups claim to be antinomianist.
The question isn’t whether the groups lay claim to the descriptor “antinomianist” but rather whether they embrace the doctrine while paying lip-service to greater notions of charity. I’d say one could make a fairly decent case that there is indeed a strain of (unacknowledged) antinomianism that’s infected much of American Christianity, though how widespread and virulent it is would be well beyond my ability to answer.
Tad: In the very strong form you mention, how many people actually buy it?
I don’t know: but we sure hear from a large number of them in the right-wing blogosphere. (Though it’s entirely possible that in real life they aren’t quite as confident that if the US tortures people, those people deserve to be tortured, that’s certainly the view they express online.)
Sans evidence, yes. Doesn’t logic demand some of that?
Ted, few Americans actually come right out and say that it’s fine to support terrorism, death squads, etc… There’s Pat Robertson, of course, but what usually happens in the US (and presumably other Western countries) is that most Americans don’t really face up to the fact that our government supports terrorists and mass murderers when it is in our alleged interest to do so. This is a bad thing when other countries do it, so it is presumably a bad thing when we do it.
I do prefer our hypocrisy to the forthright support for terrorist actions that you do find in some other cultures, but only because it means there’s at least the theoretical possibility that people could be brought around to repentance if they’d ever admit what sometimes goes on in their name.
Real life antinomianism is rare. Hypocrisy, OTOH, is pretty common.
Sebastian, I wasn’t in the least trying to argue that antinomianism is the accepted Christian interpretation in the United States (though, as Anarch says, there’s plainly an unacknowledged strain of it infesting the Christian right).
I was referencing the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, which is not a Christian faith, but is a (not the) dominant strain of thought in the US: the belief that it was okay for the US to fund the terrorists in Nicaragua, because it was the US doing it: the belief that it was okay for the US to assassinate President Allende; the belief that it was okay for the US to sponsor torture squads in Uruguay: the belief that it was okay for the US to use cluster bombs in Afghanistan, targetting civilians and especially children; the belief that it is okay for the US to kidnap people from anywhere in the world and imprison them indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay; the belief that it is okay for US soldiers to torture prisoners: all of these beliefs have been defended by American Exceptionalism – it would be wrong if it was some other country doing these things, but because it’s the US doing it, it must be okay.
There’s an obvious analogy to antinomianism there…
“The question isn’t whether the groups lay claim to the descriptor “antinomianist” but rather whether they embrace the doctrine while paying lip-service to greater notions of charity”
I don’t think you really understand the term (and I’m not sure that Jesurgislac does either). It is generally considered a bad understanding of Calvinism, and it suggests that if you are one of the elect, nothing you can do will keep you from getting to heaven because you are predestined to be accepted into the pearly gates. This intersects with predestination–you are one of the elect if at the end of your life you are a chosen one of God, which is to say Christian. From an eternal perspective all time points are simultaneously viewable. So from an eternal perspective, no matter how evil you are now, you ‘are’ (from an all times exist simultaneously perspective remember) one of the elect. I find the theological games around this notion kind of silly. It isn’t a good excuse to commit evil unless you know you are one of the elect–which you can’t possibly know ahead of time because God is the only with the eternal perspective. And by the way it doesn’t excuse or explain away the evil you do, it just means that God’s grace is enough to forgive you before you die. If Hitler were repentant at the last second before he died, he would be ‘elect’ from the eternal perspective, but that would in no way retroactively justify his actions from a temporal perspective.
In short, very few Christians are antinomian, and even if they were it doesn’t do what Jesurgislac is using it to explain. Now if you want to argue that some Americans have a “we can do no wrong” conception of foreign policy, we can argue about that. But locating it with an allegedly influential antinomian understanding is wrong both because it doesn’t exist, and even if it did it wouldn’t do what Jesurgislac is suggesting.
“Sans evidence, yes. Doesn’t logic demand some of that?”
Slart, long-term patterns of behavior of a specific body are grounds for a hypothesis, at the very least.
Even longer-term patterns of behavior of many similar bodies (of the press, in this case) interacting in a certain way with another body (government) are also fair grounds.
Now, mind, it’s easily possible to take such suspicions and hypotheses quite rapidly over the line into rampant paranoia, hysteria, and delusion. That’s where we have to backstop not rising above a hypothesis into something more without direct evidence.
But that this is so doesn’t eliminate the point of my first two paragraphs in this comment, I think. Vous?
Jes–
I am pretty out of touch both with right-wing blogs and w/ main stream Christianity. (I have had some dealings with the Episcopal church over the last ten years because my kids attended one, but it was an *extremely* liberal church, almost comically so).
In light of that, I’m sure there are people who say what you say they say.
But I had thought that the much more common position on US assassinations, funding of terrorists, torture, etc. was different from the position you are outlining.
On your account, these people think that the badness of e.g. assassination simply drops to zero when we do it. It’s bad when another country does it, but when we do it is simply not bad. (Maybe even good).
I would have said that what I heard from, e.g., apologists for the Reagan administration’s funding of terrorists in C. Am. was a slightly different line:
Funding terrorists is bad when another country does it. It is bad when the US does it, too. However, if it is necessary to preserve the US, then we ought to do this bad thing all the same. The goodness of the US, and the importance of its survival, makes the moral calculus come out in the black, even though the funding of terrorists is a bad thing in itself, no matter who does it.
This is what I took away from, e.g. Kirkpatrick’s rants about “moral equivalence”. Funding terrorists in order to preserve a liberal democracy is bad, sure, but funding terrorists to preserve a repressive communist dictatorship is bad and unjustified, too. The value of preserving a bad country is not as great as the value of preserving a good country, and so some bad actions are justified for good countries that are not justified for bad countries.
Now, I’ll grant you that some of the nonsense over “freedom fighters” vs. “terrorists” made it look as though when the US does stuff, it simply isn’t bad. But I think most grown-ups understood the underlying rationale differently; doing a bad thing for a just cause is different from doing a bad thing for an unjust cause.
I’m not defending any part of this view: not the claim that it was necessary for the preservation of the US, not the claim that our national goodness justifies the commission of bad acts, not the claim that Kirkpatrick a member of the species homo sapiens.
I’m just suggesting that *most* people understood US exceptionalism as the denial of “moral equivalence”, and understood that as a claim about the *justifiability* of certain bad acts, rather than as the claim that the acts become non-bad altogether.
I see we cross-posted:
I don’t see the analogy to antinomianism at all.
The examples you give are almost certainly better explained as utilitarian thinking (possibly run amok). Utilitarian thought can be quite permissive of sacrificing other people to your allegedly more important goals. Funding the Contras and is ok because it is more important to fight Communism for example. I am unaware of targetting children with cluster bombs (but frankly I don’t care do bother with addressing your specific mischaracterizations).
Even if antinomianism justfied things in retrospect, the analogy would be strained. Since it doesn’t, I don’t see it.
the belief that it was okay for the US to use cluster bombs in Afghanistan, targetting civilians and especially children
Jes, in the above statement were you saying that the US took special pains to target children with cluster bombs, or are you just emphasizing that children were among the civilians killed by cluster bombs in Afghanistan? Because if it’s the former, I’d like to see a cite.
I can’t speak for all American exceptionalists, but I personally do not believe that American foreign policy is without “sin.” Indeed, some of our policies have been tremendously unjust.
But I do believe that American hegemony has been, on balance, less harmful and more beneficial to the world than that of any other hegemon in the past. Sure it would be nice if all nations lived in peace with one another, but they don’t. Given the alternatives of competing hegemons (like circa 1913 or 1937), or of another dominant hegemon (like the USSR), I think the world is better off with a dominant America.
I do not believe that Americans are inherently better than other people. I do believe, however, that American civilization has accomplished more positive things than any other single nation in history. That’s my American exceptionalism.
Oh, I should add that a big part of American exceptionalism for me is the fact that we are free (indeed, obligated) to criticize our government when it does wrong.
I forget who came up with the quote, “My country, right or wrong,” but I seem to remember the second half of that quote is something like “When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be set right.” So keep criticizing Bush, ’cause Lord knows he deserves it.
ThirdGorchBro: I’m saying (with regard to cluster bombs) that the US military has known and acknowledged that when they drop cluster bombs on urban areas, they kill civilians, and especially they kill children. This is because cluster bombs are designed so that some of the bomblets won’t explode when they’re dropped: they’re intended to explode later on, when picked up, thrown, kicked, whatever. And the bomblets are small, light, plastic, and easy enough for a child to pick up or for children to play with – until they explode. Whereupon you have a dead child, or possibly just a badly maimed child. I repeat: this is a known and acknowledged result of using cluster bombs, especially in urban areas – they kill children.
The US dropped a lot of cluster bombs in urban areas in Afghanistan. Iraq, too.
Tad, I don’t think you’re using the term AE as it is commonly employed. It’s not about pride in the ideals of our culture, our values, or the high points of our history. It is the conclusion that because of those things a different set of rules applies to us than applies to other peoples. We accuse Iran of meddling in Iraq, huffing and puffing about how wrong it is for one country to interfere in the internal affairs of another. It’s easy to see that our recently coined preemption doctrine could justify an attack by any Arab nation on Israel, given very little in the way of extra rhetoric from the Israeli government. Fact is, we don’t think anyone but us has the right to engage in preemptive war, or to enforce, militarily, UNSC resolutions without a specific authorization to do so. I can give you a million examples, but I’m sure you’ve already gotten it.
And we have these rights because we’re so Good that we’re exempt from the usual rules, because they are designed for Bad people.
TGB, I agree with you about the mostly benign impact of American hegemony — compared to prior hegemons — and I’m sure this is where I seriously part company with Jes in this discussion. I’ll take a back seat to no one here wrt the pride part. The issue is, are we exempt from the rules that bind other people. I reject categorically the notion that might makes right, and all its permutations.
Our hegemony would be even better for humanity if we stuck to our values more, and went for the expedient a whole lot less. Just think where our moral authority would be if we actually lived the civic and international values we preach.
CharleyCarp–
Alright, sounds like I have not properly understood the term. I don’t own it, so I’d better use it the way the users use it.
And if they use it to mean “we’re the US, so whatever we do is ipso facto good and righteous”, then it is not the view I thought it was.
And I agree that it is not a view compatible with original sin, or with common decency, or with basic sanity and self-knowledge.
In fact, it strikes me as a deeply immoral, not to say nutty, and border-line racist, stance to take.
For all these reasons, though, I find it hard to believe that many people consciously embrace it in this strong of a form. I’m with Mr. Holsclaw here–I suspect something like a moral calculus (his “utilitarianism”) is by far the more common underlying thought about why we are justified in torture or funding terrorists or whatever.
(It’s nutty and immoral–surely people couldn’t *believe* it? That line of argument shows how naively optimistic about my fellow Americans I still am).
Either this is one of those Grover Norquist things, or you’re simply manufacturing. In either case, I have no idea what you’re talking about. A cite would help.
You’re going to have to cough up a reference on that, Jesurgislac. To my knowledge, all cluster submunitions currently used by the US military are designed to explode on impact, if not before. The problem with unexploded submunitions lies with a defect in the fuzing mechanism, which could easily be remedied.
Of course, I could be wrong, and so could the program office manager that told me that.
Sans evidence, yes. Doesn’t logic demand some of that?
The Torygraph’s reputation for peddling the Whitehall line was not acquired sans evidence.
“I do believe, however, that American civilization has accomplished more positive things than any other single nation in history.”
I wouldn’t know what quantitative measure one might use, but I do think that Rome did a bit here and there, as did Athens, as did, lo, the Umayyads and Abbasids, the Babylonians, the Han Dynasty, and, oh, let’s skip ahead, to Great Britain, and I even have a kind word for the contribution of France. Which is not to argue; just saying that “we did the most” isn’t the end of either discussion or consideration of huge contributions to all of us today.
“I forget who came up with the quote, “My country, right or wrong,”
Sigh.
Also.
You’re thinking of the later statement, picking up from Decatur’s famous one, made by Senator Carl Schurz on the Senate floor, February, 1872.
Quantitative measures? What are you, one a’them “reality-based” libruls? 😉
Heh, maybe I should have said “recent” history. Of course we’ve built upon the foundations laid by earlier civilizations.
“This is because cluster bombs are designed so that some of the bomblets won’t explode when they’re dropped: they’re intended to explode later on, when picked up, thrown, kicked, whatever.”
This is entirely wrong. They may malfunction in that way, and typically some will, and if you wished to make the point that that must be kept into consideration in their use, you would be correct, and the Air Force entirely agrees with you.
But your statement above is utterly false. Try Human Rights Watch. I do hope you will retract your error, please.
“And if they use it to mean “we’re the US, so whatever we do is ipso facto good and righteous”, then it is not the view I thought it was.”
CharlyCarp is also wrong. The term is, in fact, used both ways, commonly.
“It is the conclusion that because of those things a different set of rules applies to us than applies to other peoples.”
Basically, that’s the way it’s used by critics of American Exceptionalism.
“And if they use it to mean “we’re the US, so whatever we do is ipso facto good and righteous”, then it is not the view I thought it was.”
Well, modifying and partially withdrawing what I just said, that’s not a common use at all. That’s how critics of American Exceptionalism say others are acting. Often they’re right, to be sure.
But the difference in applying a term to others and using it to describe one’s self is, as you know, most large. Relatively few declare that America can do such and such because of “American Exceptionalism.” It’s a term used by critics, primarily, though often accurately, IMO.
Must be an echo in here.
“Must be an echo in here.”
When I wrote mine, yours hadn’t appeared yet. I think.
But I really can’t say for sure. Funny, that. If only someone could invent a way to tell when we posted!
I yield to Mr. Farber, and apologize to Mr. Brennan.
I introduced the term into the thread, I think, and meant the usage I described.
As I stated yesterday, somewhere else (maybe) it looks as if bad HTML (which I’ve been unable to find the exact occurrence of) disabled our timestamps around August 10th. I’m going to submit a trouble ticket to typepad, I think, and see if they can find it.
It pretty much coincided with Hilzoy’s primate post, so I can safely say something right about then monkeyed around with the blog settings.
“The term is, in fact, used both ways, commonly.”
Not necessarily a good argument for using, understanding, or accepting a term in a particular way.
no apology needed, CharleyCarp.
I think Gary’s right about American exceptionalism.
Interesting to hear liberals praise the idea of original sin. I can’t stand it. Not the idea that all men are fallible, that man is capable of great evil to his fellow man, etc. etc. I can stand that, and there seems to be an awful lot of empirical proof for it. I mean the more specific idea that this capacity was caused by Adam and Eve’s defiance of God’s commands, is passed down to each of us through our DNA, is stronger than our capacity for good, and doomed us all–including infants–until Christ’s sacrifice.
And as conventionally understood, I think the idea of original sin can actually be anti-liberal. It states that human nature is fundamentally corrupt; it pathologizes free will–it says we cannot be trusted with “the knowledge of good in evil”, it would be better if we never obtained it, and its only proper use is finding the right authority and submitting ourselves to Him (or Her, or it).
But this isn’t possible. There is no escaping our capacity for error. We usually end up either submitting ourselves to another person who is equally fallible. They may claim to be speaking for God, but that claim can be as wrong too. The same thing goes for relying on our personal subjective belief that God has commanded us to do something–that is as capable of being incorrect, and grossly immoral, as anything else. Even if one believes that the various holy writings are divinely inspired, they were still written down by men, translated and re-translated by men, and are interpreted by men. Opportunities for error abound.
This is obviously NOT the only way for Christians to read the story (Dostoyevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor argues that this is the exact wrong approach, and his idea that “all are responsible for all and to all” is not far off from what I think provided that one defines “responsible” in a way that’s not synonymous with “guilty”)but it seems to be the dominant one.
I’m not much of a Christian and never was so I apologize if I’m making a mess of Christian theology.
Some of us who say we believe in original sin don’t believe in a literal Adam and Eve, so we probably don’t mean we believe in the doctrine as originally formulated. I just mean I think people are all sinners and in a political context, that we all have a tendency to think more highly of our motives than we should, that we are born rationalizers, and this is why we need checks and balances and when some politician starts talking about good vs. evil, one should internally translate that to read “lesser evil vs. greater evil” and don’t take for granted without further investigation which is which. I’d probably say more, but fortunately for all concerned I have to get the laundry.
Yeah, I more or less believe all that too. It’s amazing what different meanings people can put behind the exact same words and phrases, eh?
Further information on cluster bombs.
The designers of the cluster bomb may, for all I know, have a sincere hope that all of the bomblets will explode on impact. But they clearly haven’t designed any cluster bomb in current so that all the bomblets explode on impact: consistently, over more than ten years of use, the bomblets don’t, and civilians, especially children, are killed.
This isn’t directly related to the cluster bomb issue, but in at least one news report in the NYT there are unnamed Pentagon and “senior administration officials” who saw a good side to civilian casualties from our bombing of Fallujah in the months between the initial battle in the spring and the final assault in November 2004. The NYT report was by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, October 14, 2004 on page A14. (I clipped out the article, but don’t have a weblink).
Begin quote from news story (I don’t know how to do the italic thing)
“If there are civilians dying in connection with these attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision,” one Pentagon official said. “Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that, or do they want to get rid of the insurgents and have the benefits of not having them there?”
A senior administration official said that the new air strategy over Fallujah was also intended to drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists.
“We’re doing kinetic strikes in Fallujah and working on the Zarqawi elemets and setting up divisions among the various antiregime elements that are in Falluja,”, the official said. “Now we begin to see Falluja leaders come out and say ‘ok, No mas What do we do about this? How do we work with you, Prime Minister Allawi, to try to stop this kind of warfare’. That’s beginning to show some success.”
There may be “people in Falluja who don’t necessarily like us or the Iraqi government, ” the official said, but they “also are not particularly keen on blowing up women and children.”
End of quote
This is interesting on several levels–you’ve got American officials basically admitting that the killing of civilians has its bright side, which means you’re on that slippery slope that separates collateral damage from deliberate premeditated war crimes. Then you’ve got the Orwellian observation that maybe some Iraqis who don’t like us also don’t support insurgent attacks on women and children, and this division among the Iraqi opposition is being brought out by our bombing of their civilians. And then there’s the tacit admission by a “senior administration official “all the way back in the fall of 2004 that maybe not everyone who violently opposes the US in Iraq is a terrorist who attacks civilians.
Not that this makes me feel inclined to romanticize them–I’ll leave that sort of thing to people on the left and right who get all tingly over the thought of guerilla freedom fighters. But nonetheless it wasn’t the usual governmental line back then, not that I can recall.
They were all terrorists and Baathist deadenders, I thought, not the sort of people who’d have qualms about targeting civilians.
“Further information on cluster bombs.”
That’s quite impressive of you, Jes, to quote back at me as refutation of what I wrote, the precise same link I gave to you to prove that what you said was false.
Of course, according to your logic, the designers of cars design them to kill millions of people around the world, as do the designers of bathtubs, staircases, electrical wiring, knives, and boats, just to start. Good thinking.
“This is because cluster bombs are designed so that some of the bomblets won’t explode when they’re dropped: they’re intended to explode later on, when picked up, thrown, kicked, whatever.”
My understanding is that you’re a tech writer/copyeditor. What do you normally say to this use of “designed” to mean “accidental” and “intentional” to mean “unintentional”?
For $#% sake, have you ever simply said, “I was wrong about that”? Would it make your head explode? Try it, I promise you it won’t, even if it feels like it. But it’s easier each time, and there are all sorts of benefits, I swear.
Donald, the link is here, but that’s to the abstract; the Link Generator doesn’t have the original, unfortunately. However, you can find a number of full copies here. Here is one.
Another way to interpret that statement is “if they’re free to come out, and they don’t want to come out, but instead are supporting and harboring the terrorists, they’re not civilians any more.” But I certainly wouldn’t say that’s the only possible interpretation, and not being a mind-reader, I have no idea what the gentleman had in mind. Here’s a quote you missed, though, that’s again interpretable in various ways:
But also:
Presumably there’s no clevery hidden motive there, unless someone can point one out.
One observation that might be made is that whenever you’re dropping even a 500 lb. bomb in an urban area that hasn’t been evacuated, you’re incredibly likely to kill civilians. Anyone who says differently is lying. On the other hand, ever since use of airplanes bombing cities was started, while there has been a range of attitudes, from carpet-bombing cities with thermal bombs to cause firestorms, and kill as many people as possible along with destroying as much property as possible, to the sort of “we have lawyers examine every strike” attitude the American forces have generally taken in the post-Vietnam period, it has generally, though not universally, been considered a normal use of warfare around the world, unbanned by any Geneva Convention any more than is that tank, howitzer, rifle, or grenade. They all cause civilian deaths. While questioning individual cases is not just fine, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, and the same for questioning the general case of aerial bombing in today’s world, the question also arises if, in fact, any use of American weapons at all in Iraq would be acceptable to Jes, and the folks of her mind? I kinda have the idea the answer is “no.” So if it’s just back to “the war is unjust,” well, fine and good, but better to go directly back to that, perhaps, then pussyfoot around with questions that no answer would ever satisfy Jes. If a bomber threw a crewmember overboard on top of the bomb, a la Slim Pickens, to handguide it down, and prevent it from going off if a civilian is in range, Jes still wouldn’t agree that the utmost care was taken to avoid “intentionally” killing civilians, would it? I may, of course, be wrong, and I’m sure Jes will correct me if I am.
“(I don’t know how to do the italic thing)”
Here’s how to do it all, actually. Simple as can be. For italic, scroll down to “Presentation Formatting.”
“Jes still wouldn’t agree that the utmost care was taken to avoid ‘intentionally’ killing civilians, would it?”
That should have read “would she.” My apologies, Jes.
In case anyone’s interested, the DoD is funding work to develop an even more precise 250-lb class weapon.
Bastards.
Other news of weapons deliberately designed to not explode on impact here. Inhuman monsters, all of them.
Thanks for the HTML guide, Gary.
On the civilian casualty issue, in the majority of cases in the Afghan and Iraq wars, leaving aside the moral question there’s usually no incentive for the US to want to kill civilians. It’s counterproductive, the same as torture is counterproductive. I’m not being sarcastic. There are obviously some intelligent moral people in the military who do want to fight wars as cleanly as possible and sometimes their views prevail. I think it’s clear this isn’t a universal outlook. So speaking of the military overall,
they often take some care to lower civilian casualties. In the runup to the Iraq War I remember saying something to this effect on various comment sections at different blogs.
In the case of Falluja, however, the quotes I cited seem unambiguous. The officials cited think that civilian casualties inflicted by our bombing would provide an incentive for Fallujans to turn against the insurgents, particularly against the subset of insurgents who themselves deliberately blow up civilians. Morality aside, that’s logical, though of course one never knows if people will respond to bombing in the way one might “logically” expect them to. Sometimes bombing by outsiders brings people together and has them support a government or group they might otherwise despise.
Getting back to Falluja, I don’t think the US was trying to kill as many civilians as possible (as in the Tokyo firebomb raid). But with the attitude on display in the quotes I cited, they apparently didn’t have very great concerns about civilian casualties either, and as you point out, you can’t drop 500 pound bombs, carefully targeted or not, on cities and not expect to kill civilians, unless they’ve all fled (because of the bombing). In fact, if you’re trying to catch the insurgents by surprise with sudden air attacks, you’re automatically going to take civilians by surprise too, with no time to take cover. So judging from the article I cited, I’d guess the bombing of Falluja falls somewhere between unavoidable collateral damage, where the military makes serious efforts to minimize civilian casualties, and the mass strategic bombing of WWII and Korea (and to some extent of Vietnam). The Lancet paper that raised such a stink last year surveyed one neighborhood in Falluja where about 50 people out of a little more than 200 had been killed. There’s no way to tell how representative that neighborhood was, but it makes you wonder.
As for cluster bombs, the argument I’ve seen from human rights groups is that because of the problems mentioned (bomblets that don’t go off and the general indiscriminate nature of the weapons), they should never be used in urban areas. It’s like the police using shotguns or submachine guns in a hostage situation. I suspect the military uses them because they know that in the US in the current political climate, they can get away with it. If Abu Ghraib goes pretty much unpunished, then you’re not going to get anywhere trying to raise a stink about cluster bombs.
So anyway, there’s a middle ground between the position that says our government makes no effort to reduce civilian casualties and the position that says they always make an effort, or between the position that says everyone in the military supports torture and the position that says it’s just a few bad apples. I think the record clearly supports a middle position in both cases.
A couple of other points I forgot to comment on.
Gary, your alternative reading of the administration official’s statement is a distinction without a difference. In fact it seems like my reading to me. If our government thinks people who don’t come out of Falluja are proving that they are terrorist supporters and can be bombed, then they are rationalizing attacks on civilians. It’s an extraordinarily weak sort of argument anyway–maybe people wanted to stay in their homes as long as possible, given that the alternative was living in some refugee camp in the middle of the summer and not knowing if you’d be allowed back. I also recall reading that men of military age were actually turned back when they tried to leave Falluja, which if true seems like a major war crime in itself to my non-legal mind.
Suppose people did stay because they supported the insurgents, not that the US would have any way of knowing that. This also opens up the whole can of worms about what it means for civilians to support evil policies and whether their support means they can be targeted. I think it’s a good idea to stick to a very narrow definition of the class of people you are allowed to target. Open it up in a way that allows you to think that all remaining civilians in Falluja have lost the right not to be bombed and you throw away the moral argument against terrorism.
“If our government thinks people who don’t come out of Falluja are proving that they are terrorist supporters and can be bombed, then they are rationalizing attacks on civilians.”
Where’s the proper place to draw the line as to at what point support for actual insurgents/terrorists make you culpable as one of them?
I mean, none of the people we’d all agree are Bad Guys wear uniforms. So where’s the line? I have no clear answer, myself, and if I did, it would only be a suggestion, anyway. But “does the government have a properly moral line drawn as to where we distinguish between ‘civilian’ and ‘enemy’ in this war?” is, I suggest, perhaps the question you might wish to actually be looking closely at.
God knows the entire history of insurgencies is a history of this problem. Generally the answers have ranged from brutal to extremely brutal, to unbelievably horrifically brutal, to be sure.
Forgive me if I address the rest of what you said at a later time, please. I’m kinda yawning.
I have to go to bed myself.
Where to draw the line–you target people who are armed or who you know give orders. Nobody else. (Collateral damage can happen, but it shouldn’t be happening with the kind of winking and looking at silver linings that is going on in the NYT article we’re discussing.) If a war can’t be fought that way, it shouldn’t be fought. If we had an insurgency in the US we’d fight it that way, I hope. If we don’t fight it carefully in this fashion, then we should stop lecturing people about morality in warfare, because we only adhere to it when convenient. This is all independent of whether we have any right to be in Iraq in the first place, but since we don’t, it’s all the more outrageous that we think we have the right to partially destroy a major city.
This issue came up in Vietnam, as you probably know. And the way the US officials rationalized their policies was to say that people who persisted in living in certain areas in South Vietnam must be supporters of the VC or VC themselves and were therefore legitimate targets. Westmoreland was asked about civilian casualties as a result of free fire zones and ( quoted in Neil Sheehan’s book “A Bright Shining Lie”) he said “Yes, Neil, it is a problem, but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?” Now he wasn’t necessarily saying we were exterminating the population–he was saying that by bombing and shelling areas where the VC were strong, we forced out the population and dried up the sea that the fish swam in, to use Mao’s analogy. Which seems to be the same reasoning in the NYT article.
BTW, you attributed views to Jesurgislac and I didn’t say anything about them one way or the other, because though I doubt those are her views, I expect she’ll come along and tell you whether you got them right or not.
“Where to draw the line–you target people who are armed or who you know give orders. Nobody else.”
But what that means, in practice, is that you’re dealing with people who will suddenly pull out automatic weapons and fire at you from a crowd, then when your troops attempt to flank and take them, they throw down their weapons and disappear into the crowd. Whoops, now they’re civilians again, and whaddya gonna do?
I’m not saying the solution is mow down anyone in the vicinity, nor am I proposing any particular solution at the moment, because, again with the tiredness thing, but I’m just noting a complication with your quick and easy solution.
And what if in my example above, the guys didn’t have the guns at first, but they were smuggled into the crowd by other guys who handed them off? Are they just civilians? How about the people who handed the weapons to them? How about the people who just keep watch while someone buries and IED? How about someone who brings them tools?
I suspect I can come up with further complications in the morning.
BTW, you attributed views to Jesurgislac and I didn’t say anything about them one way or the other, because though I doubt those are her views, I expect she’ll come along and tell you whether you got them right or not.
Donald, I decided some months ago that it really wasn’t worth getting into dialogue with Gary any more – I’ll explain why in e-mail if you’re interested. Gary’s aware of this, and frequently says provocative things trying to get me to respond to him. I figure eventually he will get bored and give up, and the regulars are all aware of it, anyway.
Some of the regulars are of the opinion that this doesn’t constitute a shortcoming on Gary’s part, just to be put in my two cents.
Slarti: just to be put in my two cents.
Worth all of 1p in British money, but thanks anyway.
I also recall reading that men of military age were actually turned back when they tried to leave Falluja, which if true seems like a major war crime in itself to my non-legal mind.
The first post I could find with google:
I remember reading at the time that even younger boys were turned back, and that families didn’t always leave because their oldest sons weren’t allowed to leave.
Well, Gary, I’d be fine with shooting people who are busily making bombs (leaving aside the question for the sake of argument about whether we should be in Iraq at all), while avoiding the killing of people who support them in less immediate ways, but doubt that such fine discrimination is possible with 500 lbs of explosives dropped from a plane. Again, take things any further and you’re in Ward Churchill territory (who, btw, clarified that he “only” meant people who supported US imperialism in his famous Eichmann remarks, not cleaning ladies and the like.)
I’m kinda sleepy too, as you could guess from the time if there were still such things as time stamps.
Dutchmarbel confirms what I thought I remembered. I think that’d be a war crime, forcing people back into a city that you’re bombing. Not that it matters–if we’re not going to be serious about the torture scandal a little thing like that isn’t going to go anywhere.
I’ve sorta suspected various inter-personal tensions around here, and in fact occasionally harbor paranoid suspicions that there are people who studiously avoid speaking to me directly. I’m fine with that. It’s probably unavoidable when talking about really emotional topics that people will sometimes dislike their opponents. I’m real-life friends with people who harbor political and theological beliefs I dislike, but only rarely do we talk about them. We have other things in common. That’s one thing blogs like this are for, I suppose–talking about the stuff that would drive you crazy to talk about all the time with real life friends who have really stu…, um, misguided opinions.
“I suspect the military uses them because they know that in the US in the current political climate, they can get away with it.”
Or alternatively because they are effective at killing people and causing damage, which is what bombs are generally intended to do.
Or alternatively because they are effective at killing people and causing damage, which is what bombs are generally intended to do.
And these bombs are especially effective at killing civilians who thought it was safe to return to their homes after the fighting had stopped. And they’ve proven very specially at killing children. All of which the US military knows. Targetting civilians – especially children – is usually considered to be a bad thing, but… clearly this didn’t matter in Iraq or in Afghanistan. (It did matter in 1995 and in 1999 when the issue of using these bombs in Europe arose.)
Sebastian, that was a truly pathetic display of sarcasm. The point is whether the military should be using an inherently indiscriminate weapon like cluster bombs in urban settings if they are serious about minimizing civilian casualties. You obviously know this, but don’t want to deal with the issue because you know that cluster bombs in urban areas are inexcusable.
At some point I’ll carefully read that post Gary provided about HTML. Anyway I did a google search, putting in the words “cluster bomb Iraq” and the third story was this one from USA Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-12-10-cluster-bomb-cover_x.htm
I’m sure some folks will zero in on the word “unintended”, but the general point of the article is the one I made earlier–you don’t use cluster bombs in urban areas if you want to minimize civilian casualties, any more than police use shotguns or automatic weapons or 50 caliber sniper rifles that can shoot through buildings in situations where civilians are likely to be hit.
For my next display of rhetorical skill, I will assert that the sun rises in the east.
Really? Especially? More effective at killing them than killing enemy soldiers, or simply more effective at killing them than mortar fire, sniper fire, or the random firefight?
From Donald’s link, what’s killed the people in question are not cluster bombs nor submunitions of cluster bombs; rather, they appear to be submunitions of unguided mobile artillery (probably this). Bad, certainly, but when engaging in criticism of something, it’s best to know what you’re criticising, and to use at least marginally precise language when writing about it.
So, in the interest of accuracy: a cluster bomb is a weapon dropped from an aircraft that scatters submunitions. When speaking of submunitions delivered by artillery, “cluster bombs” is not an accurate descriptor.
disagrees, slartibartfast:
In a later report (december 2003):
The problem is ‘bombs’. You can put the cluster in front of it or not and the bomb part is still the problem. Bombs kill people, including civilians. Cluster bombs are selected because they are a particularly effective method of doing so. Though you apparently do see it, your argument essentially boils down to ‘you shouldn’t use effective people killing devices in cities’. No one has shown that cluster bombs are particularly more dangerous than any other unexploded bomb, shell, or other device. I don’t see a single thing in your argument that isn’t absolutely applicable to using a tank gun, artillery piece, or anything else. Cluster bombs are not particularly more indiscriminate than any of those. All are aimed but have a blast radius larger than zero.
And from the fact that the army uses effective means of killing people, you draw rather broad conclusions about the nature of the civilian command. Which may or may not be appropriate conclusions independent of the question of ‘cluster bombs’, but is a question independent of ‘cluster bombs’. Cluster bombs are not illegal weapons, and frankly I don’t think they should be. If you want to object to city warfare, do so. But you might have to convince the jihadis to come out. They rather like hiding behind civilians and religious artifacts, and probably won’t listen to you.
typo in the tags… first sentence should have been ‘HRW disagrees” and the tag should have ended there. Sorry.
“The United States used an unsound targeting methodology that relied on intercepts of satellite phones and inadequate corroborating intelligence. Thuraya satellite phones provide geo-coordinates that are accurate only to within a one-hundred-meter (328-foot) radius; therefore, the United States could not determine the origin of a call to a degree of accuracy greater than a 31,400-square-meter area. This flawed targeting strategy was compounded by a lack of effective assessment both prior to the attacks of the potential risks to civilians and after the attacks of their success and utility. All of the fifty acknowledged attacks targeting Iraqi leadership failed. While they did not kill a single targeted individual, the strikes killed and injured dozens of civilians. Iraqis who spoke to Human Rights Watch about the attacks it investigated repeatedly stated that they believed the intended targets were not even present at the time of the strikes.”
This is the classic double bind. We try to pinpoint things to within a 100-meter radius and we try to minimize outside damage by targeting only the basis of special intelligence instead of bombing out the entire Iraqi military structure. Is that considered a good thing? Of course not. That would only be a good thing if any other military in the world did it. Russia bombs to plus or minus a whole city, and that causes pretty much the same level of outrage.
The problem is that you want to protest the bombing of the city at all. Fine. Just do so.
Even with the edit, dutchmarbel, the point is that they don’t. As both Sebastian and myself have explained.
“….disagrees, slartibartfast….”
This is a matter of specific terminology. Indeed, a “munition” is not a “bomb.”
This isn’t a terribly major point, other than that, yes, it’s useful to use accurate terminology, so people don’t wind up talking about different things. But your “correction,” I’m afraid, dutchmarbel, of the precise language shows the opposite of what you intended. An MLRS munition is definitely not a “bomb.” A “bomb,” in modern terminology is, loosely speaking, dropped from an airplane; all explosives intended to be used in combat, more or less, on the other hand, are “munitions.”
This is, however, to repeat, not a major issue, merely one of communicating clearly.
With that in mind, Jesurgislac please note your link is chiefly a criticism of US use of all munitions–very little is specific to cluster bombs. UXO is pretty much unexploded anything. Using UXO statistics as if they were cluster bomb statistics is highly misleading.
“Donald, I decided some months ago that it really wasn’t worth getting into dialogue with Gary any more – I’ll explain why in e-mail if you’re interested.”
Indeed. Because the honorable thing to do is whisper slurs about someone behind their back, rather than in public where they might be refuted. Very brave. Very admirable.
Got something to say about me to someone? Have the honor to say it where I can hear it, why don’t you?
“Gary’s aware of this,”
All I’m aware of is that you don’t seem very interested in honest debate, or ever admitting error in the course of it. I remain open to learning that you merely have fits of that, or have learned better, or choosen to behave better in future, or any number of other optimistic possibilities.
Beyond that, all I know is that I had just gotten through a very nice invitation to you to dinner, after some unpleasantness, and you then, for reasons utterly inexplicable to me — because, you know, you’ve never bothered to explain them — declared that I was “dishonest” in what I wrote, and implicitly a liar. And have been unpleasant in my direction ever since.
And that’s it. Whatever policy you have in your head that you think is obvious, isn’t.
Nor, as it happens, do I keep running lists of whom I’ve offended and what light they hold me in this week and what their Policies towards me are. For the record.
That’s what I’m “aware” of; alas that you don’t hold a very prominent place in my universe of people whose attitude I might keep track of.
“…and frequently says provocative things trying to get me to respond to him.”
You mean, I talk to you like anyone else here, save that I don’t go out of my way to do it, and don’t bother engaging in a lot of conversation I might, because I’ve grown to find it generally futile, for reasons I’m unaware of.
Witness:
So, I say here:
Jes responds here with:
So what the frick was that supposed to communicate? Boggle.
Then, of course, you try to squirm out of admitting that this statement of yours is simply false: “This is because cluster bombs are designed so that some of the bomblets won’t explode when they’re dropped: they’re intended to explode later on, when picked up, thrown, kicked, whatever.”
“Intended” actually has a non-metaphoric meaning, and pretending the metaphor substitutes for the actual meaning is, well, I guess some people might suggest that that’s not an “honest” way to use language. I also rather doubt it fools anyone. (And this has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of using said bombs; they can be criticized honestly with no problem.)
To insist that it’s proper to use “designed to” to refer to “any resulting effect” is Orwellian newspeak. Doing it in defense of that which is Left And Good And Just doesn’t change that.
And it’s so pointless. You’re completely free to decry any and all aspects of cluster bomblets and munitions from any number of angles, having admitted that they are not “intended to explode later on, when picked up, thrown, kicked, whatever.”
Why act so strangely? I don’t know. Stubborness, pride, fear, alien possesion, I have no clue. All I know is that it’s bizarre.
Try doing the right thing. Stand up. If you’ve made a trivial error in an assertion, so what: be a grown-up about it, why don’t you, instead of channeling it into verbal aggression?
And if you want to slander me, or, to assume the best, simply explain your just complaint about me to someone, have the honor to do it where I can respond. You’re not otherwise obligated to engage in pleasantries with me, although I am, when not poked with a sharp stick, generally a very genial and silly and funny and pleasant person.
I think there’s plenty of evidence on this blog that when I make a mistake, I admit it, and that when I say something jerk-headed (as I do from time to time), I apologize. When I accept apologies made to me, I do my best to forget the issue, and carry on as if it hadn’t happened. If you ever want to start behaving reasonably towards me, I stand as ready as ever. Otherwise, you can enjoy whatever’s festering in your head and soul for as long as you like, and may you make of that what you can. Your choice, Jesurgislac.
Actually, Sebastian, there are some decently well-documented dud rates kept on cluster bomb submunitions. For the M77 used on the MLRS rocket, 4% is the given rate, which means that on average each rocket delivers a couple of dozen unexploded submunitions. Its replacement would lower that by a factor of four. What’s not discussed so much is what percentage of the dudded submunitions were armed. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of research that’s been done, but this isn’t my area.
This suggestion that we’re targeting civilians has been objectionable from a number of points of view, most of which have been presented by Gary, it should go without saying, much more ably than I could have done. What seems out of sorts to me, though, is that we’d be dropping these in an urban setting. I know we dropped quite a few cluster bombs in Iraq, but the only ones I’m aware of were carrying the SFW submunition, which is specifically an antiarmor weapon and obviously NOT the submunition described in the article Donald linked to. Furthermore, these were dispensed from a WCMD cluster bomb, which is GPS-guided and in any case doesn’t have much in the way of aerodynamics that would enable it to fly from, say, a column of armor in the desert to the edge of a large urban area.
And of course the answer is: we weren’t dropping cluster bombs in urban areas. Why we were dispensing cluster munitions in urban areas using unguided mobile artillery is something I know just a little bit more than nothing about, so I’m not going to comment on this other than note that this probably is a bad idea in general, and goes exactly against our commitment to refining the accuracy of our weapons so as to avoid collateral damage, and that in the event this isn’t already against rules of engagement in an urban setting, perhaps a rule change is in order.
And you can take that with a grain of salt this big: my current job is basically making positive target identification and accurate weapon delivery a higher probability, so I’m possibly more likely to cheerlead efforts in that direction than I would be if my job was to design submunitions that don’t explode until a baby picks one up.
Gary, I was tempted to cry foul on that very point, only I had this niggling fear that she actually had a point, and that you knew that she was referring to, and it was this great, dark secret involving multiple personality disorder, murder, stolen identity, betrayal of a close relative, and possibly incest and so I was afraid to ask. This fear multiplied with each hour that you didn’t respond. So now I wait with semi-breathless anticipation for Jesurgislac to either fill in the blanks, offer a humble apology, continue to stonewall, or pretend it never happened.
“This fear multiplied with each hour that you didn’t respond.”
Strangely enough, I have higher priorities in life than in responding to Jesurgislac. I imagine you can contain your surprise without even distributing it into clusters of subsurprise, some of which are duds.
Gary: Got something to say about me to someone? Have the honor to say it where I can hear it, why don’t you?
I did. Back when the incident happened, I explained why I wasn’t going to respond to you any more, and – as I recall – invited you to discuss it with me via e-mail, rather than on this blog. That invitation is still open, but you’ve never taken me up on it. I concluded you’d rather sulk publicly than discuss issues in private. Certainly that’s your choice, but I decline to have a fight with you about it on this blog.
Some observations here and here. Any comments from anyone appreciated. Note I picked up on the same “long-term” bit that you did, although I highlighted “to have Iraq retain some U.S. forces beyond the insurgency’s defeat — something critical to achieving the United States’ broader security objectives.”
I have the irritating thought that there was another major point about all this in the back of my head yesterday and earlier that’s hiding for now, but, oh, well, if so (and I think it is), it will come back to me.
This suggestion that we’re targeting civilians has been objectionable from a number of points of view
I have in fact never yet encountered an American who was willing to accept that the US military targets civilians.
Willing to accept that for the US military to use cluster bombs in urban areas means that the US military is killing civilians, and that the people who give the orders to use those bombs know that in doing so they are killing civilians, especially children. But unwilling actually to step from the passive voice “The US military uses cluster bombs in urban areas knowing that this use means civilians, especially children, will be killed” to the active voice “The US military is targetting civilians”.
Stepping to the active voice demands a response: keeping in the passive voice suggests that there is nothing that anyone should do about it.
Sebastian’s reluctance to accept that there is something peculiarly vile about the civilian-targetting capacity of cluster bombs, and preference for believing that I am actually trying to argue that all bombing is wrong, is noted.
Slartibartfast’s essential decency shines through in the most unexpected places.
How annoying. My previous comment should have gone into another window in another Firefox tab for a comment on another blog.
Very first time I’ve ever done that. Sorry.
So there’s no difference in degree, kind or moral culpability between a known secondary effect that follows from one’s actions and the actual thing one intends to achieve? Interesting. Wrong, but interesting.
“…and – as I recall – invited you to discuss it with me via e-mail, rather than on this blog. That invitation is still open, but you’ve never taken me up on it. I concluded you’d rather sulk publicly than discuss issues in private. Certainly that’s your choice, but I decline to have a fight with you about it on this blog.”
I don’t recall such an invitation, but I can believe I might have forgotten.
I don’t know why you’re projecting a “fight” if you have something reasonable to say. I also have no idea what it is either of us is supposed to be unable to say in public. Why not just say it?
I’m not opposed in principle to a private conversation, but I’d prefer having it out in the open because should it not go well, you’d leave me in the position of having to then ask you for permission to quote what you said, in which case we’d either: a) wind up reprinting the relevant parts in public anyway; or b) I’d have to publically refer to That Thing Jes Said I Can’t Repeat; I’d have to put up with having, hypothetically and conceivably, suffered some dire insult or astonishing comment that would be necessary to explain to others for anyone to understand the dynamics of some later interaction, but I’d be unable to and would have to keep silent; or c) I’d have to repeat it without your permission.
And I wouldn’t do c without extreme cause if I’d otherwise given my word. And if you don’t want a promise of secrecy, why not be public in the first place?
A is merely inefficient, but tolerable; the possible excessive effort involved seems pointless. If you can explain the point to me, I’ll happily reconsider. Why not just say what you have to say?
Or, at the least, send it off in e-mail first, and see what happens.
If, on the other hand, you’re not asking for secrecy at all, why not just say what you have to say?
However, I’ll note that I’m perfectly prepared to believe that I’m being possibly being blind to any number of possible aspects here, and so I’m quite prepared to learn that, and to revise or withdraw anything I’ve said here.
Meanwhile, you’ve ignored everything else I said, and not withdrawn your kind offer to Donald to whisper your grievances in private. This fills me with reassurance not. Why don’t you just mass e-mail everyone else here about your grievience? If you’re doing it for one person, why not more? Why not everyone? Do you really think that was an honorable offer you made to him in the first place? Should I be reassured by your good faith from it?
What, you’re saying automobiles weren’t actually designed with the intent that people would get liquored up and kill themselves and/or others in them?
“I have in fact never yet encountered an American who was willing to accept that the US military targets civilians.”
Depends upon your meaning of “target.” Is it like “intentional”? Or is it like “drops bombs knowing there is a certain probability of also hitting civilians”?
“The US military is using cluster bombs in urban areas knowing that this use means civilians, especially children, will be killed” is active voice, but seems to change the meaning not at all. And I have no problem believing that either sentence accurately describes some situations.
Your second construction: that word “targetting” doesn’t mean what you think it means. If there are such cases, and there may well be, obviously they are subject to debate, and if indicated condemning. Have you never in fact encountered an American willing to condemn American war atrocities, such as, say, My Lai? Somewhat astonishing, if so, and you must obviously have never had any contact with anyone on the American left or mainstream, but if so, it would explain much.
“Stepping to the active voice demands a response: keeping in the passive voice suggests that there is nothing that anyone should do about it.”
What absolute nonsense. If unnecessary civilian casualties are being committed, or deliberately inflicted, they can bloody well be condemned, and should be, in as strong a set of terms as one likes, without any reference to the active or passive voice. The latter couldn’t be more irrelevant.
“Sebastian’s reluctance to accept that there is something peculiarly vile about the civilian-targetting capacity of cluster bombs….”
I’m pretty sure being killed by shrapnel from a 250, 500, 1000, or 2000 lb bomb is pretty darn vile, too, and I’m reasonably sure that’s all Sebastian’s point was. Are you defending dropping 1000 lb bombs on urban areas, then? Do you advocate that as more humanitarian?
Phil: So there’s no difference in degree, kind or moral culpability between a known secondary effect that follows from one’s actions and the actual thing one intends to achieve? Interesting. Wrong, but interesting.
How nice for the children killed by US cluster bombs to know that when the US military decided to kill them it was a different decision in “degree, kind, and moral culpability” because the decision to kill them was regarded by the US military (and by many Americans)as a “secondary effect”.
You appear to feel that a decision to kill civilians is less culpable if the decision to kill civilians is monomaniacally regarded as a “secondary effect”. I don’t see how this works. If you are genuinely unaware that your action is killing civilians, then this is plainly less culpable. If you know that your action is killing civilians, how is it less culpable to assert that your decision to kill civilians is only a “secondary effect”?
And finally, Gary, again, if you want to talk it over in e-mail, I’m willing. E-mail me. I see no reason to discuss it in public, nor any reason why either of us should quote what the other one says. If you prefer not to talk it over in e-mail but to sulk publicly, I will certainly not respond further.
That is because even the super active ‘knowingly killing people in cities’ is not the same as ‘targets civilians’. The fact that you think it means the same thing makes me think that you don’t understand the concept of ‘target’.
If you said that Vioxx was created to cause heart attacks, you would be flatly wrong. It probably does slightly increase the chance of heart attacks, Merck may or may not have hidden some knowledge of that at some point, and it may or may not be worth trading a very slightly increased risk of heart attack for a chance to live without crippling pain, but all of those are other issues. It was neither designed to create heart attacks nor was prescribed to create heart attacks. Cluster bombs weren’t designed to kill civilians (they were designed to kill people–combatant status almost certainly irrelevant). The US military targets combatants. It targets combatants who intentionally hide behind civilians–often causing civilian deaths, and in some case there are civilians who intentionally hide the combatants. None of this changes the fact that the combatants are the ones being targeted under the normal usage of the word. No one is denying that civilians are getting killed.
A huge point of the Geneva Conventions was to make combatants and non-combatants as distinct as possible. This is being undermined by jihadi method of warfare against the West. This guarantees that fighting them will get more civilians killed than if they made the distinctions.
Now if you want to talk about targetting civilians we could talk about planting bombs on buses and train stations. That isn’t aiming at combatants and tolerating civilian deaths on the side. But that is precisely the moral equivalance you want to assert, isn’t it?
Oh, for the children. How nice for the thousands of children killed and maimed by moving vehicles every year that we find little ‘moral culpability’ assigned to the fact that people want to get from one place to the next and as a secondary effect it increases the number of people killed each year.
Clearer and clearer that you don’t understand the word ‘target’.
The extra dead children are an unintended benefit, aren’t they? The locals will know that if you harbor bad guys, your kids may get taken out too. Seems like a moral hazard to me.
There probably should in fact be some moral culpability for discouraging mass transit and accepting drunk driving and hiding the real costs of energy consumption.
I hate to repeat this again, but Jesurgislac still wrongly maintains that her link says anything at all supporting the claim of cluster bombs killing lots of civilians in Iraq. Maybe gremlins came and stole the part of this thread that discussed that point.
But your “correction,” I’m afraid, dutchmarbel, of the precise language shows the opposite of what you intended. An MLRS munition is definitely not a “bomb.” A “bomb,” in modern terminology is, loosely speaking, dropped from an airplane; all explosives intended to be used in combat, more or less, on the other hand, are “munitions.”
As Sebastian shows, just a few posts above me (I miss the time stamp too), bombs is used for things that go BOOM, loosely speaking. And using clusterbombs for the ones dropped from the air and not counting the ‘cluster munitions’ that have the same effect is misleading – as the HRW report I linked too stated quite clearly.
I have to flee, the car is packed with kids and luggage, so I cannot reply further till friday. Read the HRW reports…
So there’s no difference in degree, kind or moral culpability between a known secondary effect that follows from one’s actions and the actual thing one intends to achieve? Interesting. Wrong, but interesting.
I actually have a pacifist friend who, in all seriousness, makes that argument, especially in regards to civilian casualties during a time of war. FWIW, it’s essentially impossible to argue against — which doesn’t make it right, just infuriating.
I noticed that the article I cited was about cluster munitions but not cluster bombs, but didn’t anticipate that anyone would think the distinction was important. I have to say I find the emphasis people are placing on artillery-delivered munitions vs. those dropped by planes kinda funny. I’m as interested as the next layperson in the technical details of weaponry, but whether a cluster of explosive devices is delivered via artillery or a plane seems a little beside the point.
Yeah, Sebastian, in general, I think it’s a bad idea to be using any sort of artillery or bomb in a city that contains civilians one is trying to, ah, liberate, unless of course their lives are not of any great concern. My position would change if someone invents a device that only blows up the insurgents, but cluster munitions aren’t even remotely in that category.
Using a device that scatters little bomblets around in urban areas, some of which may not explode until later, sounds like the definition of indifference to human life. You keep talking about effectiveness at killing. Yes, cluster munitions are very effective at killing and if that’s the only criteria then why not add napalm or white phosphorus or that 22,000 lb thing they dropped on Taliban positions in Afghanistan? You know the answer–effectiveness at killing isn’t the only criteria for a weapon that you’re using in a city filled with people you’re supposed to be liberating. I’ll go back to what I remember reading John Paul Vann saying in the Neil Sheehan book on Vietnam (or maybe it was somewhere else)–the ideal weapon to be used in counterinsurgency warfare is a gun or even a knife. The use of artillery and bombs in cities is clearly going to kill civilians and claims that it’s all collateral damage, tragic and “unavoidable”, are just hollow rationalizations. We didn’t have to go into Iraq (or Vietnam) and if we’re there to liberate them (gag), then the moral obligation is on us to fight it as cleanly as possible. If we don’t want to fight it cleanly, then don’t do it. It was a choice, after all.
John Paul Vann used to go into apoplectic rages when he couldn’t get his superiors in Vietnam to understand this point, something a fairly bright 8 year old could comprehend. And the VC lived among civilians too. They were civilians themselves part of the time.
By the way, when I said the sun rises in the east I didn’t intend to imply anything positive about the geocentric theory. Given the debate over plane vs. artillery, I thought I ought to clarify that point.
How nice for the children killed by US cluster bombs to know that when the US military decided to kill them it was a different decision in “degree, kind, and moral culpability” because the decision to kill them was regarded by the US military (and by many Americans)as a “secondary effect”.
That’s some terrific rhetoric, Jes. It doesn’t answer the question I actually asked, but if I were president of the local Toastmaster’s, I’d certainly applaud the effort here.
Which would be a brilliant point, if you don’t want to be taken for, well, less than smart by referring to missiles, tank shells, grenades and mines as “bombs”. Seriously, there is in fact a correct set of nomenclature for all this, and if you choose not to adhere to it, those who do will tend to see your arguments as bunk.
I’m with Donald Johnson on this: is there a substantive distinction between cluster bombs and general cluster munitions with regards to this discussion? It seems people are getting massively, and pointlessly, het up about the one word (bomb v. munition) when it’s the other word (cluster) that seems relevant.
If you’re objecting to cluster bombs and you voice that objection to…someone who’s in a position to do something about it, that person will simply respond by (correctly) pointing out that cluster bombs simply aren’t responsible for large numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq.
See what you get for being funny? You get to be ineffective. Still, the laughs might be worth it.
Look, I don’t want to defend Jesurgislac’s conduct of her side of this debate. I think the whole thread could have been much short and less contentious with some clearer terminology. (E.g. “will be killed” is by no stretch of the imagination the passive form of “is targetting”).
But isn’t her question still a perfectly reasonable one to ask, when phrased roughly as follows:
1) US forces have a variety of weapons at their disposal;
2) different weapons have different rates of collateral damage, either due to imprecise targeting, failure to explode on impact, inherent design, etc.
3) Of any combat situation our forces may face, we can ask: are they using weapons with the minimal necessary collateral damage rate?
The comparison of cluster munitions with land mines is illuminating at least in this respect: it is now fairly standard military policy not to use land-mines to set up a perimeter defense around an emplacement. IIRC, the only place we still use them at all is along the Korean DMZ.
That reflects some thought about the likely rate of collateral damage that goes with using that kind of weapon, versus the military necessity to use them, in light of the alternatives available.
So: have US forces in Iraq used weapons with a high rate of collateral damage (e.g. cluster munitions), in contexts where they could have attained the same ends with “safer” weapons (i.e. ones that have lower rates of collateral damage)?
Just like there’s a fair question after a police raid: did the cops *have* to use shotguns in that hostage situation, and would it not have been wiser to use sniper rifles instead? Maybe the answer will be yes, maybe no, but it’s a comprehensible question about tailoring ends to means.
It seems to me an entirely different question, one raised by Donald Johnson, whether some people in the Pentagon were trying to drive up civilian casualties in order to create political pressures against the insurgents. That question certainly involves the intentional infliction of civilian casualties, but is, (as I think Mr. Holsclaw noted), unrelated to the cluster munition question, or to the use of any particular kind of weapon.
“there is in fact a correct set of nomenclature for all this, and if you choose not to adhere to it, those who do will tend to see your arguments as bunk”
And those who aren’t invested in the whole argument will tend to see your tendency as an excuse to avoid the argument (esp. given you’re talking to a non-native speaker).
rilkefan: So that was the diplomatic way of making that point. All my earlier attempts (thankfully deleted) were a lot more… pointed.
Tad, if that’s the question she wanted to ask, she should have done so, instead of asking, “Why won’t you bloody Yanks admit you’re targeting children?” or somesuch.
I find nothing to disagree with in your post.
slartibartfast–
“See what you get for being funny? You get to be ineffective. Still, the laughs might be worth it.”
I think that was unhelpful and uncalled for.
You have made your point about terminology. In my post I followed the locution you prefer. But now you are just being nasty to Donald Johnson on a point that, I agree with Anarch, really is irrelevant to the central moral issues under discussion here.
“Read the HRW reports…’
I’m getting a little tired of this. I go to the trouble to find a cite that I think is both accurate and presents the best possible accurate case against the U.S., so as to best pre-empt any accusation that I wasn’t facing the issues.
What’s the result of my effort? I get presented with my own cite as new information. And I get presented with my own cite as new information again. And I get told to be sure to read that cite I’ve not read before.
If people can’t read, I can’t help them. There’s no point to writing things when they’re responded to in this fashion.
I’m simply attempting to establish what the argument is. I’ve already shown that cluster bombs are not, in point of fact, the source of the civilian casualties in question. More accurately, Jesurgislac’s own links show that.
Given that, you can discuss civilian casualties in any context you please, other than bombs. Given Jesurgislac’s insistence on continued use of cluster bombs as a source of indignation, what am I to conclude? That she’s being deliberately dishonest? That she’s failed to read 90% of the thread?
For another amusing thread diversion, we can discuss particle physics using such descriptive terms as “thingies”.
“Yeah, Sebastian, in general, I think it’s a bad idea to be using any sort of artillery or bomb in a city that contains civilians one is trying to, ah, liberate, unless of course their lives are not of any great concern.”
But that wasn’t the case in Fallujah. The idea — and this may be argued with, challenged, or condemned as a war crime, as has been already done here in comments, on a provisional basis — was that everyone innocent in Fallujah had been told to evacuate and given lots of time and chance to evacuate, and that therefore those left were consciously part of the “enemy.”
Now, one can additionally argue that perhaps some who stayed were under duress. And that’s a valid point, all though it does leave unanswered the question of how, assuming it’s true and it’s a moral duty to not attack if such people are at risk, how one would be able to attack at all. But the notion that there were a lot of innocent people hanging around in Fallujah, playing cards, or whathaveyou, doesn’t seem to have been suggested by anyone, although I could easily have missed it.
On the flip side, should Berlin in 1945 not have been bombed or shelled, given that theoretically some people were there to be liberated? (Let’s set aside that in reality it was largely the Soviets who did the bombing and shelling.)
Now, one might say, “but this is fighting an insurgency, and that’s partially about winning hearts and minds, which wasn’t the case, overall, in WWII.” And that’s a good point. But it goes directly to the problems of fighting insurgencies again: often there aren’t simple answers.
“Using a device that scatters little bomblets around in urban areas, some of which may not explode until later, sounds like the definition of indifference to human life.”
No, war is the definition of indifference to human life, on a large scale. Theoretically, for a higher purpose. But innocent deaths in war are a given. Which is not a shield against the moral duty to minimize them to the best practical degree, and reasonable people may differ where that line is, or whether someone did their best to adhere to it (whether it’s done by calculation aforehand, or in the heat of the moment, is always relevant in the moral calculus, of course).
“We didn’t have to go into Iraq (or Vietnam) and if we’re there to liberate them (gag), then the moral obligation is on us to fight it as cleanly as possible.”
I do fully agree.
okay–
this is a completely content-free comment.
You see, I keep looking at the list of recent comments and seeing (e.g.) “Gary Farber on Balance”, and thinking “yes, on balance Gary Farber is a fine fellow”. Or I see my own name and think “well, on balance, I’m not so sure.”
But that’s reading the phrase with a comma in the middle.
So, just for this one post, I am changing my name to “Tad Brennan,”, with a comma,so that I can see “Tad Brennan, on Balance”.
Sorry to derail the thread with typographical whimsies, but you can get back to debating the doctrine of double effect in just seconds.
I’m simply attempting to establish what the argument is.
Forgive me for saying so, but I doubt that.
So the next new thread here should be entitled “is unbalanced”?
I think you misunderstand me. I was referring to Mr. Johnson’s insinuation that the only value the munition/bomb distinction held for him was humor. So in the comment you referred to, the one doing the laughing would be Mr. Johnson, not me. I certainly didn’t intend for anyone to read that the way you evidently did.
You insult me, sir. Petards at five paces?
Incidentally, given the number of cross-postings of late — insert obligatory comment from Gary on the utility of time-stamps here — I’m going to recommend that most of us simply walk away from the thread and wait for other people to respond to us in person, rather than trying to play free-for-all catch-up with the comments surging forth.
Obviously, “munition/bomb” distinctions hold no moral value, and no one is sugesting otherwise.
Jargon, like most things, has its useful side and its counter-productive side. It’s useful to speak as precisely as possible so as to avoid confusion and ambiguity; it’s counter-productive if it’s used merely as a test people have to pass to be entitled to speak to an issue.
If confusing or ambiguous language is used, and more precise terms are pointed out, it’s to everyone’s benefit if the more precise terms are adopted and used by all.
There’s almost always an emotional component of this; people who have a good knowledge base on a subject find it painful when those with less of a grasp use inappropriate, erroneous, or ambiguous language (“bombs are things that go ‘boom'” seems useful to Dutchmarbel’s grasp of English and technical terminology, whereas from Slart’s position, it makes him feel like he’s talking to a third-grader; but if Slart makes too much of this from the opposing view, he’s just unnecessarily bullying over unimportant technical differences; one needs to see the other person’s view no matter which side one starts on.)
Perception matters, as well as do the objective facts.
“cross-postings”
Speaking of jargon.
“I’m going to recommend that most of us simply walk away from the thread and wait for other people to respond to us in person, rather than trying to play free-for-all catch-up with the comments surging forth.”
I recommend carpet-bombing the enemy. I suggest CBU-97‘s. I suspect some people here are armored.
But if anyone is dueling, choose your munitions here.
(And this will doubtless be seen as in bad taste by some; they’re right.)
Tad,
I’m glad it’s not just me adding that comma in scanning the Recent Posts lists.
Since my ability to contribute in any substantive way to this food fight is thus fulfilled, I will now resume my silence.
kinda meta for my taste, but just this once.
lied
“kinda meta for my taste, but just this once.”
That’s becuase I never meta rilkefan I didn’t like (with apologies to Will Rogers).
Ah, hell.
Responding to Gary (indeed, making that initial comment to Donald) was the wrong thing to do. I’ve managed for months not responding, whatever the provocation, and I apologise to all inconvenienced for my lapse. It will not happen again.
rilkefan–
Oh sure. “Just this once I’ll go meta–just once, and then I’ll quit!”
“If confusing or ambiguous language is used, and more precise terms are pointed out, it’s to everyone’s benefit if the more precise terms are adopted and used by all.”
One thing that annoys me on this thread is that what should be non-confusing and non-ambiguous language like “target” is being used inappropriately and for inflammatory effect. As with the case of our discussion of the death of Nicola Calipari rehtorical firebombs are thrown and then the verbal terrorist hides behind the accusation that those who disagree can’t you simple language.
And since it has been said that conservatives don’t like to use the active voice I will simplify–though it is less diplomatic to do so. Jesurgislac is throwing rhetorical firebombs. When challenged she either pleads that it is unfair to hold her to her actual words, or pretends to be misunderstood. I believe she knows full well what she says. I believe she has not been misunderstood on this thread.
But hey, if you really want to talk about it, I have what I thought was a rather illuminating Vioxx analogy that you could respond to.
heh, can’t ‘you’ instead of ‘use’? Sounds like a transcriptionist error, only I wasn’t speaking or recording a spoken conversation. Hmmm.
Jesurgislac, I can’t think of any course of action that would leave you with less honor than the one you’ve chosen. Your choice, certainly, but…ok, I’m speechless.
Slartibartfast, you are perfectly right that sarcasm isn’t usually helpful in these discussions and in my better moments I know that. But I think you’re being petty in a couple of different ways. First, most of us are talking about the morality of using indiscriminate weaponry in cities. If you work on weapons, I’d assume as a decent person you’d want to minimize their tendency to kill innocent people whether or not people here use the right term. And calling Jes dishonest because she uses terminology that you find sloppy beyond your capacity to endure is an imprecision of language in itself.
Second, with respect to my post, I said a lot of things, most of them about the substantive moral issue and you ignored them all, focusing only on my amusement over the terminological dispute. Well, it’s a ridiculous tangent. If you can’t discern what the important issue is and want to fixate on the terminology, I’m not going to feel responsible for your choice. You work on cluster bombs and they haven’t killed people in Iraq. It’s cluster munitions. Now that this is clear, we can get back to talking about the moral issue. I’ll try and avoid sarcasm in the future, but you might want to examine your own conduct in this thread.
On the secondary effects issue, Jes makes some valid points–Americans in the respectable political mainstream almost never admit to targeting civilians. They often favor policies that are certain to hurt civilians and sometimes the idea is that the hurt civilians will be beneficial in achieving some policy goal. But people rarely come right out and say “The US government is targeting civilians.” When it does happen, it’s usually someone who doesn’t seem to realize the implications of what he’s saying. As an example, there was a Washington Post report by Barton Gellman in the June 23, 1991 issue in which various Pentagon targeting planners said that they’d hit Iraqi infrastructure in order to hurt civilians–the sanctions would prevent repair and this would put pressure on Saddam and maybe even lead to his overthrow. But I’m sure if the press had jumped on this story and pressured the Bush I Administration about it they would have denied any such intent. Cheney is quoted in the article and knows better than to talk that way. And there’s also the story I quoted way upthread, where various unnamed US officials saw benefits to collateral damage. That doesn’t mean they targeted civilians, but it strongly implies they didn’t care much if they killed some and in fact saw a silver lining in it. Has a Ward Churchillish ring to it–Gary’s own “alternate” reading amounted to saying that people who remained in Falluja had it coming. (That was Gary’s possible interpretation of the quote, not Gary’s opinion AFAIK.) That, along with what else we know about Falluja, ought to make people feel more than a little uneasy about what happened there. Sending men back to the city, for instance, was barbaric.
With respect to cluster munitions in cities, it’s not quite equivalent to targeting civilians deliberately. It’s rating their lives as not very important in comparison to the goal we’re trying to achieve. And then blaming our choice of weapons on the insurgents. I mentioned this before–there are military men who feel very strongly about the way an insurgency should be fought, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. If you show that you are willing to use weapons in cities solely because of their lethality and show insufficient concern for civilian casualties, the people present are going to notice. Rationalizations that may go down well in blog comment sections won’t impress them. And I think they’d be correct.
“verbal terrorist”
I don’t know what Jes‘s deal is with Gary and certain terminology, but the above can’t help, can it?
I suggest closing the thread and moving on.
Whoops, that was me. Now you can close the thread.
Any weapons?
Yes, of course. And to be sure, I’d want to be aware of where, specifically, the problem lies so that I could more effectively fix it. Maybe that’s just me, though.
On the contrary, I’m doing so in precisely the same way that Jesurgislac calls Charles Bird dishonest for repeating things that, according to her, he repeatedly has been corrected on.
On the contrary, I mostly agreed with them. In fact, if you’d read any of my earlier posts (here, for example), you’d see that there wasn’t much for me to respond to.
Mostly so as to avoid lying, I’d hope. Or lying through omission, such as dropping the combatants after “civilian[s]”.
But I’m really unsure of what your purpose is with me, here. Either you get the bomb/submunition distinction, or you don’t. Say, and I’ll try to explain it a different way. Or you can continue to complain about the wrong thing, and have anyone in the know on the other end of the complaint wonder what the hell you’re talking about.
If I were attempting to get our armed forces to change military policy, I’d try and make sure what policy it is that I’m complaining about. But, again, that’s me.
Slarti: On the contrary, I’m doing so in precisely the same way that Jesurgislac calls Charles Bird dishonest for repeating things that, according to her, he repeatedly has been corrected on.
Given what you’ve said about that behavior in the past, that’s an awfully curious role-model to be choosing; and that’s even presuming the analogy holds, which it rather plainly doesn’t (see below re relevant distinctions).
Mostly so as to avoid lying, I’d hope.
Are you declaring with certain knowledge that the US has never targetted civilians? Are you declaring with certain knowledge that those making the claims would be lying, i.e. deliberately telling an untruth in order to deceive?
For that matter, while I agree that this is a somewhat imprecise use of the word “targetting”, I’d say that this:
would count as (indirectly) targetting civilians, as for example blowing up a dam in order to flood the factories below would count as (indirectly) targetting those factories. Depends on what, precisely, you mean by “target” and whether you use it in the tactical sense to refer to the specific locus of a particular strike or in the strategic sense to refer to a broader goal. Both are legitimate uses and, IMO, both carry the intent that renders them equivalently culpable.
Either you get the bomb/submunition distinction, or you don’t.
Since numerous people above, including your interlocutor, have noted the distinction: either you get that most of us aren’t seeing why this distinction is relevant to the issue at hand, or you don’t.* Frankly, I have no idea which, and I’m not entirely it makes a difference at this point. Given, however, that you seem hellbent on not answering the question of that relevance — which has been asked, what, three times upthread? — I’m guessing that there isn’t a meaningful distinction (again, vis a vis this discussion) and am thus left wondering why you didn’t simply repeat your tacit acknowledgement of this fact (from the post you just cited) and move on.
To put it another way, and perhaps more plainly: until you explain why you have this particular bee in your bonnet, pretty much everyone else is going to conclude (rightly or wrongly) that your present participation in this discussion is for some reason other than legitimate debate. Can I suggest that you take a moment to reconsider what your purpose here is, and how these posts are furthering that goal?
And then, petards at dawn. But not regular petards: cluster petards.
* For example, maybe cluster bombs are more dangerous than regular cluster munitions because they could plonk someone on the head, causing a lethal noogie even without an explosion. Maybe they’re less dangerous precisely because they tend to “plonk” instead of “boom”. Beats me.
“(That was Gary’s possible interpretation of the quote, not Gary’s opinion AFAIK.)”
Yes. I don’t have remotely enough fact to have an opinion. I don’t know remotely enough about who was in Fallujah, what their circumstances were, what their politics were, what their military involvement was or was not. I don’t know remotely enough about the actual strategy and tactics used by the Americans, nor remotely enough about their actual operations or use of munitions, nor enough about the chain of command.
And I’ve read a reasonable amount on the subject, to be sure. But I’d want to have a fairly sure command of the facts before forming an opinion. And, thankfully, I don’t bear the responsibility for such decisions.
Anarch–
yes. Many thanks for saying much of what I was going to say.
It’s bad to ignore *morally relevant* distinctions.
It is also bad to ignore the distinction between morally relevant distinctions and morally *irrelevant* distinctions.
Incidentally, I will try to observe the munitions/bomb distinction in future because precision is a good thing for many reasons, even if I am so ignorant as to not know what the deal is here – perhaps we drop lots of bombs but use relatively few munitions, at least of the cluster sort.
Sadly still haven’t read that text on basic military lingo and facts and history – that I know about as much about Athenian soldiers as American soldiers is not good.
No, hence mostly.
Gee…I’m torn. On the one hand, the word “lie” has been presented on many an occasion here to represent an untrue statement. On the other hand, perhaps replacing “looking stupid” with “lying” wasn’t all that bright an idea.
Certainly, if one neglects the word infrastructure.
If you don’t get the relevance, you don’t get the distinction, or at least this is how I see it.
You mean all those times I answered it in increasingly painful detail, I wasn’t really answering it? You mean, you really didn’t get the distinction after all, even though you said you did? Or is there some other interpretation of your statement that makes sense, that I’m missing?
Well…maybe I need to think on how better to explain this. In the meantime, please do continue campaigning against cluster bombs, even though cluster bombs are manifestly not even an issue with HRW. Even if I can’t look at you oddly when you’re doing that, I’ll still be thinking of you oddly.
It’s also bad to ignore distinction altogether, simply because you don’t see why it’s an important one.
Slartibartfast, I sincerely apologize for my sarcastic tone in several posts above. I can’t help suspecting that this must be the bigger reason for your anger, because I can’t quite wrap my mind around the notion that you’re mad about this misuse of weapons terminology. Well, that’s not quite true. I just deleted a cute little story about how angry I once got at a high school classmate for saying that William the Conqueror “easily” won the Battle of Hastings, but the point was that I sometimes get ticked off at people for messing up some point of fact where I know better (or think I do).
Anyway, if I’d known the stink it was going to cause, I’d have been careful to use the right term when I cited that article.
Oh, btw, the high school classmate story took place a long, long time ago. I just reread that and realized how it might have been interpreted.
In some haste:
Certainly, if one neglects the word infrastructure.
Yes, and if I’d written a completely different sentence it totally would have meant something different. Hooray. Would you mind addressing what I actually wrote?
You mean all those times I answered it in increasingly painful detail, I wasn’t really answering it?
You have not yet answered why the distinction between cluster bombs and general cluster munitions is relevant to the discussion of whether such devices should be used in civilian proximity (or however you want to abbreviate the present debate), no. [In fact, you yourself basically denied that distinction upthread which makes your present pedantry all the more bewildering.] The closest you’ve come — which barely scratches the surface of “increasingly painful detail” — referred to attempts to change the policy of the US military which no-one here is doing at the moment, unless there’s a petition that I’ve missed.
You mean, you really didn’t get the distinction after all, even though you said you did? Or is there some other interpretation of your statement that makes sense, that I’m missing?
Rather manifestly. May I suggest you read what people have actually been writing?
[As an aside, I’ve now read this thread in its entirety three times, as well as having read the latter half of the thread over eight times. The previous post I submitted went through about a dozen drafts, the present (due to lack of time) only three. Is it too much to ask for a comparable effort on your part?]
Well…maybe I need to think on how better to explain this.
Apparently so, given that we’ve now asked four times. What is the moral distinction between cluster bombs and more cluster munitions, and why is it relevant to this discussion?
In the meantime, please do continue campaigning against cluster bombs, even though cluster bombs are manifestly not even an issue with HRW.
If you pay veeeeery close attention you might note that my name is neither Jesurgislac nor Donald Johnson, and therefore the above remark is not particularly well-directed. Once again, can I suggest you take a break from this thread and consider what your purpose is here?
The infrastructure was targeted in order to cause civilian suffering–that suffering included increased death rates, If you destroy much of the electrical power system, apparently you automatically damage the water treatment plants and according to Human Rights Watch (in a report they published on the air war back in 1991), the US even deliberately hit at least one water treatment plant themselves. Obviously that would cause increased death rates.
The insurgents today do the same thing, for the same reason (destablization) with the same concern for innocent human life.
I would equate this to terrorism–if al Qaeda did the same to us we’d have no difficulty seeing this. It didn’t even occur to me that people wouldn’t see it as terrorism.
Okay, here’s what I’ve learned from the terminology debate so far:
A bomb is dropped from an airplane.
A munition is any explosive used in battle.
A submunition is an individually explosive piece of a munition.
Any of these explosive devices can be guided or not. We probably all agree that guided explosives should be prefered so as to minimize civilian casualties.
Any of these explosive devices can fail to blow up when they were supposed to. These UXBs can be dangerous, if armed: nobody can predict if/when they’ll explode.
Okay, now what? It does seem to me that munitions that contain lots of individually explosive components that are then scattered around where they’re less easy to track down effectively would seem to be more dangerous to later passers-by.
Maybe there’s more information that could be inserted into some of these definitions, maybe all munitions systems need guidance systems, maybe there are no good solutions in fighting an urban guerilla war. I do there is some room to mitigate harm to innocents, though.
“It’s bad to ignore *morally relevant* distinctions.”
Sure. Like the difference between ‘targetted’ and ‘not targetted’. Like the difference between ‘killed’ and ‘murdered’. Like Lancet articles that don’t bother with the difference between ‘combatant and non-combatant’. Like the difference between bombing an Iraqi propaganda outlet and Saddam’s forces shelling civilians to drive them in front of US forces. I really feel your pain on the arguing with people who don’t want to recognize moral distinctions you find important front.
That said, the most important distinction I see in this discussion is ‘bombing a city’ vs. ‘not bombing a city’. ‘Cluster bombs’ just are not different enough from generic ‘bombs’ to make a big moral difference. In both cases civilians are likely to end up dead or injured as a side effect of attempting to kill combatants.
You can argue that cities should never be bombed. I think it is a particularly stupid argument, but it is internally consistent. You can argue that cities shouldn’t be subjected to nuclear attacks and I might give you the long term radiation card in your favor. You might even argue that it is better to go with massive explosives over napalm because the death is unnecessarily painful with napalm. I could see the utility of such distinctions even if I came out differently in the conclusion of whether or not the tactics shoud be allowed.
The distinction between cluster bombs and regular bombs however is not particularly useful.
And the little game Jesurgislac plays–as if the cluster bombs were designed specifically to kill more civilians than other bombs, is not only a lie, it doesn’t even make sense except in an “I like to make nasty stuff up about America” kind of way. The military favors cluster bombs because they kill the people they are lobbed at more effectively than many other bombs. They don’t have a little chart of civilians/non-civilians where they look at it and say “Sweet! This one kills civilians at a 5-to-1 higher ratio and is less effective against insurgents. Let’s use it”. Jesurgislac’s lie is particularly nasty because it is the exact opposite of how the US fights right now. We could easily have wiped any number of Iraqi cities completely off the map and made them uninhabitable for quite some time in the future. Many, many of our civilian-protecting choices have made us less effective than we could have been in this war.
I realize everyone has their own little terminological pet peeves. I’m endlessly annoyed by folks who can’t distinguish apes from monkeys or spiders from insects, for example.
But if bombs are only dropped from planes, someone had better talk to Francis Scott Key and Ted Kaczynski. And we’ll all have to learn to call them VBIED’s, not car bombs. The upside will be the final retirement of “homicide bomber”.
“And the rockets’ red glare, the munitions bursting in air…”
I can imagine this:
“Sweet! This one kills civilians at a 5-to-1 higher ratio and is [more] effective against insurgents. Let’s use it”.
But it seems to me the claim is rather, “This one is more effective against insurgents, maybe it’ll kill more kids but who’ll know or be able to prove it or be able to get the proof widely known?”
Mr. Holsclaw–
I said:
“It’s bad to ignore *morally relevant* distinctions.”
You quoted me, and then you said:
“Sure. Like the difference between ‘targetted’ and ‘not targetted’. Like the difference between ‘killed’ and ‘murdered’. Like Lancet articles that don’t bother with the difference between ‘combatant and non-combatant’. Like the difference between bombing an Iraqi propaganda outlet and Saddam’s forces shelling civilians to drive them in front of US forces. I really feel your pain on the arguing with people who don’t want to recognize moral distinctions you find important front.”
I believe we are in agreement here; but at the same time the phrase “I really feel your pain”, which is generally used by way of mocking or sarcastic disdain, suggests that perhaps you think you are disagreeing with me.
In fact, the distinction between “targetting” and other kinds of non-culpable or less-culpable killing is exactly what I had in mind as a *morally relevant* distinction. (I said as much in my earlier comment about active and passive–which we had time-stamps!).
The distinction between cluster munitions delivered by plane and those delivered by rocket seems to me clearly *not* morally relevant, and it was exactly the one I had in mind in making my abbreviated comment. (I abbreviated because I had just registered my agreement with Anarch, who had also said that he saw no relevant difference in the method of delivery of the cluster munition).
SO, I believe we are in agreement, and I don’t think that any mocking or sarcastic disdain is called for on your part. If you intended none by your use of the phrase “I really feel your pain,” then nothing stands between us and a lifetime of harmony.
Unless perhaps you *do* want to argue that there is some difference, relevant to the issues under discussion in this thread, between cluster munitions delivered by airplane and those delivered by rocket or other means? I would be very interested to hear that thought expanded upon.
Sometimes I come to see that I have been mistaken about what is morally relevant. Perhaps this is one of those times. I am open to persuasion.
“‘Cluster bombs’ just are not different enough from generic ‘bombs’ to make a big moral difference. In both cases civilians are likely to end up dead or injured as a side effect of attempting to kill combatants.”
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean there’s necessarily no moral difference, and the question, best answered by a close look at the facts, and further debate (not necessarily here at this level of expertise), is valid.
It does seem true that cluster dispersal are going to leave more potentially explosive dud submunitions than large unitary munitions. So, numerically, one would seem to be upping the possibilities of potentially later injuring an innocent. On the other hand, the explosive when it detonates is far less powerful.
“But if bombs are only dropped from planes, someone had better talk to Francis Scott Key and Ted Kaczynski.”
That’s why I specifically said in modern terminology. Were those words unclear?
To forestall the obvious: and add the word “military” as a modifier, please.
Italic out!
Targeted, incidentally.
The word is “targeted.”
Yes, two t’s and not three. 🙂
“SO, I believe we are in agreement, and I don’t think that any mocking or sarcastic disdain is called for on your part. If you intended none by your use of the phrase “I really feel your pain,” then nothing stands between us and a lifetime of harmony.”
No I honestly do feel your pain–the refusual to make useful distinctions is a constant annoyance I have here. I wasn’t being sarcastic. Though I can totally see how you might think I was. Hell–I read what I had written and I thought I was being sarcastic. Sorry.
Refusual? is that like a usual refusal? Sheesh, too bad I can’t dictate my posts and have someone transcribe them. 😉
Mr. Holsclaw–
good–then it’s a lifetime of harmony.
see you on another thread.
Regarding that Lancet study that Sebastian says didn’t distinguish between civilians and non-civilians, here’s a relevant quote–
“Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could have been combatants. 28 of 61 killings attributed to US forces involved men age 15-60 years, 28 were children younger than 15 years, four were women, and one was an elderly man. It is not clear if the the greater number of male deaths were attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants who may have been disproportionately male, or if this was because men are more often in public and more likely to be exposed to danger.”
Presumably most of the women and children and some of the men were non-combatants. The bulk of those 61 deaths (52, in fact) occurred in Fallujah, something I think I think was discovered by someone at Tim Lambert’s blog Deltoid–he emailed one of the authors and asked. You could almost figure that out from the paper, but not all the breakdowns one would like were given in the paper.
Here’s another tidbit–“At all sites, only 64 households (<8 %) were recorded as empty at the time of our visit and none were abandoned after all or most of the residents had died. In Falluja, 23 households of 52 visited (44%) were temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbors interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned houses, but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the study." They then discuss whether this could have led to either an overestimate (yes) or underestimate (yes) of the deaths in Fallujah.
The survey was done in September 2004, before the final assault. This carnage came from air strikes.
There's enough detail in the Lancet paper to let us know that something pretty terrible probably happened in Falluja, even if you can't use one neighborhood and make a trustworthy estimate of the death toll for the city as a whole.
Wow, this was a fun romp. Props to Jes for making incendiary statements that generated another 50 comments full of accusations and recriminations when the thread was in dire danger of dying out due to mass agreement. Are the blog owners paying her for her services in generating traffic?
Slart might perhaps be mildly condemned for pedantry regarding the cluster submunitions fuss (though I’m inclined to cut him some slack given that that’s his bailiwick), but those of you who accused him of attempting to thereby change the subject might ask yourselves why he would want to do that, considering that he had acknowledged that deploying cluster submunitions in an urban area was of questionable morality.
This could have been a calm, thoughtful discussion about how one goes about determining what the acceptable level of risk of civilian casualties is for a given conflict when choosing tactics; but I guess the atmosphere around here is too toxic for calm discussion about anything politically controversial.
This is going to sound very callous and cruel, doubtless, to some, but I’m merely going to point out a sad, tragic, fact. Which is that in innumerable wars around the globe, from Nepal to Congo to Israel/Palestine to Afghanistan to Chechnya to Somalia to Haiti and on and on, it’s perfectly common for soldiers with automatic weapons to be from 8-13 years old. Perfectly common.
It’s very horrible. But the “presumption” that those under 15 are non-combatants, is, alas, not at all warranted.
Of course, neither would any presumption that they automatically were combatants be in the least justified.
hmmm, I take a week’s vacation and this thread is the one that catches fire? go figure.
some probably not terribly helpful thoughts:
jes — sometimes your passion betrays you. absent stronger evidence, at best your argument is that the US military shows deliberate indifference toward civilian, especially children, deaths. but especially with a philospher of the caliber (munitions joke) of Prof. H supervising this place, i think you would be well served by recognizing that deliberate indifference is not the same thing as intent.
that said, i’m sorry that you and Gary appear to be at such a bitter impasse. i believe you are both a smidge stubborn, and the threads here would be well served by both of you extending an olive branch.
please consider doing so.
SH: when you say “‘Cluster bombs’ just are not different enough from generic ‘bombs’ to make a big moral difference”, you really need to explain yourself better, given that the HRW link much debated appears, to me, to show that cluster munition UXO has a far greater impact on civilian children than other kinds.
are you making a flat argument that all weapons and munitions are of equal moral weighting? given the worldwide views of mustard gas, that seems unlikely.
are you making a factual argument that cluster munitions and submunitions have an equal impact (both during and after battle) on civilians, thereby giving them equal moral weight? that seems factually wrong.
what, then, the basis of your belief in that moral equivalence?
“SH: when you say “‘Cluster bombs’ just are not different enough from generic ‘bombs’ to make a big moral difference”, you really need to explain yourself better, given that the HRW link much debated appears, to me, to show that cluster munition UXO has a far greater impact on civilian children than other kinds.”
The HRW report is pretty much a brief for the prosecution and certainly should not be seen as a neutral source on the concept.
That said, it fails to explore the fact that cluster bombs are all so much more effective at their intended function. By way of analogy, dropping loose straw and hay on the enemy is likely to much safer for civilians, but not very effective.
It pretty much brushes aside the fact that the ‘inital failure rate’ is about the same for cluster and non-cluster weapons.
Much of the distinction in banned weapons is NOT effectiveness in killing, but rather the unnecessary ugliness in death or uncontrollable effect. Say what you want, but the uncontrollable effect and ugliness of gas or biological weapons is vastly different that that of cluster bombs. Gas can drift for miles. Compaints about Iraq (which I quoted as did dutchmarbel) is that they can spread over 100 square meters. That is hugely different in terms of control.
HRW pretty much wants perfectly controlled weapons. They don’t exist. But following the Geneva conventions by not hiding in civilian areas would do wonders to protect civilians–far more than the difference between cluster and non-cluster munitions. Not that anyone on this thread will pay more than slight bit of attention to that fact.
Which is not to say that absolutely nothing could or should be done to address some of the concerns noted. For instance adding fuzes might be technologically challenging but worth it.
BTW, if you tend to push that type of thing you should be aware that it can be expensive and think about how it intersects with complaints about the monetary costs of the war.
“Not that anyone on this thread will pay more than slight bit of attention to that fact.”
oh for god’s sake, lay off the persecution complex. yes, all the regulars here are well aware of your views about insurgents hiding in civilian populations. and yes, many regulars here, myself included, pay close attention to your posts which are not overly self-indulgent.
moreover,
1. the OpFor is cheating (based on the US’s rules of war). So? they’re home; we’re not.
2. last I checked, we invaded for the SOLE purpose of deposing the Saddam regime. that was done a while back. it seems to me that our moral case for using cluster munitions against insurgents who legitimately wish to throw out an occupier is a little weaker than if we fighting Iraqi regulars.
3. last I checked, the purpose of this war was to win. Since winning, per CBird, involves a regime that is not virulently anti-US, some of us believe that using munitions that cause civilian casualties will lead to our strategic defeat even if it results in a tactical victory.
4. also last i checked, you were arguing that the iraqis were insufficiently crushed by the original american offensive. although you’ve been coy about what additional crushing would involve, most readers here, including me, have assumed that you desired substantial additional casualties, one result of which would have been substantial additional civilian casualties. you’re not exactly on high ground here.
5. the choice is not simply between regular munitions and those containing sub-munitions. the choice also includes not using artillery and air power. i recognize that giving up those capabilities would likely cause additional american casualties, at least in the short run. but if eliminating / substantially reducing civilian casualties allows the US to “win” sooner (or at all), won’t the sacrifice be worth it?
But following the Geneva conventions by not hiding in civilian areas would do wonders to protect civilians–far more than the difference between cluster and non-cluster munitions. Not that anyone on this thread will pay more than slight bit of attention to that fact.
You keep bringing this up, and I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make. Are you of the impression that anyone here is rooting for the insurgents? Yes, the bad guys don’t follow the Geneva conventions. (That’s but one of many reasons why THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS.) What exactly are we supposed to do with that fact, try to kill them more?
I don’t know anything about cluster bombs (or munitions) and if I did I’d be afraid to say it.
The most damning thing to me, about our military’s policy towards civilian casualties, is the lack of any serious effort at all to count them.
“What exactly are we supposed to do with that fact, try to kill them more?”
More? Quite a few people here don’t think we should be killing them at all in Iraq.
Small correction department–the Lancet paper is clear on the number of its counted violent deaths that were killed in Fallujah. There were other details that someone commenting at Tim Lambert’s site got from one of the authors.
Sebastian, yeah, there’s some considerable question about whether we should be killing insurgents in Iraq. They are in Iraq, after all, not here, and we invaded them, not vice versa. Sure, they’re often bad guys, though some may only be defending their country against occupation by shooting at US troops (something which in my slightly-pacifistic way I see as a very bad choice on their part and which I wouldn’t cheer for anyway, since I’m American and also know someone who might be sent over there.) There are also government death squads and private militia Shiite death squads and maybe we ought to be killing them too, though there’s the problem that according to a Peter Maas (sp?) article in the NYT Magazine some months back, the US is working with some of those units–I think the article was called “The Salvadorization of Iraq”.
I’m not at all sure about this, Gary, but I don’t recall seeing many stories about kids shooting at American soldiers in Iraq. Not that it couldn’t happen or hasn’t happened. In the case of Fallujah (or Falluja–I see both spellings), where the biggest chunk of Lancet deaths were counted, these were people who were attacked from the air and I doubt this particular randomly selected neighborhood was crawling with armed child soldiers. Anyway, here’s a relevant quote from the Lancet paper–
“Of the 28 children killed by coalition forces (median age 8 years), ten were girls, 16 were boys and two were infants (sex not recorded). Aside from a 14 year old boy, all these deaths were children 12 years or younger.”
Most of these would have been in the Fallujah cluster–it doesn’t much sound like precision bombing aimed at insurgents to me, though maybe large civilian casualties are to be expected when you use aerial bombing in cities whether you try to target carefully or not.
“Of the 28 children killed by coalition forces….”
“…maybe large civilian casualties are to be expected when you use aerial bombing in cities whether you try to target carefully or not.”
Is 28 “large”? It depends upon the context: the size of the population and the number of munitions laid on, and, as we’ve touched upon, what sort of attacks where made and how they were made.
It says here that the pre-war population was approximately 350,000. For an example of what can happen, during Gulf War 1:
So that’s bad, and it happens, but theoretically a number of our systems are more accurate now than they were in 1991 (when, in fact, the overwhelming majority of bombs were “dumb,” despite the videotapes shown on tv of smart bombs at the time; they were a small minority; now most of our bombs are guided).
Regarding the attempt to retake Fallujah in April, 2004, Wikipedia says:
A source for this is here. It’s very much worth reading. It starts:
Later:
Nothing there about barring men leaving, but one can’t rely on a single article, of course, so that means little. But it gives some clues as to some of the problems.
Back in the Wiki piece, there’s nothing more about children; during the November counter-offensive, it says:
If that’s vaguely correct, 28 accidental deaths of children seems as if it might be a fairly low and unsurprising number, but I really wouldn’t come to any judgment based upon the rather vague level of information I possess. Neither bombing nor shelling is specifically addressed in the Wikipedia piece.
This account, via Democracy Now!, from an independent journalist clearly not at all friendly to the U.S. thoroughly condemns the U.S., but leaves the impression that the overwhelming majority of Fallujans were in refugee camps (interview on April 28th, 2005:
If ~350,000 people live there, it would seem that most had left before the fighting.
The Grauniad, on the other hand, thoroughly condemning Fallujah as “our Guernica” says, on April 27th, 2005:
Which truly suggests not so many left in the city during the fighting. They don’t include any more hard or soft info on civilians in the city, save to note that they can’t really know since they didn’t have free access (which I kinda have the idea was denied them by more than just the U.S. Army, FWIW).
Gary, you are missing the point, or my point at least. All the Fallujah deaths identified in the Lancet study occurred before the final assault. The survey was done before the final assault. These people were killed by air strikes. And it was the air strikes which drove people out, except for military aged men who were forced to stay behind and any families that also stayed behind.
You mean, you want me to misinterpret the targeting of infrastructure as targeting of civilians? No, thank you.
Other than noting that the devices actually being singled out for mention aren’t, in fact, being used in civilian proximity? Given that this is the entirety of my point, no, thank you.
If you’d paid veeery close attention to the preceding portion of the thread, you’d already have noticed that your dispute with me is not particularly well-directed unless you disagree with the distinction that I’m putting forward. As for moral vs. any other kind of distinction, this is orthogonal to my point. If you insist on dragging the discussion back to this point, though, I point out that the use of cluster bombs in urban areas in Iraq is a hypothetical, whereas the use of unguided artillery bearing cluster munitions is not.
I’d respond further, but the messenger has been shot, hung, disembowelled, and has spent the last 36 hours or so in bed and has no more energy for this sort of nonsense.
Donald, I have no anger at all toward you, outside of the original state of slight annoyance at the snark. If snark had a lasting effect on me, the cumulative snark would have had me out of all blog comments long ago.
And if I’ve been excessively, needlessly harsh with anyone, please do attribute it to grumpiness and impatience born of the virus that put me down for the last day and a half, and still has me feeling under the weather now. And please do take my grumpiness as impatience rather than a sign of disrespect.
Gary::bombs are things that go ‘boom'” seems useful to Dutchmarbel’s grasp of English and technical terminology, whereas from Slart’s position, it makes him feel like he’s talking to a third-grader
[from a later post]
But your “correction,” I’m afraid, dutchmarbel, of the precise language shows the opposite of what you intended. An MLRS munition is definitely not a “bomb.” A “bomb,” in modern terminology is, loosely speaking, dropped from an airplane; all explosives intended to be used in combat, more or less, on the other hand, are “munitions.”
My original statement was: “As Sebastian shows, just a few posts above me (I miss the time stamp too), bombs is used for things that go BOOM, loosely speaking. And using clusterbombs for the ones dropped from the air and not counting the ‘cluster munitions’ that have the same effect is misleading – as the HRW report I linked too stated quite clearly.”
From my 1982 New Collins Concise English Dictionary: “bomb: a hollow projectile containing explosive, incendiary, or other destructive substance”. “projectile: 1. an object thrown forwards. 2. any self-propelling missile, esp. a rocket. 3. any object that can be fired rom a gun, such as a shell.” “munitions: militairy equipment and stores, esp. ammunition”
Looking at the above definition my loosely speaking ‘goes BOOM’ seems to be more accurate than your loosely speaking ‘dropped from an airoplane’.
In this discussion I think Slartibartfest could quite easily have said “One should say cluster munitions , since the US army uses the word clusterbombs only for the kind that is dropped from an airplane”. Instead he seemed to use semantics to make the discussion LESS clear.
Read the HRW reports…
That was aimed at Slartibartfest Gary, not at you.
Sebastian:Like the difference between bombing an Iraqi propaganda outlet and Saddam’s forces shelling civilians to drive them in front of US forces. I really feel your pain on the arguing with people who don’t want to recognize moral distinctions you find important front.
[…]
You can argue that cities should never be bombed. I think it is a particularly stupid argument, but it is internally consistent. You can argue that cities shouldn’t be subjected to nuclear attacks and I might give you the long term radiation card in your favor. You might even argue that it is better to go with massive explosives over napalm because the death is unnecessarily painful with napalm. I could see the utility of such distinctions even if I came out differently in the conclusion of whether or not the tactics shoud be allowed.
The distinction between cluster bombs and regular bombs however is not particularly useful.
By ” Iraqi propaganda post” you mean the hospital in Fallujah that was bombed? When you say that as far as nuclear attacks are concerned the “radiation card” is the major argument against them, do you mean to say that you feel that nucleair weapons could be used if there was less long-term radiation coming from them? If so, what is your interpretation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its goals?
Also: when the Germans occupied Europe in WW2, do you agree with them that the European resistance were terrorists? Do you feel that the members are to be judged harshly for not making themselves clear targets for the Germans? If (I hope not) the US is ever occupied, should there be a resistance movement and if so, should they make sure not to mingle with civilians?
Needless to say, that was the opposite of the intended effect. I guess I suck, and am ruining this blog.
What, you mean that thing that I’ve only read eight times or so? It still says what it said the first time I read it.
[Dutchmarbel:]Instead he seemed to use semantics to make the discussion LESS clear.
[slartibartfast:]Needless to say, that was the opposite of the intended effect. I guess I suck, and am ruining this blog.
Nah, that position is allready taken 😉
I am glad the effect was not intended, but it lead to great confusion and it took the thread totally away into a discussion about technical terms.
That was aimed at Slartibartfest Gary, not at you.
What, you mean that thing that I’ve only read eight times or so? It still says what it said the first time I read it.
There was an ‘s’ behind report… There are several reports about the devastating effect of cluster munitions *and* cluster bombs on the civilian population. The one I quoted from only said that the US government muddied the issue by giving the numbers about cluster *bombs* and not all cluster munitions, when these effects are discussed.
You mean, you want me to misinterpret the targeting of infrastructure as targeting of civilians? No, thank you.
No, I would have liked for you to acknowledge that tactically targeting infrastructure can also be strategically targeting civilians, as per my post.
Other than noting that the devices actually being singled out for mention aren’t, in fact, being used in civilian proximity? Given that this is the entirety of my point, no, thank you.
If that really was the entirety of your point, I have to say that you did a really poor job of conveying that. Of course, see below.
And please do take my grumpiness as impatience rather than a sign of disrespect.
I completely understand and, fwiw, you’ve lost no respect of mine during these exchanges. [It’s a royal pain to be an expert in a technical field and watch laypeople misuse precise terminology, so I understand your pain.] I hope you can say the same of me.