by hilzoy
Via Glenn Greenwald, an absolutely surreal op-ed by Shelby Steele, in which he argues that “since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war”, that this restraint is why we can’t seem to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, and that the reason we practice it is … white guilt!
“Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America–the greatest embodiment of Western power–goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past–two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation. (…)
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war–and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past. (…)
Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites–and nonwhites–to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life–absorbed as new history–so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.”
Gosh: where to begin?
First: in fighting the war in Iraq, we fought a war that virtually the entire international community opposed. We tossed aside large chunks of international law, including the Convention Against Torture and our own military field manual’s interrogation rules. We sent Gen. Miller over with orders to ‘Gitmo-ize’ Abu Ghraib. If this is what counts as guilt-ridden restraint, I’m not sure I want to know what we’d do if we really took the gloves off.
Second: Shelby Steele writes: “Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem–win a war, fix immigration–they lose legitimacy. To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a ‘unilateralist cowboy’?”
Recall that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld have led us in Iraq. They, and especially Rumsfeld, shaped our plans and our strategy. Try to apply these words to them. Dick Cheney: hamstrung by white guilt! George W. Bush: overcome by tender solicitude for third world victims of Western oppression! Donald Rumsfeld: running from stigmatization as a unilateralist cowboy! The idea that they, of all people, are supposed to be paralyzed by political correctness will keep me in stitches for days.
It’s not “restraint” that has crippled us in Iraq; it’s Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on treating the war as a testing ground for his theory that we could fight with half as many troops as the military recommended. That’s why we didn’t prevent the looting after the fall of Baghdad, or secure the Iraqi borders, or even guard the WMD sites that were our pretext for invading. Only in an alternate universe does this have anything to do with white guilt.
Third: We are fighting an insurgency. When you fight an insurgency, you have to care what the people around you think. If they are on your side, the insurgency will not be able to function. If they are against you, those who do not actually join the insurgency will give it safe harbor, and you will lose. In these circumstances, caring about what Iraqis think of us is not “white guilt”, it’s common sense.
I can imagine a commander who is so concerned about giving the least offense to anyone that he holds back when he ought to attack. I can also imagine a commander who is so eager to seem macho, unsentimental, or ruthless that he needlessly alienates the surrounding population and transforms people who could have been on his side into his deadly enemies. Both undue restraint and undue ruthlessness are serious mistakes in war. And when I ask myself which of these mistakes Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are more likely to make, undue restraint is not the one that leaps to mind.
Fourth: Glenn Greenwald points out some of the reaction from the right. Jeff Goldstein predictably finds Steele eloquent and forceful, and tells us that “there are times when the international equivalent of Sherman’s march through the South would, in the long run, save American soldier’s lives and foreshorten the conflict.” Mark Noonan, at Blogs for Bush, informs us that White Supremacy “had its good and bad points” (the bad point: “the disgraceful way it treated non-white people”. Um, yeah.) A few others:
Dr. Sanity finds Steele’s piece ‘brilliant’. Wizbang recommends it highly. Marc Schulman at American Future adds to my suspicion that some right wing bloggers really do inhabit an alternate universe by saying that “It’s been more than 60 years since the United States defeated an enemy in a hot war involving a major commitment of American troops.” (The first Gulf War? It “did nothing more than evict Saddam from Kuwait”. I always thought that we won the first Gulf War for that very reason: evicting Saddam was our aim, and we achieved it. Silly me.) Thomas Krannawitter at the Claremont Institute: “I think his broad analysis is largely right: The self-loathing and guilt caused by past sins of racism and imperialism have defanged the West, especially America.” The Tail Gunner: “American [sic] is so oppressed by White Guilt that we are at great risk of failing in our war against the Islamic Fascists bent on killing us all.” And so on and so forth.
Glenn makes one crucial point about this:
“Looking at the bright side of this deranged rhetoric, it is, in a sense, refreshing to see that many of these war supporters, in their great frustration, are finally relinquishing their solemn concern for the Iraqi people and the tearful inspiration caused by the Purple Fingers. Instead, they are now just calling for some good old-fashioned carpet bombings and mass killings. (…)
To sit and listen to people who have spent the last three years piously lecturing us on the need to stand with “the Iraqi people,” who justified our invasion of that country on the ground that we want to give them a better system of government because we must make Muslims like us more, now insist that what we need to do is bomb them with greater force and less precision is really rather vile — but highly instructive. The masks are coming off. No more poetic tributes to democracy or all that sentimental whining about “hearts and minds.” It’s time to shed our unwarranted white guilt, really stretch our legs and let our hair down, and just keep bombing and bombing until we kill enough of them and win. Shelby Steele deserves some sort of award for triggering that refreshingly honest outburst.”
Glenn is right. Being lectured by the likes of Jeff Goldstein on liberals’ insufficient concern for the people of Iraq is like, well, being lectured by Jeff Goldstein (and other defenders of Bush’s assault on the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights) on liberals’ insufficient love of our country and its freedoms.
But what strikes me even more than the rush to shake off our alleged restraint and bomb them into the Stone Age is just how delusional this all is. As I said above, we have not been particularly restrained in Iraq, and the idea of Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld being hobbled by white guilt is just risible. If you think about it for more than a nanosecond, and you are even remotely inclined to wonder whether the central argument of Steele’s piece is true, the only possible answer is: not in this universe.
My best guess is that the reason so many bloggers on the right have applauded this tissue of fantasy is as follows. They know that things are not going well in Iraq. They are not prepared to blame the administration that has, you know, actually run the war. Luckily, here comes Shelby Steele with an alternative explanation that happens to invoke a narrative to which many of them are already wedded: the idea that America has been emasculated, its vigor sapped, and its “superior strength” tied down with a million Lilliputian ropes. Effete liberals rush about, cooing: “Oh no, America, you can’t possibly do something so brash and bold!”. We claim to be motivated by lofty principles, but in reality it’s something much darker: a love of death, uncontrollable envy, the will to power.
If things are going badly in Iraq, it can’t possibly be because our Secretary of Defense convinced himself that we didn’t need to plan for the occupation of Iraq, and our President was too credulous or incurious to question him. It has to be the fault of the liberals who, despite having no power whatsoever over the conduct of the war, have nonetheless managed to sap our national will. I mean, who else could possibly have screwed things up this badly? As Moonbattery puts it:
“Our enemy in Iraq is not so much al Qaeda or the remnants of Saddam’s ghoulish regime, as our own carping media and our fear that if we take off the kid gloves and play to win, effete Euroweenies might denounce us as cowboys. It doesn’t occur to us that we ought to be proud to be cowboys. (…)
In the end, we only have one enemy that genuinely threatens us. The rest are just opportunistic infections. The true enemy is the liberal elite intelligentsia that has poisoned our most crucial resource: our belief in what we are.”
Note to these bloggers and those who accept their arguments: there is a difference between being hamstrung by guilt and being restrained by principle. The former is a sign of weakness; the latter is a sign of strength. Our principles are our own. We do not follow them because we are afraid of what someone else will say, but because we believe that they are right. The day we come to confuse our adherence to morality with timidity and fear will be the day we lose whatever virtue and strength we have, and forfeit our claim to anyone’s respect.
Because I love my country, I want it to be the best country it can possibly be. But I don’t think it’s enough to keep saying that it is a great country. Saying doesn’t make it so; work does. And I think that to be citizens who are worthy of our country, we have to we have to work hard, every day, to make it the country we know it can be. The founding ideals of this country are glorious. We owe them our allegiance, and we owe it to our country to try to be worthy of them.
Abu Ghraib is not worthy of them. Neither are the Salt Pit, Guantanamo, or any of the other places where we have violated our laws, our consciences, and our humanity. And neither is it worthy of our ideals to pretend that the problem with a war that includes these things is that white guilt has made us unwilling to take the gloves off and really knock some heads.
Hmm, I think his argument overall sucks. But I do in fact think that the US showed undue restraint early on in the insurgency (we acted as if we had already won and were just cleaning up). This was especially so in Sadr’s first and second rebellion. He should have been shot during the first one.
Seb: I’m not sure ‘restraint’ is the right word. Carelessness, maybe. But I definitely agree that we should have been a lot more active in trying to control the looting, securing the borders, and getting a handle on the insurgency from the outset.
I think that the fact that we didn’t do this wasn’t due to any sort of squeamishness, though, but to our troop levels, which in turn are due to Rumsfeld’s idiocy. (I have just finished Cobra II. I didn’t think it was possible for my opinion of Rumsfeld’s prosecution of the war to get any lower. Imagine my surprise.)
I’m not with Steele, but I’m not with Greenwald either. Steele is too vague and generalized for my taste, and Greenwald is just Greenwald. Overlooked by Steele is that, since WWII, we have adopted the Geneva Conventions and set forth well-defined rules of engagement (with notable exceptions). It makes our job harder, but it saves civilians’ lives.
SH, there was no “rebellion”, we closed his news paper and put out an arrest “warrant” for the man (tantamount to a come get tortured and killed warrant). Unsuprisingly he didn’t take the deal. That’s when the violence started, it was entirely because we decided to have a go at him. The second “rebellion” was actually a second botched attempt to capture him on the same “warrant”. Anyways, he beat us both times, and now is the second most powerful person in Iraq, if we had wanted to avoid that we probably shouldn’t of picked a fight with him we couldn’t win.
Sebastien writes
“But I do in fact think that the US showed undue restraint early on in the insurgency (we acted as if we had already won and were just cleaning up).”
This is an, um, odd description of restrained behaviour. Arrogant, yes. Myopic, yes. Restrained? Hmmm.
Sorry Sebastian, I’ll spell your name right next time.
right–Asteele’s point goes to the role of Sistani and the Shia street in all of this. Sistani has kept Baghdad relatively calm. Had we gone after Sadr, and had Sistani unleashed his people, then we would have had many delightful opportunities to show how guilt-free we are. We would have had a lot of blood in the streets, ours and theirs.
And, hey, if that would have achieved America’s strategic objectives, then I’d say it’s worth doing. But it would not have. At the end of the bloodletting, we still would be back where we started: stuck with the job of reconstructing Iraq without enough troops, without any real buy-in from Rumsfeld, and with a president who is too bored and confused to do it right, but too paralyzed by fear to get out.
Look–Rumsfeld and Bush have been in total control of this show from the start. They remain in total control of it. This Steele stuff? It’s just the English for Dolchstosslegende.
Holy crap, that Jeff Goldstein is retarded:
In short, the only way this guilt works is if we come to believe that we are, by virtue of certain cosmetic or superficial or logistic similarities, responsible for the actions of those in the past who were in many other respects “like us”. And this can only come to pass if we internalize certain historical occurrences as a form of cultural “memory”.
But it makes no sense to say we “remember” things that we took no part in, and so it makes no sense to culturally hamstring ourselves over events that we are under no obligation to take ownership of.
Ah, yes, the hazy memory of racism, lost to the distant past. Of course, I myself only missed being born into the segregation era by six years, but I’m sure it’s quite vivid to Condoleeza Rice, whose best friend was blown up in a goddamned church bombing.
Seriously, how can he write this stuff?
I mean, some of the people who helped to perpetrate these distant, hazy evils were still serving in the Senate during the GWB administration. How can we be expected to remember that?
Charles: Overlooked by Steele is that, since WWII, we have adopted the Geneva Conventions and set forth well-defined rules of engagement (with notable exceptions). It makes our job harder, but it saves civilians’ lives.
Possibly Steele has noted that the US had been in blatant disregard of the Geneva Conventions both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, both those governing treatment of civilians and of combatants – formally, officially, openly and with support from the highest levels of US government.
Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Steele interprets concern for the US’s kidnap victims, hostages, and other illegally-held or illegally-treated prisoners as “white guilt”.
Great post, hilzoy. Stirring ending.
It’s the old “the beatings will continue until morale improves” routine, isn’t it? That’s funny as a joke, and horrifying as an actual policy.
We seem to be leaning more and more to the policy side.
No one knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Well, now we do. Glenn is right (correct) – at least the racist heart of the remaining support for this administration is out in the open.
Not that it still doesn’t make me ill.
Jake
This line of reasoning is one that I’ve been hearing more and more over the last few months. Apparently it’s now “obvious” that sending too few troops was due to fear that the Arabs would get angry rather than Rumsfeld’s great experiment. That’s just one example — it seems that the talking points are now geared towards tying up a consistent and convenient explanation for ‘Why things tanked’ rather than ‘why things are going great.’
I really think this op-ed is only partially about Iraq. Yes, it sends the message (incorrectly IMO) that we weren’t tough enough when wwe went into Iraq.
But it is really (again IMO) a set-up for much more drastic measures that this administration may be contemplating for Iran.
When we do saturation bombings there, it will show we are no longer hampered by the “white guilt” they are talking about.
This is part of a campaign to soften the public for some possibly very nasty doings.
He had me right up until the “white guilt” part. I personally think that the “restraint in war” is not something that started with Vietnam, but has been evolving gradually over time. It doesn’t make war all that much less brutal, but it does tend to make it less brutal in theory. I also think that showing restraint in war is a good, desirable thing, even if it tends to make the objective harder to reach.
That said, it’s possible that we could have actually reduced the amount of bloodshed by being more aggressive and decisive with, for example, Sadr and his crew. That’s an idea that I’d tend to find more credible coming from someone of Lt. Colonel rank or above, in a position to know, than some newspaper columnist or weblogger. I take it with many, many grains of salt coming from someone whose background is in race relations as opposed to, for instance (and I don’t have anyone particular in mind, here), someone who’s been embedded with the troops for months on end.
That’s one of the problems I have with Monday-morning quarterbacking from all corners of politics: mostly, you just don’t know. Especially you just don’t know when you’re not particularly well-connected with those who do.
In general, I think you also have to recall that because the author has made his entire career out of race relations, his observations are as surely colored (give it a rest, already) by that as mine are by my background in defense engineering.
I think notAsteele (@ 5:55) is on the right track: Sure, Shelby Steele’s WSJ Op-Ed is a masterpiece of delusionary blather – no argument there – but I think its main purpose is not so much to actually push for “white guilt” as an “explanation” for US shortcomings in Iraq, but to provide a sort of intellectual cover for the inevitable finger-pointing and blame-shifting that the pro-war Right will be forced into as that pesky “reality” thing conspires to trash their high-minded neo-imperial project to “re-make” the Middle East.
We see a lot of it already in the starboard-side blogosphere: they have long since adopted the standard talking-point that setbacks in Iraq are mainly “The Media’s” fault for not reporting all the “good news”. That disillusioned warhawks
and their amen chorus will turn to looking for scapegoats to blame should not come as much of a surprise (and God forbid they should actually attach any responsibility to Dear Leader Dubya and his gang!).
Dolchstosslegende indeed. This, I fear, is just Round 1.
Jeff Eaton writes: it seems that the talking points are now geared towards tying up a consistent and convenient explanation for ‘Why things tanked’ rather than ‘why things are going great.’
Bingo.
Great post Hilzoy. When I read Steele’s piece, and then Jeff G.’s psychotic extensions of it, I felt, really, that I had entered some deranged parallel universe. The title of Jeff’s post pitched the discussion of a mismanaged war as involving “language” and the “Other.” Poor rhetoric, it seems, has impeded Jeff’s preference for fewer “smart” bombs and more “thorough lethality.” But although more lethality would have led to victory we are, you see, constrained by fear of bloody pictures on TV. So, we don’t/didn’t kill enough people. And this is all becasue of “white man’s guilt” as stoked by the left: thus may we lay the blame for the mess in Iraq at the feet of….ta da! — LIBERALS! (Glenn Reynolds has been preparing the way to blame the MSM.)
(slartibartfest writes: In general, I think you also have to recall that because the author has made his entire career out of race relations, his observations are as surely colored (give it a rest, already) by that as mine are by my background in defense engineering. And Jeff G.’s is in English and literary theory; not exactly the tools for diagnosing strategic failure in a nation torn assunder by insurgents and sectarian violence.)
This appalling behavior is called failure to take personal responsibility, a trait I thought conservatives valued. In my own case, I voted for Bush in ’04 and chose to believe those who said he would properly and competently prosecute the war in Iraq and foreign policy in general. Well, I was as wrong as a person can be. But the day you see me running around saying Rumsfeld (Rumsfeld!!) was constrained by effete angst over his nation’s racial sins, well, someone should cart me off to the psych ward. Especially in light of the growing consensus (see Cobra II) that failure to secure borders was an initial and horrible blunder. But no…much easier — if deranged and risible — to say the error was that we didn’t raze a few cities and get some Dresden-style carpet bombing going, cuz of “white man’s guilt.”
I thought that after removing Saddam, we were then fighting for the people of Iraq, to build them a functioning democracy. By all that is freakin’ holy, how do you do that by turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots or whatever versions of “thorough lethality” Jeff has in mind? Truly, the idea that the democracy project in Iraq is failing becasue Americans are hamstrung by guilt over their past racial sins, thus causing them not to kill lethally enough in a nation-building context, is so sick and demented that anyone promoting it should be cast from the universe of serious thinkers.
My reaction is a little different than everybody else’s. I thught both Steele and Goldstein were expressing pretty openly the evil that lurks in the heart of the extreme right wing: the conviction that foreign policy is an extention of personal ego and that the only matter of importance in time of war is wining in order to gratify one’s ego. This is particularly apparent in Goldstein’s comments since he doesn’t care how many Iraqi civilians die so that he can say we won, and, as Mona points out, that completely contradicts the (lastest) reason for being there in the first place.
It’s the Swiftboat liar mentality. It isn’t what yu fight for , it isn’t how you fight that matters. All that matters is wether or not your team wins.
wow… “white guilt” . it has a bit of an, err, Aryan ring to it, no ? as if the cure for white guilt would be a bit more white pride ? i suppose that’s ironic, if we’re talking about killing Iraqis and Iranians, given that “Iran” literally means “land of Aryans”.
sure, Steele works hard to try to play down that White Pride, White Power thing, but he utterly fails.
i can’t believe this was published.
yeah, i suppose it’s even more ironic, given that Steele is black. but the fact remains that the words he chose have connotations he can’t avoid, and he knows it.
sure, Steele works hard to try to play down that White Pride, White Power thing, but he utterly fails.
Shelby Steele is black.
Um, cleek: Steele is, by all appearances, relatively nonwhite.
la la la la
With respect, Mona, it’d be wise to dial it back a bit. Claiming that Jeff is saying something when he’s already corrected you multiple times doesn’t do anything to make your point.
“it’s Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on treating the war as a testing ground for his theory that we could fight with half as many troops as the military recommended”
Conventional wisdom not completely supported by “facts” as I understand facts, and again a flattering explanation,repeated in comments. “Rumsfeld’s theory of warfighting” involves offensive operations and not occupation, peacekeeping, maintaining order and so may not even be relevant as an explanation. Further, I think this:
“it can’t possibly be because our Secretary of Defense convinced himself that we didn’t need to plan for the occupation of Iraq,”
somewhat contradicts the first explanation. Did we go with insufficient troops because Rumsfeld didn’t think we needed them or because he didn’t plan for the occupation. They are not identical.
The next step in the chain of implausible idiocies is that Rumsfeld didn’t believe there would be an insurgency or civil disorder, which requires ignoring his own quotes about “Stuff happens.”
How about maybe we didn’t provide sufficient troops to adequately do the job because if we had insisted on 300k more the war would likely never happened? If they had waited 6 months or more the WMD rationale would have collapsed;if they had compromised to get additional allies the control and neo-con aims might have been jeopardized.
As to why I am willing to be skeptical about all the expert narratives, there is a strong institutional tendency to protect a President and certain military theories. Have we yet abandoned the concept that strategic bombing can be effective? Iraq seems to demonstrate not.
slartibartfest: With respect, Mona, it’d be wise to dial it back a bit. Claiming that Jeff is saying something when he’s already corrected you multiple times doesn’t do anything to make your point.
Oh codswollop. Jeff’s “corrections” were utter evasions and misdirection; a total refusal to specifically identify exactly what he mens by rejecting “smart” bombs in favor of more thorough “lethality.”
Language has meaning, as one ought not have to tell a literary theorist like Jeff. His words signify that we need to abandon targeted “smart” bombs and employ more “lethal” means that would make ugly pictures on TV. That’s what he wrote. I gave him multiple opportunities to “explain” all that if his outrageous commentary didn’t mean what it manifestly does, and he declined to get specific. Going on and on about how “sad” it is that I don’t “understand” him and blah, blah.
What drivel, but it isn’t a new MO from Jeff. He routinely adopts the posture of unfairly maligned martyr, and did it with hilzoy over his call to “civil war,” and there are legions of other examples; Jeff should never be held responsible for his own rhetoric. Attempts to hold him to it are examples of “misunderstanding” him.
Bullspit.
Incidentally, at the time the war began I did wonder why a strategy wasn’t followed, which may or not have been more brutal, possibly could have required only the troops available, and might have worked.
Why could they have slowly moved up the Tigris toward Baghdad, conquering, pacifying, and disarming one province at at a time? Obviously, with air dominance, no counterattack was likely. And the problem wasn’t and isn’t Sadr, it is Sadr with guns.
Like this one? Saying he’s not talking about nukes and carpet-bombing, while not exactly clarifying what he is talking about, nonetheless clearly rule out your picture of Goldstein.
Flat-out making things up still fails to compel, Mona.
Bob: the slightly longer, yet still too brief, version of me on Rumsfeld:
He thought that we could make do with fewer troops, since technology and special operations had to some extent removed the need for lots of people.
One reason he thought this was: that he (and other civilians in DoD) thought it was silly to think that you needed more troops to keep the peace than you needed to fight the war. (Most of the military disagreed.)
He was disinclined to rethink this for several reasons, among them: (a) that it would challenge his ideas about transformation, but also (b) that he hated the idea of nation-building, and wanted to somehow “move past” it. Also, the whole administration did not want to have anything to do with anything Clinton had done, which in this case means: anything like what they did in Kosovo.
This contempt for nation-building (maintained in the complete absence, as best I can tell, of any serious answer to the question: well, if you’re going to take down a country, what are you going to do instead?) led to both the inadequate troop strength (since we don’t need to think about the number of troops needed to deal with a country once we’ve defeated its army), and also to the lack of planning for the occupation.
Denial is a beautiful thing. Especially when it has its grip so firmly around the imperialists and apologists.
If they actually wake up and decide to fix those mistakes, I would recommend arms and influence.
Saying he’s not talking about nukes and carpet-bombing, while not exactly clarifying what he is talking about, nonetheless clearly rule out your picture of Goldstein.
Yeah, emphasis on “not exactly clarifying what he is talking about.” That’s called wanting to make extreme and obscene statements without having to take responsibility for them: rejecting the strategic use of “smart” bombs in favor of more “thorough lethality,” without having to be held responsible for the common options that constitute more “thorough lethality.”
He rejects smart bombs as insufficient. He calls for more lethal means being employed and says we ought to be willing to accept greater civilian casualties and ugly pictures in the media. Well, just what does that mean? The ever-coy Jeff isn’t saying, and if you raise the obvious methods of escalating to more thorough violence than rendered by the smart bombs he rejects, then you are oh-so-unfairly maligning Jeff.
That is so intellectually dishonest — a great sin in my book — as to be unbelievable.
Nevertheless, he’s told you exactly what it doesn’t mean, so portraying him as advocating something he’s specifically said he’s not advocating is, well, a lie.
Now, if you want to engage Jeff on his own points, please feel free to go over to his place and do so. I’m pretty sure you remain unbanned over there.
Or, you know, you could agree with him to conduct your debate over here, where the posting rules are a bit more restrictive, as long as you realize that they constrain both of you.
Slarti, in the comment you link to, Jeff says:
He’s advocating collective punishment here. And that’s a war crime (Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Convention).
Mona isn’t far wrong.
It is, however, a far cry from “turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots”, which is (and always has been) my point.
Billmon on Steele
Well, out of context and used simply as a lead, without prejudice:
“He calls for more lethal means being employed and says we ought to be willing to accept greater civilian casualties and ugly pictures in the media. Well, just what does that mean?”
Folks, FWIW, in my current mood, when I read stuff like Steele and Goldstein, I worry that they are really not talking about Iraq at all.
They are preparing us for Iran.
So: yes, Mona is exactly wrong on this point.
I had an intermediate reading of Jeff’s post. I thought that if you read it carefully, a lot of it was about how we shouldn’t show too much restraint; there was a time for really letting loose, and so forth. Which is all well and good: I imagine we can all agree that in a just war of self-defense against a brutal invader, a commander who just sits there, ganglia a-quiver, unable to bring himself to actually hurt anyone in the course of defending his country, is showing “too much” restraint. Fine.
But what does any of this have to do with Shelby Steele’s article, and/or our present circumstances? Precisely nothing. What would make anyone think that our primary danger, just now, is that our leaders are too worried about being seen as too brutal and mean? Again, nothing. Jeff’s post, however, makes no sense except on the assumption that this is somehow apropos; and he sometimes says as much, bringing his argument out of the realm of “it is sometimes necessary” and into the present:
I think that it makes no sense to read him as though he’s just making the point that there is such a thing as excessive restraint, as opposed to the claim that this is a problem we have now, in Iraq. Mona is trying to call him on it, and he is retreating into “well, I only said that this is sometimes true”, which is, I think, disingenuous.
Slart, I know you never engage in hyperbole and get upset when others do. And perhaps Mona did.
It is obvious, however,t hat Jeff G displays little regard for the planned deaths of innocents. I am sure he would argue that if they are letting insurgents operate in their neighborhoods, they are hardly innocents.
Rather specious arguing, however. I truly believe that most people who live in gang areas are not guilty people.
However, it is important to recognize the reactions of those reading his words, who won’t let their thinking be limited by his attempts at clarification.
Bush may be right when he said he never said that Saddam was not involved in 9/11. However, things he and others said definitely gave many people that impression.
Likewise, Henry may not have meant death when he said “will no rid me of this meddlesome priest” but it was interpreted that way.
I am not as much conerned about what Jeff G feels he meant as I am about how some people will interpret what he meant.
Bob, as I mentioned earlier, you and I are on the same wave length here, and that is what scares me.
Not that we are on the same wavelength, but that our interpretations may be right.
It is, however, a far cry from “turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots”, which is (and always has been) my point.
when I read it, Mona’s full sentence was:
By all that is freakin’ holy, how do you do that by turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots or whatever versions of “thorough lethality” Jeff has in mind?
bob,
You may be right, but I read him more as preparing the groundwork, as Tacitus’s No End But Victory site did (though I haven’t read it after its first week), for an argument that the reason we lost in Iraq is because of the stab-in-the-back by liberals.
Into the Twilight Zone
Obsidian Wings didn’t like Shelby Steele’s piece in WSJ’s OpinionJournal, White Guilt and the Western Past, that Protein Wisdom commented approvingly yesterday….
Slartibartfast: Flat-out making things up still fails to compel, Mona.
“Still”? I thought you too voted for Bush in 2004, proving that when the Bush administration flat-out makes things up, that does compel.. you, at least.
No, it’s not that Mona did so once, here. It’s that Mona has done so, serially, here and over there, even after being corrected. And then complained about intellectual dishonesty.
Hyperbole isn’t an aid to understanding or debate. It’s just another blowoff valve for the spleen. If you want to debate, debate. If you want to spleen, don’t waste my time.
And failing, largely because she’s calling him on things he’s not saying. Again, hyperbole is not your most effective tool here.
I have no idea whether Goldstein is making a valid argument or not. I tend to look at such things as exercises in academics wherever they come up, unless they’re being made by people who have been rather closer to the action. If Michael Yon, for instance, had made claims of this nature, I’d sit up and take notice. Regardless of that, you cannot treat this discussion as a discussion of Iraq in aggregate. Whether we’ve been on average too precipitous or too hesitant in Iraq has almost nothing to do with whether we may have lost opportunities to neutralize folks like Sadr by being more aggressive in disposing of them.
And now that I’m sucked into the same sort of discussion-sans-authority, I’m going to stop.
Nevertheless, he’s told you exactly what it doesn’t mean, so portraying him as advocating something he’s specifically said he’s not advocating is, well, a lie.
Oh piffle, I wrote: ” By all that is freakin’ holy, how do you do that by turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots or whatever versions of “thorough lethality” Jeff has in mind? ” I put it that way precisely becasue the dishonest Mr. Goldstein calls for more civilian deaths, more pictures of carnage on TV, and more “thorough lethality,” but he steadfastly won’t say how he wishes to effect all that. He will holler like a stuck pig if you suggest the standard means of escalating beyond the methods he rejects as effete, but he ain’t sayin’ just what more “lethal” methods he does endorse. But he wants them, he does, whatever they are — but again, he’s not to EVER be held to any specific method, just insisting it must produce more bloody civilian carnage, which can only come about if we remove ourselves from the grips of this liberal-induced and unjustified guilt.
Whatever.
But the over-arching issue is not Jeff; he is but one example of the sordid displays we have started to see, and will continue to see. It is a pro-war, pro-Bush contingent that very clearly is in a mad search for parties to blame for a mess in the ME produced by an Administration they have doggedly defended. And so, along comes Shelby Steele’s febrile, incoherent ravings that our failure is due to “white man’s guilt,” and Jeff and many others are all about it. Jeff signs on, and yessirree, the problem is “Language, intent and the Other”; we are losing because of identity politics and liberal-induced angst over past national sins. We didn’t kill thoroughly and lethally enough, because we (and Rumsfeld!) have been “hamstrung” by liberal social constraints.
Never will it be allowed to blame them, or the Administration they have defended to the death on foreign policy. Nauseating, really.
What. Rot.
Looking at Jeff’s thread, I have to say that the best argument by far counter to Jeff has just been made by beetroot. Which is kind of a shocker for me, because I don’t normally see beetroot saying things that incisive.
The first time I read Shelby Steele’s article I confused him with Shelby Foote, and wondered how such an erudite historian could be so far off-base.
As other posters have pointed out, a counter-insurgency campaign must involve a degree of restraint that wasn’t necessary in the war against Germany and Japan. Any fool should know that.
For the record, I am one conservative who is willing to put the blame for losing this war squarely on Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
Somehow I doubt the WSJ would have run this piece had it been written by a white person. Which says something about the objective worth of the argument (if it has any merit it shouldn’t matter who articulates it), but more importantly shows that even the WSJ is held back by this pernicious political correctness! Those lefties at the colleges and their meddling dog have ruined war for everyone!
re Jeff Goldstein, his notion of razing whole neighborhoods for tolerating insurgents in their midst is at least a step or two in the direction of the mentality of “destroying the village in order to save it.” Maybe that’ll work out better this time around, who knows. Was the whole “winning the hearts and minds” thing ever officially rescinded, or was that just sort of understood after about Abu Ghraib?
Slart, I wasn’t that impressed with the Goldstein comment you linked. If I understand correctly, Mona says he implied he wanted to use tac nukes or carpet bombing or something equivalent. It would have been simple for Goldstein to have refuted her line by writitng, “I oppose tac nukes and carpet bombing and favor the use of conventional munitions such as blah”. I find it unlikely Goldstein actually would approve of tac nukes, but it’s trivial to straightforwardly deny and “razing a neighborhood” doesn’t have positive connotations in my book.
From the beetroot comment: “Now, the Bush admin could say, “We’re changing the policy. We’re not rebuilding. No more schools, no more elections, just war.””
I thought we had run out of money for rebuilding. Is that me overgeneralizing from hospitals and some particular projects?
I think it’s about Iran, and that this is another side of the same coin shown when someone told Hersh that tactical nukes might be used in Iran. To build support (among The Base) for whatever it’s to be in Iran,* it’s important to distinguish it from the current situation in Iraq. No mollycoddling of brown people this time — we’re going to go in, give it all we’ve got, and get out. If they can’t fix what wrong with their society after that, well, that’s hardly our problem. And anyone who objects is not only a traitor, but a weakling disabled by ‘guilt’ as well.
There’s a constituency for this kind of thinking.
* IMO: sell-job, build-up, and strike, if necessary for domestic politics, by fall. If not necessary for domestic politics to strike in the fall of 2006, a strike during early 2007.
rilke, I’m not here to defend Goldstein; he’s perfectly capable. I was simply pointing out that Mona’s flailing away at a strawman of her own device. And doing so in a decidedly dishonest way, given that she’s been corrected multiple times.
Given Goldstein’s ambiguity, I think there might be a spine in that strawman.
Mona v. Jeff: an analogy. (I know: mind-reading foul admitted to in advance.)
Jeff: Here’s a brilliant piece claiming that white guilt makes us too scared to run up the kinds of real deficits we need to fix this country. How true: sometimes, you just have to be willing to break the bank when your country needs it.
Mona: Us? Too scared to run deficits? We’re running huge deficits! What would you like to see: deficits of a trillion dollars a year?
Jeff: I never said a trillion dollars; you’re just putting words in my mouth. I just said sometimes.
Mona: Well, what would you like to see us spend? Seven hundred billion dollars a year more than we take in?
Jeff: I just said sometimes. Now I am going to retreat into abstraction punctuated by insinuations about Mona performing peculiar acts on Glenn Greenwald.
— Like I said: disingenuous.
Let me say, though, that I think Sherman’s march was necessary. And as ugly as the mass death always is, so were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imo. Hamburg too, although I think Dresden might have been superfluous. Of course, once you’ve unleashed the thing, it’s hard to stop at Hamburg, and not do a Dresden.
Slarti, you accusing Mona of “flailing away at a strawman of her own device” when you have blithely invented the strawMona yourself and are flailing away at it…? At least acknowledge you misread what Mona wrote.
Slarti- I am going to pile on here. Mona is obviously right, and you aren’t making any sense.
I’m not here to defend Mona, who I don’t know – but when A says B’s statement S means X, and C says B’s remark R refutes B, and I see that remark R contains a subjunctive in reference to X and not simple refutory statement Y, I tend to tell C that I’m not convinced. If A has been chasing B around and B has been failing to make statement Y, then I would tend to think B doesn’t actually believe Y and might in fact mean X, or at the least isn’t interested in clarifying matters in which case I don’t much care what B’s position is and arguing about A seems unuseful.
rilkefan writes: If I understand correctly, Mona says he implied he wanted to use tac nukes or carpet bombing or something equivalent.
In my first comment over there, I very calmly and politely stated how a reasonable person would read what Jeff wrote, observed that it was the case, however, that he frequently claims he has been misunderstood, and so I asked whether my understanding of what he was arguing was correct. Many of his commenters then began filling in the blanks; Dresden and Hiroshima, bombing the crap out of the place & etc…were all endorsed. But Jeff was silent for a good long while, even after I objected that Dresden and Hiroshima were absurd suggestions in the context of building Iraq up as a peaceful democracy — we are engaged in nation-building and are not at war with the people of Iraq.
Jeff wouldn’t say what he meant, finally jumping in to yammer about accusations he is a chickenhawk and various other non sequiturs and ad hominems (I have never accused him or anyone of being a chickenhawk), tho apparently finally he mentioned razing neighborhoods where terrorists are hiding. Well, how many neighborhoods, and how is that different from “turning vast parts of the nation into a glass parking lot”? How does it fit with building up the nation of Iraq both politically and in terms of infrastructure? I don’t know, and he isn’t getting specific, last I checked over there.
But all of this is to obscenely argue over absurdities. The real issue is the right-wingers who have enthusiastically glommed onto the inane theories of Mr. Shelby Steele, to wit: we can blame the liberals who, doncha know, make us feel guilty. We would have won in Iraq if only they weren’t doing their awful liberal things and inducing “white man’s guilt.”
That’s what so outraged me; the transparent and grotesque blame-shifting. Taking responsibility, and honestly examining what goes wrong when what one has endorsed has gone wrong, is the only option for people of integrity. Those who rushed to embrace Steele’s nonsense are repulsively dishonest.
rilkefan, you just made my head explode.
I read the whole thing with Shelby Foote in mind too, and I kept thinking, “How could that cute man say things like this? And isn’t he dead?”
TGB, my apologies – sending all the king’s horses over stat.
Poll: do my A says x and B says Y and etc. comments generally suck?
What’s going on with the discourse? Can I not read?
So, you’re saying this Mona is a caricature of the real Mona? I sure hope so. I mean, what sort of real person would endlessly invent positions of her opponent that her opponent has not taken? Even after these positions have been denied by said opponent?
So, yes, I’d hope we’re seeing strawMona, here.
For those who haven’t been following this, there’s a history of animosity between Mona and Goldstein that predates this thread by months, at least. So Jeff’s reluctance to clarify just for Mona has a certain context. Said context being, in my book, insufficient excuse for making up arbitrarily silly positions, assigning them to your opponent, and then taking those elsewhere and pointing said opponent out as a monster.
But, as in most other things, YMMV.
It’s gratifying to see Slarti give Jeff G. the intellectual cover to make his calls for ‘revengance,’ while nodding and winking towards his true intentions the whole time. No idea is worthy of condemnation so long as your code words are sufficiently clever is the lesson, I suppose.
Slarti, a straightforward question – are you seriously contesting that Goldstein’s thesis is that we need to Kill More Brown People Now?
Not being a big fan of the Brown People subterfuge, I’m not sure how to answer that.
As for your other comments, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Mona: how is [razing neighborhoods] different from “turning vast parts of the nation into a glass parking lot”?
Orders of magnitudes of deaths, for one. First use of nukes since the consensus against them (esp. against non-nuke-armed foes), for another.
Slart‘s a good person to pitch one’s arguments to, in my view. You’ve taken a blunderbuss to Goldstein’s position and thereby lost him. Why not drop the nuke bit and go with the entirely satisfactory “Goldstein wants us to use indiscriminant force and is afraid to say so.”
Not entirely satisfactory, in my view. First, if I’m reading Jeff correctly, he’s saying that we ought to be using (and I’m quoting him, here) “a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal”. So, not indiscriminate.
As for the “afraid to say so” part, that involves telepathy far beyond my puny skills.
I just want to note that for the first time in living memory, rilkefan has either misspelled a word or made a typo.
This would not be worth noting if it weren’t such a complete and total break with the entire previous history of the universe. It makes me wonder whether the sun will, in fact, rise tomorrow.
Could be one of those statistically insignificant possibilities that laugh in the face of probability and go ahead and occur anyways.
Bastards.
The first time I read Shelby Steele’s article I confused him with Shelby Foote
Foote’s been dead for nearly a year and he could still write a more sensible column than Steele.
Re: Goldstein. If the nature of these discussions are all academic anyway, I can’t fathom why anyone would waste their time reading someone who’s a caricature of the theory-sodden lit’ry type that conservatives have loved to mock for decades.
Said context being, in my book, insufficient excuse for making up arbitrarily silly positions, assigning them to your opponent, and then taking those elsewhere and pointing said opponent out as a monster.
Actually, this site is the only place, to the best of my recollection, that I have had anything to say about Jeff outside of his own blog. And that was to agree with Hilzoy in her calling Jeff out on various matters.
With one other exception, that Jeff himself invited. He chose to update a post with the false accusation that Greenwald had censored a guest post of mine for the reason that it was going to say approving things about Jeff, which Greenwald purportedly found intolerable. That was totally false, and I said so at Greenwald’s blog, to defend primarily myself, as one who would allow her commentary to be censored. I pulled that post, not Greenwald.
The truth is, between the time I wrote my post, and when it was to go up, Jeff made his call to (non-violent) civil war, in which he and those like him might choose to live in separate parts of the nation from the liberals he was (again) maligning. For me to then put up a “can’t we see what bridges might be built” among pro- and anti-Bush partisans who agree on many social issues, would have made me look foolish, indeed. But Jeff was deeply offended, chose to publicly post about it, and I offered my explanation at the site he was falsely accusing of censorship. And I moved on to post about the abomination that is the war on people who use (some) drugs.
hilzoy – “refutory”? Late for my wife’s O.B. appt.
If I’d said anything at all about you having done this before, this might have been good point.
Mona, I agree with the underlying idea you’re working on here — that Jeff is tossing out a ‘weasel-word’ version of ‘Kill them all and they’ll respect us.’ But in many cases, I’ve found that bending over backwards verbally to suggest the ‘palatable’ interperetation, and asking, “Perhaps this is what you meant?” is a better approach.
Often, the sort of ploy you’re objecting to only works because people CAN find a way to make it sound acceptable to themselves. “Surely, he means X…” and so on. Spelling out that potentially acceptable interperetation, and asking, ‘Surely this is what you mean, right?’ offers an opportunity for agreement, but also forces the other speaker to explain in more detail any of the deeply objectionalbe portions of his or her idea.
If it’s all a misunderstanding, things turn out well. If it’s not, and you’re right in your interperetation, speakers tend to hang themselves rather quickly.
just a note, sand will fuse into glass below the temperatures produced by many conventional weapons (given the right type of sand).
Slart’s a good person to pitch one’s arguments to, in my view. You’ve taken a blunderbuss to Goldstein’s position and thereby lost him. Why not drop the nuke bit and go with the entirely satisfactory “Goldstein wants us to use indiscriminant force and is afraid to say so.”
If I were to say that, Jeff would deny it, insist I am maligning and misunderstanding him, and slartibartfast would agree, no doubt continuing with accusations that I am erecting a strawman.
The bottom line is this: Jeff explicitly rejected targeted bombings, i.e., smart bombs. He called for a “thoroughly lethal” display of force, and long refused to give any indication what he meant by that, even as his commenters invoked Dresden and Hiroshima. The only example he (finally) offered was razing neighborhoods. Is that “all” he meant by calling for some thorough lethality? Is “white man’s guilt” preventing us only from razing a few Iraqi neighborhoods?
Goldstein is a former literary theorist; he is arguing for more vicious and lethal rhetoric.
And through the magic of speech-acts, that’s what we all get.
Jeff Eaton writes: Mona, I agree with the underlying idea you’re working on here — that Jeff is tossing out a ‘weasel-word’ version of ‘Kill them all and they’ll respect us.’ But in many cases, I’ve found that bending over backwards verbally to suggest the ‘palatable’ interperetation, and asking, “Perhaps this is what you meant?” is a better approach.
That is essentially what I did. My first comment was this, first quoting Jeff:
Jeff: I believe this is true—and I believe that the source of much displeasure with Bush and co. from supporters of the war stems from what they see as fear of appearing too brutal.
Me: Jeff, I’m trying to be certain I understand what it is that you (and Mr. Steele) seem to be arguing. Is it your position that to whatever extent we are “slogging” along in a less than ideal situation in Iraq, it is because Rumsfeld et al. were constrained by “white guilt” and a consequent fear of prosecuting the war properly? (I confess to finding that idea risible, about Mr. Rumsfeld.)
You believe that if we bombed more massively, with more death and disruption of Iraq, we would win? And be regarded as benevolent liberators by the surviving population?
I mean, at some point doesn’t that sad trope of burning the village in order to save it come into play? But—and outside of non-specific, airy recommendations that we adopt a “show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal”— just exactly what is it you think should have been, or should still be, done? (emphasis in original)
He didn’t say, for some time. Apparently, he eventually did offer that he endorses razing some neighborhoods.
Slarti, apologies for both my lack of clarity and civility earlier (posting before coffee should be a no-no).
To me, JeffG is doing the classic 1st Ammendment protected-but-still-odious version of incitement. Am I putting words in his mouth by suggesting that he’s essentially saying ‘I can’t actually say what I’d like to say, but you all know what needs to be done anyway?’ Well, yeah, but given the reaction in his thread, it seems clear that his readership ‘got it.’
And when Mona, bless her heart for taking him on over there (so we don’t have to over here, har har), calls him on it, he questions the meaning of “is”.
Or the meaning of “nuclear”, possibly.
What a cleverly crafted op-ed. Clearly prep for Iran, and aimed like a laser scalpel at the base GOP constituency which has lately shown signs of wavering… Bravo whoever coordinated it. Also quite possibly the most transparent nationwide invocation of the
white nationalismsouthern strategy since, well, jeez… Reagan, maybe?BTW I thought Vercingetorix’s comment in the PW thread was a good summary of the “kill more” position.
Implication that “international incidents” never get out of hand? Check. (odd that somebody with such a fine moniker would overlook so many of history’s major moments — maybe Caesar’s gallic campaign is all he knows about?)
Implication that APCs that currently can’t defend themselves from roadside bombs will somehow be more effective if only they have the ability to cook anybody who gets too close instead of shooting them? Check.
Complete failure to recognize that most of the insurgency is already experiencing very heavy (but of course non-nuclear) airstrikes and invasive patrolling? Check.
Short of some sort of concerted long-term carpet-bombing (possibly effective assuming we care only about insurgency and not about global terrorism), mass relocation of Sunnis (probably totally ineffective), and making central Iraq one big free-fire zone (who knows?) there’s not a lot of non-NukeBioChemo options that haven’t been tried. Oh yeah, and anybody remember “shock and awe?” The point of that little exercise was to persuade the insurgents (formerly known as the Iraqi army) that US military force was utterly unstoppable.
It’s all just a video game to some folks, isn’t it?
“I just want to note that for the first time in living memory, rilkefan has either misspelled a word or made a typo.”
Are you so sure that you know the correct spelling? This is the kind of thing that would cause me to question myself. 😉
For thirty years we have been listening to right wing nonsense about what went wrong in Viet Nam (i.e., everything was going fine until those evil Dems allegedly cut off funding in 1974) — our own Charles Bird being on the the purvayers of this nonsensical rewriting of history.
It seems that we are now into that phase of right wing think for Iraq — dreaming up illusory reasons why things have gone wrong that are as fact free as the lines about Viet Nam.
_______
As for the “we should have taken the gloves off” school of thought regarding Iraq, a few thoughts.
1. Basic counter-insurgency doctrine teaches restrained use of force since the key to the struggle is winning the support of the populace. That’s why you don’t use maximum firepower in guerilla wars — it doesn’t work. Gee — you would think someone would pay attention to that when writing on the subject. Charles Bird points out the influence of the Geneva Convention regarding unrestrained killing in the war zone, but there is a more practical reason why its not wise in a guerilla war.
Even with restraint, there has still been significant civilian deaths in Iraq — perhaps Steele could explain how a greater killing toll would further our goals.
2. As for not laying waste to the Sadrists in 2004 as was Sebastian’s point, one very big reason for restraint was that we could not afford to have the guerilla struggle spread into the Shiites — we would have been in a very bad place due to inadequate forces if we had decided to wage war on large Shiite factions. Since, you know, their militias were providing most of the security that we failed to provide.
Not entirely satisfactory, in my view. First, if I’m reading Jeff correctly, he’s saying that we ought to be using (and I’m quoting him, here) “a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal”. So, not indiscriminate.
This is the point where I call total bullschtick, Slart. What part of this–
Razing the whole neighborhood rather than trying to drop a JDAM in through a chimney sends a message to others who think it perfectly safe to allow insurgents to operate in their neighborhood.
–is inaccurate to describe as “indiscriminate”?
There is NO WAY to spin the example he have, an example intended to clarify his position. No way at all. It is at best a callous disregard for collateral damage inflicted on noncombatants, something that we have been moving away from for the last century. At worst, it is the desire to inflict indiscriminate damage on an area known to contain combatants with the expressed purpose of terrorizing the population into being afraid to harbor insurgents–a war crime under both US and international law, the perpetrators of which I would have no problem seeing put against a wall and shot.
And ultimately, what Goldstein is advocating is not just a war crime–it’s an stupid, stupid policy that would serve only to further radicalize a population, turning those who support us against us. Is Goldstein really so mentally and morally retarded as to think that only insurgency sympathizers would be caught in his hypothetical neighborhood-razing–and that this would actually benefit us? The insurgency recruitment posters practically print themselves.
No, that particular passage I think is over the top. Including the bit about shooting anyone who flees.
What that has to do with vast parts of Iraq into glass parking lots, though, is anyone’s guess.
As far as Iran goes, too late. We’ve got Marines in Iran now, according to Dennis Kucinich.
I think, unfortunately, that the urge towards fairness and restraint and giving the ole’ benefit of the doubt is cutting against the sane folk here.
Certain ideas need to be stomped on VERY HARD. Take — just to throw out an example — the notion of nuking Iran.
There’s two possible responses to this (assuming you are against it).
1) Make a long post detailing how, in calm detail, how this is a “bad idea”.
2) Say “Are you CRAZY? Nuts? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? My god, you are INSANE!”.
The first renders nukes a topic of discussion, upon which reasonable people can disagree. The second indicates that the urge to peemptively nuke Iran places one outside the bounds of civil discourse.
I think Steele falls into the latter. Yes, we can point out in detail how he’s wrong — god knows, there’s plenty of things to point out. But in reality, that’s a fake reaction. I didn’t read Steele’s piece and think “Goodness, this man is off base for a variety of reasons which I should tell my friends”.
I thought “This man is clearly crazy, a moron, or living in an alternate dimension”. And I’m sticking with it — if he believes this, he’s either a moron or insane. If he doesn’t believe it, he’s a monster for trying to justify the unjustifiable.
Either way, it’s nuking Iran or torturing terrorists again. When you’re debating the merits of torture, or preemptive nukes, or whether our problem in Iraq was “being too kind to Iraqis” — the sane ones have lost. We are not merely negotiating what flavor of insanity we’re willing to accept.
Sorry. “We are merely negotiating which flavor of insanity we are willing to accept.”.
One does not reason with fools, or the insane, or the pathologically criminal.
CharleyCarp: “Let me say, though, that I think Sherman’s march was necessary”
Me too, I guess. But in the Goldstein mode, I’m ambivalent about its ferociousness. Unfortunately, racist southern Democrats were spared to pollute the Democratic Party until the lightbulb went on over Nixon’s head. More ferocious next time.
Jackmormon: “he is arguing for more vicious and lethal rhetoric.”
I don’t know. I think “more lethal” means to him that he will print his stultifyingly sophomoric rhetoric in leaflets and drop them over Iraqi cities, thus killing all of the inhabitants with either boredom or excessive giggling (because we are all about consumer choice). My stultifyingly sophomoric rhetoric, while stopping short of the nuclear option, would be more lethal, but, like Bush, the man has made up his mind on his choice of weapons.
Once upon a time, I actually believed that sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me. That was before I stumbled on Protein Wisdom…
I’m reminded of a line from one of Tom Clancy’s old books, back in the day. One of the characters was reflecting on Soviet responses to terrorism during the Cold War. They, he said, just grabbed the bad guys, tied them up, and started taking off fingers. There was a sort of ambivalent admiration inherent in the statement — they may be the bad guys, it implied, but they really knew how to get things done.
This seems to be an extension of that philosophy — a frustrated sort of chafing that comes with the conviction that Bad Guys are hiding behind Protections that are really only meant to keep Good Guys safe. With that emotional ‘truth’ as a starting point, the rest rolls out pretty easily.
scrolling down, I see that:
Sebastian wants to execute (murder?) a popular cleric and politician. About 2,000 years ago the Romans tried that and the planet is still paying for the consequences. SH, you’re a smart guy. Please research the concept of “martyr”. (For extra credit, apply the concept in recent settings. Suggested areas of consideration include Palestine and South Africa.)
Charles Bird accuses Greenwald of being himself. This is a bad thing?
Slarti starts by saying something true: That said, it’s possible that we could have actually reduced the amount of bloodshed by being more aggressive and decisive with, for example, Sadr and his crew.
[after all, just about anything is possible, especially in Iraq. it would be nices to know, though, what being more “aggressive” toward a popular Iraqi politician and cleric means. Killed more of his followers? Bombed more of his mosques?]
then goes around the bend. Slarti, Mona has raised an entirely legitimate point here and at PW. (i’ve only skimmed the thread there.) What is the appropriate level of violence against Iraqi insurgents?
[it is noteworthy that the US has recently deployed gunships to Iraq.]
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason By Sam Harris. Reading this is leading me to believe that an overwhelming response is required but not so much physical as rhetorical. Doubling the invasion force would not have made much difference to the insurgency. A doubling of deaths but no lack of pious and enthusiastic replacements.
Anyone else read this unflinching book?
On a related point, there’s a nasty little argument going on between the left and the far left over Iraq Body Count’s numbers, with IBC being the left and their opponents the far lefties (of which I am one of the more moderate members) strongly suspecting that IBC numbers are both a significant undercount and also likely to be a biased sample. You can find some of the shouting at Tim Lambert’s site Deltoid. My argument is that the press is largely dependent on official or semi-official sources for its casualty statistics and cynic that I am, I suspect that the US and Iraqi governments would probably try to cover up civilian casualties inflicted by the US or its lovely allies, the death squads it probably helped to train in some cases. I know I’ve read of cases where reporters were able to go to a scene and check up on US government statements, and (sit down for this) they found that the locals gave a very different account of what happened and who died from what the US military said. And one hears rumors that this happened in Vietnam too and when I read Alistair Horne’s book on the French war in Algeria, I noticed his numbers got all vague when it was a question of the number of civilians killed by the French, because there was no official count for that category.
Iraq Body Count’s own case is up on their website–John Sloboda has been unfairly abused by people like me who are more inclined to be nastier than I am in emails (at least, I don’t think my emails to him were nasty) and so they responded in a somewhat heated way. They say their critics are wrong on virtually everything and then Sloboda goes and admits in a BBC interview with Steve Fuller that the true figure might be as much as twice the IBC maximum, but certainly not five or ten times, as some Lancet-influenced critics have claimed. They argue that air strikes are unlikely to be killing large numbers of civilians now because the numbers of air strikes are so low compared to the opening months. I don’t think that proves much unless you know the population densities of the areas hit by the air strikes. Lots of sloppy reasoning going on on all sides, including by me, IMHO.
Anyway, part of what got me riled up was when I read the Iraq Body Count two year analysis (which you can find on their website if you look around and came out last summer), they make a big production of how the US is the largest single killer of civilians, but when you look at the details, the vast majority (7000 or so) of the Iraqi civilians killed were killed in the opening stages of the war. Since then, except for Fallujah (maybe a couple thousand more deaths, by IBC’s reckoning), our troops have been a bunch of Mother Teresas. The overwhelming majority of the civilian death toll since the first two months (the invasion phase, as IBC terms it) are Iraqi-on-Iraqi deaths–insurgents, death squads, criminal murders. A March 2006 update said that in the previous year coalition forces (or US forces, I forget which) had killed 370 civilians, though they added that the culprits in the violent deaths of a great number of people were unknown.
In all seriousness, when I read their stuff I wonder what our troops are doing–it’s hard to believe they could be killing very many insurgents in urban areas without also killing a large number of civilians.
I think Mona has the better of the meta-argument. I find it very annoying when someone talks in deliberately vague code phrases and then stridently refuses all invitations to clarify the meaning. “How dare you assume I meant X! No, I absolutely did not mean Y! Only a fool would claim that I said Z when I didn’t!” But what DID you mean? *crickets chirp*
The point is that it’s all well and good to say “we should be more ruthless,” but when you try to translate that into real-world recommendations, suddenly none of the options look palatable. Which should lead one to reconsider the original recommendation, but in Jeff G.’s case, he simply retreats behind a shroud of vagueness.
Mona’s also raised one or more illegitimate points that I’ve taken her to task on. In fact, her illegitimate points are really about 95% of my participation in this thread.
Unless, of course, you buy that Jeff was in fact advocating the nuking or carpet-bombing of any other country. In that case, I’d have to say that you’re also completely off-base. Or, as you say, “around the bend”.
The statement “the vast majority of civilians killed, 7000 or so” referred to civilians killed by the US, according to Iraq Body Count. That wasn’t clear. In their study last summer of the first two years of the war they attributed about 9000 deaths to coalition forces, of which 74 percent were inflicted in the invasion months. In the first two years they counted 24,000 civilian dead and the US was the largest single contributor, but mostly from the invasion. The second largest contributor were criminals. Insurgents caused, if memory serves, about 9 percent at that stage, but obviously by their reckoning our fraction has been dropping the insurgent fraction rising.
Again, I tend to take all this with a truckload of salt.
As others have pointed out several times now, I think the point was no one knows what Jeff was actually “thinking”, Slarti.
Slarti: If he wasn’t advocating carbot bombing or nukes, what WAS he advocating?
That’s something at the core of Mona’s point — if “white guilt” is preventing us from acting as fully as we should militarly, obviously Jeff feels there is SOME military option we are not pursuing. Mona has guessed at what that might be, as Jeff is not forthcoming.
Speaking for myself, carpet bombing — whether Dresden-style or merely obliterating half a neighborhood rather than a single house — seems the next logical step up the military escalation tree.
I can see why Jeff might not want to admit to this — but the fact of the matter is that about all the US military HAS held back is carpet bombing and nukes. There’s not really any other escalation to be found.
So I’m forced to conclude that Jeff either endorses the US Army escalation it’s actions to carpet bombing (I doubt he’s considering nukes) OR he is completely ignorant of the US Army’s current activities in Iraq (and it’s abilities) — neither looks good for Jeff.
But tell you what — since Jeff won’t say what he considers reasonable escalation, what do YOU think? What sort of changes in the US approach in Iraq would fit the definition of “Taking the gloves off” (to an extent, at least)? Bear in mind we already routinely violate the Geneva Convention (including the kidnapping of non-combatants), have admitted to torture, and appear to be funding and training death squads.
slart writes: Mona’s also raised one or more illegitimate points that I’ve taken her to task on. In fact, her illegitimate points are really about 95% of my participation in this thread.
Take me task all you like, but you misread my statement. I allowed for whatever “thorough lethality” Jeff might otherwise mean, if not the glass parking lot scenario. As many have now noted, Jeff was purposely vague, having made a call for increased blood and civilian casualties that would look bad in the media, all as part of his desire for “thorough lethality.” Certainly many of his readers thought that was swell, and had an idea what that should mean.
And moreover, and to return to Hilzoy’s post, it is manifestly absurd for anyone to take seriously, much less embrace, that nonsense that Shelby spewed. Yet Jeff did just that. This tells me he does not recognize insanity when he encounters it. Do you?
Mona, you’re conflation of Jeff’s more “thorough lethality” with use of certain classes of existing more lethal weaponry is obviously worse then the call for the use of “more thorough lethality,” so Slarti finds it more important to call you on the former while not offering much of an opinion on the second.
In this regard, Slarti appears to have obsorbed something from the Eustonites.
I suppose we could have short-ciruited the whole meta-narrative by simply asking Slarti what he thinks of the idea of Just Needing to Blow More Stuff Up as a panacea. Is it a good idea, or the best idea?
And as I’ve pointed out several times now, it’s dishonest to simply make up what Jeff was thinking. I mean, you haven’t told me everything you’re thinking in this regard, so how about I construct some absurd position for you and then hurl invective at you for holding that position? And then, on top of that, claim your lack of serious response to said invective of evidence that you actually DO hold that position?
No, that would be…how did Francis put it…around the bend.
And if Jeff’s as seriously, completely wrong as he’s held to be by various and sundry, then there ought to be a plethora of perfectly legitimate areas of criticism without having to resort to thrashing strawmen. I think hilzoy did a creditable job addressing the Jeff’s real (as opposed to imagined) points in her post; maybe holding others to anything like that standard is unreasonable. I’ve never been a reasonable kind of guy, though.
it’s dishonest to simply make up what Jeff was thinking.
No, it isn’t. Ambiguity is not the fault of the reader, especially where the lack of clarity or specificity is intentional. Oops, there I go making up what Jeff was thinking again.
Now despite Jeff’s ‘clarification’ that heaven’s to betsy no he wasn’t talking about nukes, WHAT IS he talking about? And does it really matter from the standpoint of saying, as Morat put it “Are you CRAZY? Nuts? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? My god, you are INSANE!”
Amongst the set of possible options for What Jeff Really Meant – which clearly contains the through lethality of even the most tactical of nuclear weapons – which of these options are ok? Honestly, does it matter if we’re talking about nukes, firebombing or neighborhood executions searching for ‘collaborators’?
No, I just think actual debate is preferable to headless-chicken emoting. I’m funny that way. I disagree with Steele, but I think there is something worth discussing in Goldstein’s piece. I don’t think Goldstein’s piece is really well-connected with Steele’s, though, even though it was obviously in response to it.
Again, one thing Goldstein’s emphatically not saying (unless you really want him to be saying it, in which case you’re likely to read it right in) is that blowing things up in general is going to solve all problems in the waging of war.
How dare you advocate selling our children to space aliens!
How dare you advocate selling our children to space aliens!
Do I really need to explain the difference between drawing a rather natural inference (one of many competing inferences, to be sure, but especially given Hersh’s recent piece is) and confusing my post for the script of “Chubby Rain“?
To blatantly steal someone’s snark, The War on Straw is an unwinnable quagmire…
I am so puzzled. Jeff G. advocates blowing up entire neighborhoods where insurgents are found, Mona calls him on it, and Slarti wastes how much time trying to take Mona to task? Because Jeff G. didn’t say the magic words “turning their cities to molten glass” or whatever?
WHY is carpet bombing evil? Because it involves the indiscriminate murder of civilians.
Jeff G. advocates the indiscriminate murder of civilians: Razing the whole neighborhood rather than trying to drop a JDAM in through a chimney sends a message to others who think it perfectly safe to allow insurgents to operate in their neighborhood. Right. The 85-year-old guy in the one-room apartment two blocks away is “allowing insurgents to operate” and should be blown up for his insolence. As are his great-grandchildren downstairs. Kill them all, says Jeff G.
So whether or not he actually said “let’s carpet-bomb Iraqi cities” or not is beside the point. He’s advocating war crimes. He’s a terrible person. Arguing about irrelevant fine points sounds a lot like defending him, and I do not want to believe that Slarti would do so.
What Anderson and Pooh said. And, like Gozer, Jeff G. is allowing us our subconscious to choose the form of the destroyer.
…allowing us our…
Yes, I suck.
Too many people apologise for hastily written blog comments. I hereby rebel and embrace my poor writing skills like one would a lover…on a dark and stormy night.
To Slarti, re Mona and Jeff:
And Brutus was an honorable man.
“Please research the concept of “martyr”. (For extra credit, apply the concept in recent settings. Suggested areas of consideration include Palestine and South Africa.)”
Actually I think you will find that compared to the number of leaders killed over the last 2000 years very few martyrs have actually been created in the Jesus mode. As a probabilistic question I strongly suspect that Sadr was not likely to be an important martyr if killed. And you have to compare that to the lesson taught to potential insurgents when they learned that you could try to start a civil war TWICE and have no apparent long-term problems.
I feel smarter after reading this blog. Which, since I came here from a link on Goldstein’s site, puts me right back where I started.
“And Brutus was …”
Shouldn’t there be some corollary to Godwin about threads with Shakespeare quotes?
Which, since I came here from a link on Goldstein’s site, puts me right back where I started.
Just be sure you spend at least 15 minutes offline before switching to ObWi, or else the neural whiplash could cause permanent damage.
Am I the only one who’s curious about the phrase “unquestioned authority” ?
Bizarre, isn’t it? I guess if the South had not only won the war but conquered the North, we’d be *really* kicking some Iraqi butt … and sending the prisoners home to work the fields?
In Vino Veritas,
Nice to have you. As a regular lurker and occassional commenter here, let me recommend you read some archives as well. This is actually on the vitriolic and inane end of the political discourse here. I’ve been watching this thread grow all day and from what I can tell, there is general disagreement with the suggestion that we blow up things more indiscriminantly, but an open, though increasingly one-sided, debate about whether hyperbole is acceptable in debate, even when qualified with ” or whatever versions of “thorough lethality” Jeff has in mind?”. A rather silly sidebar, but there you have it.
For what it is worth, I tend to eschew hyperbole myself, which makes me want to support slart. On the other hand, given that he still hasn’t acknowledged a rather blatant misquote (by removing the very important last half of a sentence which contained the above qualifier) or addressed how that affects his argument, I have stayed out of it until now.
Amusingly enough, he gives the perfect example of why I dislike hyperbole in debate. Instead of discussing how ridiculous Goldstein’s argument is, the conversation has gotten sidetracked into how he never said anything about “glassifying” cities, with slart refusing any and all calls to move back to the more interesting topic of how or why we should interpret Goldstein’s comments in a way that doesn’t still leave him suggesting something that isn’t a)absurdly ignorant of the facts on the ground or b)morally atrocious.
What a great idea. Maybe we could also blow up the headquarters of the police & interior ministry to send the message to those who think it’s perfectly safe to allow death squads to operate in their midst!
Oh wait….
Maybe we could also blow up the headquarters of the police & interior ministry to send the message to those who think it’s perfectly safe to allow death squads to operate in their midst!
And after we bomb the White House, I bet *everyone* will think twice before outing any CIA operatives! Whee!
OT: Moussaoui gets life, not death.
OT: Moussaoui gets life, not death.
And the predictable howls go up against the American courts, civil rights, etc.
It doesn’t affect my argument at all, which is why I left it out. I suppose I should have quoted her in full and bolded the part that was, well, either a deliberate lie or intellectual slovenliness (which, coming from me…you don’t want to be there) but, well, anyone whose PgUp key is busted, I’ll be happy to go the extra mile.
Funny how the same thing that gets people absolutely frothy at Charles is perfectly acceptable when leveled at Goldstein.
But I agree with socratic_me that this is just a distraction from the real discussion, because it’s been repeatedly declared to NOT be part of the real discussion. Why there’s counterargument is a question that only the counterarguers can answer, because as I said upthread, my mind-reading skills are not up to it.
Not sure how predictable this is, but I’m relieved. His lawyers and prospective future lawyers, though, are probably unhappy.
Ok, so I’ll break the seal, the jurors were clearly suffering from White Guilt as well.
Aid and comfort, etc…
As a probabilistic question I strongly suspect that Sadr was not likely to be an important martyr if killed.
and the evidence for this suspicion is…? from what i remember of the days after the invasion, Sadr was from the beginning a powerful political figure, in part because he assumed the mantle of his father who was killed by Saddam.
having the son killed by the US would be such perfect irony as to be funny, if it weren’t so tragic.
slart: defense WON. they were willing to plead to LWOP (life without parole) but the US insisted on trying to kill the guy.
It’s a win/lose thing, though. They got their client off, but lost out on decades of stringing out the appeals on the death sentence.
Me, I don’t care all that much. I’d rather spend a few hundred k keeping someone in prison for life than spend a few million trying to kill him. I don’t know what the exact figures are, but ISTR awhile back that it turned out to be a lot more expensive to kill someone (or even try to kill someone) than it was to keep them in prison for the rest a their natcheral born lives.
Slarti,
you sound rather disappointed.
Anyone interested in talking about how many civilians we are actually killing in Iraq, and whether it is in fact possible to have a reasonable estimate of what that number might be? It seems like a rather basic fact that as citizens of the US we are morally obligated to want to know and if we don’t know and don’t demand to know as much as possible, then something is very, very wrong.
I tried to hijack this thread along these lines before, without much success.
There are some cases that make me wish I supported the DP; Massouai’s ain’t one of ’em.
He might have wanted to be one of the hijackers; he might have thought he should’ve been one of the hijackers; he might even have deluded himself into thinking he was going to be one of the hijackers – but the fact remains that he wasn’t one of the hijackers, and the strong inference is that AQ considered him too mentally unstable for the job.
Even prosecution claims that he held back information that might have prevented the attack is suspect, in light of all the other dropped stitches, missed opportunities, and indifference from the top on following other leads that might’ve prevented the attacks. Not to mention suspect in light of the fact that he’s a raving loon, and raving loons aren’t generally considered the best sources of verifiable intel.
So the only reason to go for the DP was the same impulse that had people supporting the war in Iraq: we couldn’t get the real perps, so let’s go after an easier, more available, target. As a rationale for killing someone, “Because they’re there” is egregious. To say the least.
The jury did a fine job, considering all the inflammatory testimony (from both sides) and implicit pressure on them to vote for the DP.
And let me also say that the idea of using the DP to give victims and families of victims “a sense of closure” is outrageous. Since when is killing someone supposed to be good mental therapy?
“Funny how the same thing that gets people absolutely frothy at Charles is perfectly acceptable when leveled at Goldstein.”
I know the former to some extent and find him smart and trustworthy. And he’s posting here.
Neither is true in the latter case.
Yeesh, more pre-baby stuff drags me away before I can check if I wrote what I think, how am I ever going to deal with the actual thing?
slart: defense WON. they were willing to plead to LWOP (life without parole) but the US insisted on trying to kill the guy.
Moussauoui Shouts: “America, You Lost!”
Yep, he confessed, he taunted us and he rubbed our noses in it.
Second attempt looks unsuccessful too. Just as well–I’ve run out of time I can spend online tonight.
Donald, your effort’s appreciated, but conditions don’t seem especially ripe here for facing up to facts…
Predictably, I agree with Stephen Green.
We are sending all sorts of bad messages to the terrorists, Islamofascists, or whatever you want to call ’em.
No matter what you say about Jeff, there is a narrative out there that is taught to our kids, and essentially signals to our enemies that we do not really believe in defending ourselves.
on a related note, i decided (for some strange reason probably indicating that I need my meds adjusted) to look at Winds of Change this evening.
We have a moral duty to use terrible non-genocidal force to shatter the Arab world’s fantasies about their own power and ours, because we really do have the power to destroy them utterly, and will do so if necessary.
was written in a comment by Tom Holsinger, one of the hosts there.
this comment so perfectly articulates to me what’s so terribly wrong with the conservative / pro-war faction in this country. According to the writer, hundreds of millions of people need to be taught a lesson.
the lesson apparently being that no one dare challenge americans’ notions of supremacy.
We are sending all sorts of bad messages to the terrorists, Islamofascists, or whatever you want to call ’em.
let’s not waste energy trying to mold our domestic policies to better please “the terrorists”.
Talk about white guilt!
These rightest reptiles were just waiting for a black man to legitimize their murderous fantasies. Steele has offered his Black blessing. Hip hip hooray! Let’s stick it to the hajiis.
hundreds of millions of people need to be taught a lesson
heaven save us from overcompensating conservatives everywhere.
Yeah, I noticed that too. Curious stuff. I think Francis found the answer on Winds Of Change: “We have a moral duty to use terrible non-genocidal force to shatter the Arab world’s fantasies about their own power and ours”…
let’s not waste energy trying to mold our domestic policies to better please “the terrorists”.
Precisely. If they think adherence to the rule of law is a weakness, that is why we are better than they are. That is why we must defeat them. If we descend to their level of revanchism and bloodlust, who really cares who wins?
To be explicit about my final point just above, if to defeat the terrorists we become as the terrorists, I don’t see much that is normatively good about our rather pyhrric (sp, rilke?) ‘victory’.
there is a narrative out there that is taught to our kids, and essentially signals to our enemies that we do not really believe in defending ourselves
You think this ‘narrative’ is more meaningful that, say, the failure to bring sufficient force to bear to take the caves at Tora Bora? Or to even try to impose order in the chaos of the first days after the fall of Baghdad? Or the failure to bring enough soldiers to hold Ramadi, Falluja, Tal Afar, and Samarra all at the same time?
Sometimes it’s not the fault of the school board, or the US Supreme Court’s ruling on organized prayer in schools.
Yes, Pooh. A fine line from a while back is that if they hate us for our freedom, then Bush is an appeaser of the first order.
You think this ‘narrative’ is more meaningful that, say, the failure to bring sufficient force to bear to take the caves at Tora Bora?
Yes, I think that the narrative, that we were carpet bombing Afghanistan indisciminately, deterred us from doing that very thing when it would have been useful.
Nothing speaks to freedom and democracy quite like cluster bombs going off in the front yard.
But the Afghanis, Iraqis and Iranians would have or will surely know that it is for their own good, and will be in there bombshelters growing flowers and baking candy to greet us with.
I’m not. Project much?
Not entirely topical: Bananaphone.
Also not topical: if you put on polarizing sunglasses and look at a flat-panel display, you can rotate your head to an angle where it all turns black.
At times, this might come in handy. Ennyway, try it and see.
Yes, I think that the narrative, that we were carpet bombing Afghanistan indisciminately, deterred us from doing that very thing when it would have been useful.
You seem to think even less of Bush and Rumsfeld than I do.
Seriously, though, I’m mystified and a little intrigued by this. You really think the military eased up on Tora Bora because of some uninformed crapola from fringe characters? I know plenty of ordnance was dropped on the caves and all; you think more would have been the answer?
Note that there’s no analog for the ears. Unfortunately. I’ll have that bananaphone song going through my head for weeks, at least.
BTW, Slarti, I may have missed the recent updates, how are the eyes?
DaveC.:
I got some pretty bad messages from that Stephen Green thread, too. So did my kid, son of said f—— liberal weenie.
Let me follow this: liberal whining weenie lawyers get M a life sentence rather than the death penalty; said thread-dwellers find this to be a good thing because M can now be, among other things, made to tend the pigs, eat the pigs, eaten by pigs, defiled sexually by pigs, defiled sexually by fellow inmates, etc, and said proceedings broadcast over RadioFreeMecca. Thank you liberal weenie whining lawyers, but there are pigs in your future, too.
Muslim Islamofascists, too, find this to be good, because they can now confirm via RadioFreeMecca in the madrashis for the youngster jihadists that M has close contact with pigs in the heart of the Great Satan. Not exactly martydom of the many virgin kind, but a little more Abu Graib behavior can be useful for recruitment, too.
A winning convergence for the terminally and righteously pissed-off on both sides. And the pigs are in hogheaven.
All because weenie mofo liberals didn’t want the death penalty (which is a good thing) and around we go again. Lots more war, if we can just get over our white guilt about past pigf–k–g incidents. Bodies stacked like cordwood, including, if weenie mofo liberals get their just desserts, my son, who up to now doesn’t know the difference between his gun and his weapon, but kind of likes barbecued pork chops, straight up.
If that happens, I and the pigs are going to make common cause. I nuke everyone.
Regards,
Chuckles
P.S. I’m agnostic on the death penalty in this case, though now that I’ve seen the case made over at Green’s place for the alternative (now that weenie liberal lawyers have provided the opportunity), I’m thinking now M should be executed. Just for the sake of my porcine friends, who want to be left alone.
Ok, I did the link to the comments instead of what Will said. (Bad link, wrong author, I’m an idiot). Here it is:
I have remarked elsewhere that this is why I’m not so opposed to the “secret prisons”.
I have remarked elsewhere that this is why I’m not so opposed to the “secret prisons”.
As long as we put one Moussaoui in there, who cares how many Uighurs we also have, right?
DaveC, I didn’t follow the trial closely, but from what I saw (and from what I’ve read in the past about him) Moussaoui was likely not considered trustworthy enough to be given any real responsibilities by al Q. – because he’s a barely competent borderline nutcase. He and Richard Reid were going to hijack an airplane? Maybe one of these. I might have made an exception to my opposition to the death penalty for an actual participant in 9/11, but I rather doubt Moussaoui deserves even life in prison instead of a long stint in a psychiatric ward.
Look, I have no problem ending him, but we have to do it right. We can’t simply “look into his soul” and see that, unlike Putin, his heart is impure.
The eye is just fine, thanks. I’m almost to the point where I can have that be my “good” eye while the other one is recovering from its surgery. I’m thinking first weekend in June, maybe.
Overall, the only complaint I have is that they didn’t really explain to me what the recovery was going to be like, or what the medicines were for. Turns out that one of the medicines (which I, fortunately, had been taking religiously) is to prevent scarring, which is highly desirable when you’re wanting good vision.
I had a long talk with one of their docs last week, and asked him what he thought my prognosis was, and he said there’s nothing that ought to prevent me from getting to 20/20 or even 20/15. Either of those would make me a very happy guy. Reassuring, too, was that my current level of haziness/unevenness is an expected part of the recovery, which he said would continue for a few months.
Pilots get this done, he said (which I’d heard before). When they do, they get both eyes done at the same time, and they’re grounded for three months. So it’s slow.
My near vision, it turns out, is just fine at ten inches away and further, so I don’t need reading glasses for much at all. Which makes me a very happy guy.
Thanks for asking 🙂
“The eye is just fine, thanks.”
That’s really cool.
Btw, re your other complaint, I recommend getting snakes to lick the wax from your ears. Then you can hear what’s actually going on in that Bananaphone song.
Blackstone: “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
Proposed revision in reaction to Mouassoui verdict: “Better to let ten innocents rot in secret prisons than to let one guilty(ish)* person be sentenced to life without parole in a supermax prison instead of executed.”
You know, I really prefer the old version.
Good for the jury, and the defense.
*as far as 9/11; I’m sure there are crimes he is straight-up guilty of.
You’re not an idiot. At least you tried to link, which would please Gary Farber.
The update paragraph beginning with “Second, and far more important’ is utter crap, of course.
Our “civilian culture”, as Will so lovingly puts it, is down approxiamtely $320 billion thus far in Iraq alone (let’s leave aside Iraq’s connection to 9/11 for pity’s sake), some 2400 dead Americans in Iraq alone, and as someone upthread mentioned, Iraq’s civilian culture is down some uncounted but big big number of dead humans. And, “succor,” he calls it?…..
And I’m not sure what he means when he says we’re going to ignore the lessons of Flight 93. Look, I’m willing to blow up every oil tanker in the world heading for the U.S., if that what it takes to defund Al Qaeda. Wait, that’s not what he wants. But he wants the nose put down and the plane to buy deep farm, right? As with Mona’s question of Goldstein, what specifically?” And does Will’s ass figure prominently in this decisive action?
It’s late. I’m tired. Good night. I’m going to sleep one hour later tomorrow, and give the world one extra hour to get its act together, or else.
Look, I wandered into ObWi pointing out that Ramzi Yousef and Abu Hamza al Masri basically got a pass from both our legal system and Britains, and in fact were protected by it. This was long after Yousef’s 1992 WTC bombing, but before the London subway bombings. So they got away with it and ZM thinks he got away with it. Before, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, State sponsers of terrorism thought that they could get away with it as well. Some still do. I thought that this has a lot to do with what Jeff was talking about, and that he made this pretty clear, but apparently he didn’t.
Pooh, you wrote “…Precisely. If they think adherence to the rule of law is a weakness, that is why we are better than they are…” Ummm, no. Bush mocks the rule of law, has violated over 750 actual statutes, has invaded two countries illegally, releases depleted uranium into the atmosphere and is basically a fuckin’ murderer. If one wishes to travel on the high horse surely one must follow the rule of law? Oh, that’s right, the Geneva Convention is “quaint” & The American Constitution is just “a goddam piece of paper”.
On the great restraint the US has shown since WWII, it might be appropriate to remember that the three most heavily bombed countries in history are Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. All by us. (IIRC, we dropped more bomb tonnage on Cambodia in the first half of 1973 alone than was dropped on Japan in the entire war.)
Meanwhile, WRT to the threadjacking debate, if the polls have not yet closed, count me among those who regards Mona as right in calling out JG, and Slartibartfast thus as a de facto apologist for Killing More People. I realize that he’s just quibbling for the sake of quibbling, as he tends to do, but on this particular issue it bespeaks either callousness or obtuseness, IMHO.
Slarti: My near vision, it turns out, is just fine at ten inches away and further, so I don’t need reading glasses for much at all. Which makes me a very happy guy.
That’s good to hear.
dr ngo: I realize that he’s just quibbling for the sake of quibbling, as he tends to do, but on this particular issue it bespeaks either callousness or obtuseness, IMHO.
Unfortunately true, though I hope this is temporary and he will recover more sense or more sensibility with clearer vision.
DaveC: The British have tried that approach to terrorism. See the Guildford Four, and then the Birmingham Six. There isn’t much to argue about; it doesn’t work.
Now, I’m going to help substantiate Godwin’s Law here, but, whenever I read:
I can’t help but think of Oradour-sur-Glane. If anyone can point out one particle of difference between that logic, and that of the Nazis in that instance, save that America is right, and the Nazis were wrong, I’d be grateful to hear it. (And the `we’re right, we can commit war crimes’ defense is rubbish.)
I probably have better things to do with my time and passion than this, but…
My father is in hospice, dying of multiple brain tumors. He’s 80, and we don’t expect him to reach his 81st birthday, which would be early in June. As a young man, he was part of the 15th Photoreconnaissance Squadron, Fifth Photographic Group, and flew a photo-recon P-38 out of Bari, Italy, in 1944-45. Some of his pictures and records are online now, after years of my meaning to do it and not getting around to it. It’s to my great relief that I was able to show him the early results while he could still appreciate them; I don’t know if he’ll be able to register any more now.
I tend to do a lot of looking at current events and thinking, “Are we as a country honoring the legacy of Lt. Hal Baugh, and all those millions like him? Is this the sort of world for which they fought?” And I do a lot of thinking, “No, it isn’t.” When I read allegedly adult, allegedly responsible people like Shelby Steele and Jeff Goldstein, I feel a special anger – that their hatemongering yearning for death and destruction would be part of the state of my country as my father leaves this life is appalling. They don’t know the first damn thing, apparently, about what “we the people” are supposed to be doing or why. Somehow they’ve managed to get to this stage of life either never learning the most basic features of American morality or willfully setting them aside.
I simply can’t respect them. I take them seriously, but only as I take the threat of mugging or electrocution seriously, because it’s a threat. They’re dangerous to the world I want to live in, the world that people like my parents hoped to leave for us all. I can’t readily imagine what sort of twisted, rotted soul it takes to be able to say, “Why yes, Mr. Baugh, we think that the best use of our freedom and opportunity is to wish even more misery and terror on others, so that they will fear us. You might have thought that you were there to help free Italians, Germans, Slavs, and the rest from tyranny and then help them up to live more like you, but these are browner people and modern times, and we now want them only to fear and serve us.”
Dad has always been a peaceful man. I don’t think he’d punch someone who tried to tell him that. But right now I probably would on his behalf. At a minimum I’d try to throw the bastard out of his room.
I am ashamed of the state of my country, ashamed of this vocal bunch of moral imbeciles and howler monkeys who got the chance to try to piss away completely a hard-won drive toward moral betterment. America never was the pure stronghold of virtue that Dad’s training manuals and “why we’re fighting” lectures portryaed…but a lot of people wanted it to be, and tried to make it less a vision and more a reality. Lots of people still do. But – and I mean this with whatever remnants of faith I have in me – God damn the vile schemers and the combination of bad luck and evil ambition that let them get on top. It’s going to be hard to throw them over, and if and when they finally go, so very long to repair the damage. I would like to think that when I’m, say, 72, my country will again have something like the moral standing it did when my father was that age, but I’m not at all sure it’s possible.
And in the face of this vigorous, deliberate, enthusiastic betrayal of what I was raised to hold dear, I find some of the quibbling as off-putting as Dr. Ngo does.
(To give context to my penultimate paragraph above, I’m 40 this year. So 72 is three decades and a bit away. Yes, I do mean that I anticipate my country still being a wounded mess that far off, even if we throw the bastards out as soon as we can.)
In other words, by pointing out Mona as being serially wrong in characterizing Jeff’s post(s) on this topic, I secretly am advocating turning Iraq into a glowing, radioactive wasteland.
Secret confession:
I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL.
Just saving you some time, is all.
Slarti: In other words, by pointing out Mona as being serially wrong in characterizing Jeff’s post(s) on this topic
As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, you are seriously mischaracterizing Mona’s comments on Jeff’s post: this makes you sound obtuse, to me, rather than callous. Try re-reading what Mona actually wrote, and responding to that, rather than picking out half a sentence and trying to pick a fight over it.
Ok, let’s quote the whole bit here:
Opening up Mona’s skull to find out what she really meant, or whatever else you had in mind, is frankly repugnant.
You really can’t even see “or whatever versions of ‘thorough lethality’ Jeff has in mind?” even when you cut-and-pasted it yourself?
“You really can’t even see ”
I posted it and only then realized that might be taken as an overly-personal comment: which was not intended, and apologies for any offense given.
No, I can see it just fine. And I resent the hell out of you suggesting that we crack Mona’s skull for further information. I mean, that kind of thing is completely out of bounds. Hitler could have come up with something like that.
No, I can see it just fine.
So, your continued quibbling about what Mona meant really is because you can’t comprehend an “or” statement? That’s just bizarre.
I see the “or” just fine, and comprehend just fine. I even used it myself.
I’m still stunned that you haven’t yet denied that you want to open up Mona’s head. What other foul deeds do you have in mind? I mean, the mind simply staggers.
I see the “or” just fine, and comprehend just fine.
Oh, I see. Your continued pretense all the way down this thread that you don’t comprehend it was purely for self-entertainment. Well, I think you’re entitled to amuse yourself a little under the circumstances, but I hope you’re not going to make a habit of it: starting arguments by pretending not to understand a simple statement (and keeping up the pretense of non-comprehension) is boring/annoying.
That’s odd; I was having almost those exact thoughts about…oh, what’s the use?
I never, ever pretended that I didn’t comprehend it. Any notion you might have to that effect is due to your usual reading disability, or maybe something else.
I never, ever pretended that I didn’t comprehend it.
Here, here, and here, you pretend not to understand what Mona is saying. (Actually, I assumed at first that you genuinely didn’t understand what Mona was saying, but if you wish to claim that you comprehended what she was saying just fine, then clearly, in those comments, you are only pretending not to.)
Why are you pretending not to understand what I’ve been talking about all along, Jesurgislac?
Slarti,
I don’t think it’s pretense. I also think there’s lots of us who don’t understand how you can repeatedly read her statements that wrong.
I think all of me don’t understand how you don’t read it that way. It’s as if you’ve all been lobotomized or something.
I did say “or”, just to be clear, so that couldn’t possibly offend.
Also, I have to bravely speak out and declare you all apologists for dishonest argumentation. Someone’s got to do it. If I were to follow Dr. Ngo’s lead, I’d also accuse you of being apologists for something entirely unrelated to anything else you’ve said on this thread, but I cannot bring myself to engage in something that silly.
In other words, I think I’m getting in touch with my inner Moe.
Slarti,
I was not here during Moe’s period, but if that is a taste of Moe, I have no idea why anyone views that era with anything approaching respect, much less fondness.
I say Irahqi, you say Irack-i
I say let’s talk-y, you say attack-y
Irahqi, Irack-i, Let’s talky, attack-y
Let’s call the whole thing off!
Let’s call the whole thing off!
better get new post up, then.
I bet if some people looked hard enough they would even take issue with Jeff’s advice on how to caulk windows. Weep hole, indeed. Probably a project for slart.
Slarti, from my point of view, this is what the exchange looks like:
Person 1 says, “Person A is apparently in favor of indiscriminate killing, on any scale that might satisfy his lust for death and destruction. How far is this going to go, to option 01 or what?”
Person 2, which is you, says, “Person A never actually endorsed option 01.”
At this point the whole exchange becomes about the literal presence or absence of option 01.
At no point do you seem to show any serious interest in the overall truth of Person 1’s observation, which appears to many of us to be a true and valid reading of Person A’s comments – that A really does seem in favor of large quantities of death and destruction for profoundly stupid and immoral reasons. Asked to comment on that, you toss off a casual line or so and basically dodge everything else, in favor of obsessing over whether option 01 is in A’s utterances.
It’s as if Person A were to say “I’d really like to see bodies stacked like cordwood and don’t care if they’re individually guilty or not, because I hate the whole damn area and death would make me feel better”, and Person 1 were to say, “A is endorsing serial killing for therapeutive reasons”, and you were to spend a dozen plus posts explaining why this wouldn’t be serial killing as defined by the FBI’s profiling unit and certain precedents, and studiously dodged every effort to acknowledge that A is talking about a lot of indiscriminate killing for very bad reasons and that moral people should condemn this.
That’s the essence of my frustration, at least. From time to time you like to play like there’s no subtext or context, but the fact is that language as used by living souls has both.
I totally agree with what Bruce Baugh said so eloquently upthread. Yes, they are shameful people, most of all because they have degraded the high ideals of our nation.
It is so ironic that there is this debate about whether or not someone somewhere wants to make a parking lot out of Iraq while right now the Bush administratin is tip toeing away from Afganistan ( declaring victory all the while).
This was a war Repbulicans wanted and they cooked the intel to get support. They ran both wars. . The results will be theirs, no matter how they spin it. The most likely senario in my opinion is that incrementally we will withdraw all, the while declaring victory, in the hope that no one will notice if Iraq and Afganistan collapse into total chaos, and blame-the-Democrats is the back up plan.. In other words I don’t think this administratin is committed to victory anywhere except here and all of their actions regarding Iraq and Afganistan are done with our elections in mind, not based on any actual policy there.
So the failure of will is theirs, too.
I totally agree with what Bruce Baugh said so eloquently upthread. Yes, they are shameful people, most of all because they have degraded the high ideals of our nation.
It is so ironic that there is this debate about whether or not someone somewhere wants to make a parking lot out of Iraq while right now the Bush administratin is tip toeing away from Afganistan ( declaring victory all the while).
This was a war Repbulicans wanted and they cooked the intel to get support. They ran both wars. . The results will be theirs, no matter how they spin it. The most likely senario in my opinion is that incrementally we will withdraw all, the while declaring victory, in the hope that no one will notice if Iraq and Afganistan collapse into total chaos, and blame-the-Democrats is the back up plan.. In other words I don’t think this administratin is committed to victory anywhere except here and all of their actions regarding Iraq and Afganistan are done with our elections in mind, not based on any actual policy there.
So the failure of will is theirs, too.
Person 2 also pointed out that Person A has personally apprised Person 1 that option 01 is absolutely NOT what he was talking about, and that continued references to option 01 in association with the statements of Person A are therefore a steaming heap of dishonesty. Ditto for references to carpet-bombing. Which has been my ONLY point all along.
And, granted, my doing so makes me an apologist for all bloodthirsty bastards out there, in addition to having had memes evolving from white supremacist thought transmitted to me. If this sort of argumentation is what’s considered acceptable and valid, I’m not having any.
Bruce: from my point of view, this is what the exchange looks like:
…..
At this point the whole exchange becomes about the literal presence or absence of option 01.
I’ve seen JimakaPPJ do very similiar derailing of threads on TalkLeft, too, and should have caught on earlier to what Slarti was doing here. Bad Jes. No biscuit.
New thread?
There are times when threads degenerate into almost childlike squabbling. This is close to, but not quite there.
From my point of view, there are actually two things being discussed here.
One is what both Steele’s and Jeff’s comments say about where a certain part of our population is in regard to how we deal with the world. That is, after all, why, IMO, hilzoy made this post to begin with.
Too some degree, that requires some degree of generlization, but not necessarily too much.
The second is Mona’s reaction to Jeff’s column, and slarti’s onjection to the hyperbole used by Mona.
First of all, I think the hyperbole used by Mona would be totally appropriate at PW. It appeasr, both from her comments here, and reading the link, that the only way she was going to be able to get any kind of definition of what Jeff meant was to reach that level. And with no response of that sort coming prior to that level of commentary, it was approrpiate.
Slarti objected to her stating on this site that that was what Jeff was proposing, among other options. Particularly since Jeff, to slarti’s satisfaction, disavowed that extreme a tactic.
The problem became when everybody else started accusing slarti of not responding to the question of what he considered appropriate. However, that is not the issue. Also when others started supporting Mona’s “extreme” interpretation of what Jeff meant.
FWIW, I personally think Jeff would not at all object to what Mona was alluding to. However, he is not about to come right out and say so. He lets his readers make the connections.
However, slarti is correct that to directly state that his what he meant, when he has not said so is somewhat presumptuous.
Yes, slarti could have defused the situation somewhat by acknowledging early on the “or” clause and conceding that Jeff was calling for extremely drastic, and possibly (as pointed out by several posters) illegal methods.
And yes, Mona could have defused the situation somewhat by admitting that Jeff did not call for turning Iraq into a glass parking lot. And yet still saying that he was not really saying what he did consider a suitable, more aggressive , non-white guilt hampered strategy.
And yes, slarti, hyperbole may be detrimental to a reasoned debate, but at times it is necessary to release the frustration that people feel on both sides.
Good grief, Slart. I’ve seen you reduce threads to irrelevancy before with Farber-caliber pedantry, but this absolutely takes the cake. Add me to the list of people who are just dumbfounded at your unwillingness to make a simple concession that you misquoted and misread Mona and wasted everyone’s time arguing the point. Mona’s plain meaning did not require mindreading, divination, or guesswork. She was clearly not saying what you claimed. Yet through over nearly the entire thread you still persisted on blatantly misquoting her, omitting a key phrase that changed the entire meaning of what she said in a way that favored your misrepresentations.
You were wrong–completely. You were corrected–exhaustively. You have ignored those corrections in your responses–repeatedly.
You are not a stupid man, Slart. No one with your intelligence who does the job you do could possibly fail to grasp what we have been explaining to you. Don’t force the rest of us to conclude by process of elimination that you are operating dishonestly and in bad faith.
I feel exactly the same about most of the rest of you, Catsy.
So you can see how your sort of argument might not find traction over here, right?
That you and others believe that I misquoted Mona, quoted her out of context, or whatever: absolutely baffling. How is quoting in entirety misquoting?
Some of you are already there. And I’m finding myself increasingly apathetic about those opinions, given the process by which they were reached.
“How is quoting in entirety misquoting?”
The problem isn’t that you are misquoting. It is that, once you have quoted, in applying the quotation you seem to repeatedly elide over a very significant phrase, which changes the meaning of the quote.
Slarti, your desire may be mutually harmonious with that of others to refrain from straining at gnats while swallowing camels. For me, the fact that others – including people of real influence, unlike thee or me – are endorsing obtusely vague desires for more violence and less judgment and restraint seems a lot more important than whether one specific hypothetical is a precisely accurate matter. Particularly when the person that Mona was speculating about went through such a dance to avoid staking out any specific turf, and then did by staking out turf of collective guilt and the utter abolition of moral distinctions, and furthermore a kind of turf proven by half a century and more of history to not work.
But that’s me.
Wow, this thread has turned harsh (by ObWi standards, at least). Since I don’t read Protein Wisdom I have no opinion on Jeff Goldstein’s toolery or lack thereof. But I do have a few thoughts on collective punishment.
It occurs to me that there might be a teeny tiny kernel of truth to Steele’s argument, but only under very specific circumstances. To take the example of World War Two, we had been attacked by Japan, and Hitler did declare war on us first. During the war, our rhetoric and propaganda did not talk about liberating the Japanese and German people from their dictatorial leaders. Instead, we tarred them as “aggressor nations,” who were by their very nature a threat to the “peace-loving nations.” (Stalin’s Soviet Union was of course included in this latter category – cognitive dissonance is not just a feature of modern-day politics).
Because we held the German and Japanese people responsible for the actions of their governments, there was little effort made to spare civilians the consequences of our bombing campaigns. And as the war lengthened, civilians were eventually targeted deliberately (Dresden, Hiroshima, etc.). But the main focus of our bombing efforts were on military, industrial, and transportation targets.
Without getting into a debate about the effectiveness of bombing campaigns on civilian morale, I will note that atritting our enemies’ economic capabilities certain contributed to their eventual surrender, if only because they lacked the means to build the necessary weapons to keep fighting.
Now here’s a hypothetical modern situation where I believe something similar might be warranted. Let us suppose that a nuclear bomb goes off in an American port, and we trace it back to a hostile government. In that case, I would certainly support a bombing campaign that deliberately targeted not just military installations and communications, but economic targets as well – factories, bridges, dams, oil wells, etc. And I wouldn’t be too concerned about collateral damage. I (and I believe the American people) would demand not a war of liberation, but the conquest of an enemy nation, and only that nation’s unconditional surrender would be cause to stop.
But I would only support such an action under the same circumstances that started WWII – a deliberate attack by a hostile power that caused mass casualties. Iraq doesn’t qualify.
Folks, at some point, affection has to replace reason. If Uncle Slarti thinks that Mona significantly misrepresented Goldstein, and doesn’t respond to what seems like lucid refutation, we must shrug and move on.
Why are we allowing Jeff Goldstein to suck and ruin this site?
We already have people for that.
ThirdGorchBro, the pilot training manuals I’m looking at from 1943-4 do talk about liberating the German people from the Nazi tyranny. The instructions for downed pilots are pretty clear on the importance of not alienating random locals, who are not the enemy. Naturally this could and did coexist with propaganda that set other priorities. For that matter, the manuals for the Pacific theatre gloss over that a lot more, partly because, well, blending in would be harder for most downed pilots, but also as part of a higher overall level of really racist caricature. (I’m looking forward to getting this stuff scanned and online. It’s fascinating.)
*shrug*
*tries to move on*
Oh, wait.
Slarti, start a new thread on something entirely different from anything we’ve been discussing on this thread. Then we can all move on to that. 😉
Jackmormon is my hero of the day.
So as I understand the Goldstein position there are three relevant levels of force:
The current level, which is inadequate,
A much more extreme level, including tactical nukes, carpet-bombing, etc., which would be wrong. (Thus he endorses the idea that there are moral limits to acceptable force)
A “just-right” level that would be successful but not cross moral boundaries.
This “just-right” level is known to Goldstein, who through some unknown means has become an expert in counter-insurgency tactics. While his refusal to endorse, say, tactical nukes, is grounded in sound principle, those who are dubious about the “just-rightness” of his preferred approach are motivated by silly PC notions of white man’s guilt, etc.
Is that it? Is that really his point?
Bruce – I’d be interested in seeing those manuals when you get them scanned. And yeah, WWII (like all wars) did let loose some of our worst instincts, as well as our best. I’ve read some pretty terrifying things about the savagery of the fighting in the Pacific.
For that matter, the manuals for the Pacific theatre gloss over that a lot more, partly because, well, blending in would be harder for most downed pilots, but also as part of a higher overall level of really racist caricature.
I could probably find it in Wiki in 5 minutes or so, but I recall that the Japanese lynched or executed a fair number of downed bomber crewmen. The Germans did the same I think but not so many. Anyone got anything to correct these impressions?
“Particularly when the person that Mona was speculating about went through such a dance to avoid staking out any specific turf, and then did by staking out turf of collective guilt and the utter abolition of moral distinctions, and furthermore a kind of turf proven by half a century and more of history to not work.”
This seems to be a recurrent theme in the charges against Slarti in this thread. It seems to me that the specific turf charged by Mona (nuclear anhiliation) was specifically not alluded to, which seems to be Slarti’s point.
Third Gorch: Yeah, the history of the Pacific war is something that a lot more folks should know. It’s so very relevant to some modern conflicts. Simply knowing that we’ve been up against people really serious about fighting to the death, and that we prevailed, matters.
Bruce,
IN respect to the not too leinent, not too violent level that you mention in your post, I don’t think Goldstein is proclaming knowledge of that level, but simply suggests that it might be worth asking if our current level of engagement is at the “just right” now, or if the “just right” level might involve more violence than we currently use.
BRD
Bernard,
Why don’t you go over to his site and ask him? I’m sure you’ll be met with a measured and perfectly reasonable answer. Or you’ll be swamped with childish insults and a mess of faux ironic and unfunny CAPITAL LETTER STRAWMAN ARGUMENTS.
Sebastian, a warning. Although, as noted above, I agree with you, you may not want to put yourself into the line of fire on this one.
Besides, also as noted above, Slarti could have defused the whole thing early on, and chose not to. (Not to put all the responsibility on Slarti.) The person who implied that Slarti, by not condemning Jeff was in effect approving of illegal and immoral tactics was definitely over the line.
See, I thought Mona covered that pretty well with this comment:
Yeah, emphasis on “not exactly clarifying what he is talking about.” That’s called wanting to make extreme and obscene statements without having to take responsibility for them: rejecting the strategic use of “smart” bombs in favor of more “thorough lethality,” without having to be held responsible for the common options that constitute more “thorough lethality.”
He rejects smart bombs as insufficient. He calls for more lethal means being employed and says we ought to be willing to accept greater civilian casualties and ugly pictures in the media. Well, just what does that mean? The ever-coy Jeff isn’t saying, and if you raise the obvious methods of escalating to more thorough violence than rendered by the smart bombs he rejects, then you are oh-so-unfairly maligning Jeff.
The point being that if you make a broad claim and are unwilling to clarify, then your rejection of the logical conclusions of your claim seems a bit less sincere. A point I believe Mona addressed much more eloquently than I. In that case, I can see why she would include what she considers the natural extension, even while noting that there may be something else Goldstein has in mind that we can’t know because he won’t say.
An observation:
One thing to consider is that at Protein Wisdom there is a tendency to use the term “lethality” in something a bit more keeping with the way the term is used in the defense sector. Lethality through the entire sensor-shooter loop, let alone through the broader ROE, etc. factors, invovles a fairly specific set of concepts. When some folks run into the term, they get super reductionist and simply swap the term “lethality” for “murder”. I think this departure in understood meaning is what’s driving much of the hubub.
BRD
Anderson, yes, the level of Japanese violence against their POWs (and folks who weren’t yet formally POWs but were seeking to be) was much higher than the German level. I think one can – and should – criticize the US legacy of racism with regard to the Japanese without ever losing sight of the fact that Imperial Japanese policy on war was really, really bad, unrestrained in evil in a way that the Nazis didn’t match.
Imperial Japanese policy on war was really, really bad, unrestrained in evil in a way that the Nazis didn’t match.
Except on the Eastern Front.
I’m a little disappointed that Jes or CharleyCarp or someone hasn’t critiqued my war-mongering above. Although this thread is pretty much winding down, I guess.
Okay, i should have said “…that the Nazis didn’t match against the Western allies”. Good catch and correction.
TGB, I don’t think you were war-mongering. Whether or not Jes or Charley did I can’t address.
Basically you were talking about measured response based upon provocation.
Since you and Bruce brought up WWII, I am somewhat surprised that this thread has gone on as long as it has and no one has mentioned that the one thing Jeff did suggest, the razing of neighborhoods where insurgents may be operating out of, is not that different from the Germans lining up villagers in retaliation for resistance fighters acting against them.
That really worked well for them.
3rdGorchBro: I’m a little disappointed that Jes or CharleyCarp or someone hasn’t critiqued my war-mongering above. Although this thread is pretty much winding down, I guess.
Indeed. I feel that we should shrug and move on: Slarti successfully Farbered the thread, let’s acknowledge that, have a group hug, and move on.
I’m not sure that he is ‘unwilling to clarify’. That is rather different from ‘did not clarify in the post’. And to the extent that he did clarify, he specifically took away the option (and option it surely is since we have the capability) of using nuclear weapons. Mona specifically alluded to nuclear weapons as if he had left that option open. He did not.
I fully agree with your idea that if you make a broad claim and refuse to clarify on the logical conclusions of your claim that you might seem insincere. See the exchange with Jesurgislac for instance here for instance with deliberate tap dancing around ‘murder’. Interestingly the response here was not in line with the current chorus against Slarti.
Baggage. Let the liberals carry the baggage.
There is a job to do and no, not sloppy carpet bombing.
Time is pressing, or were you not aware of the drone flyovers from South Lebanon, marking Israeli targets.
http://www.MichaelTotten.com
Well that answers it then. Slart, Laura and I are the clear thinkers and absolutly correct.
Turning parts of Iran to glass, cutting out the cancer, so to speak, is the thing to do.
*Almondjeans* is busy marking targets in Israel with Hizbullah controlled drones from south Lebanon, so we should get to a decision promptly.
It saddens me to see decision cowerdice here, except for say the Big Bangin* Hunter. So cautious of a concrete commitment lest panties become moist due to fear of loss of *cool*.
Although, the glass option can come later. Only precision conventional would get the job done to start with.
A few days warning to the folks on the ground would keep them on side. Remember, they hate the Cleric mullusks as much as we do. Almondjeans hi-jacked the election, right? TG
Sure, Putin would offer some glow powder to Iran, but Putin would sell his mother*s dentures too.
Doing nothing is not an option. In the 14th century thinking mode, nothing equates to white flag with Islamofacists. TG
Baggage. Let the liberals carry the baggage.
There is a job to do and no, not sloppy carpet bombing.
Time is pressing, or were you not aware of the drone flyovers from South Lebanon, marking Israeli targets.
http://www.MichaelTotten.com
Well that answers it then. Slart, Laura and I are the clear thinkers and absolutly correct.
Turning parts of Iran to glass, cutting out the cancer, so to speak, is the thing to do.
*Almondjeans* is busy marking targets in Israel with Hizbullah controlled drones from south Lebanon, so we should get to a decision promptly.
It saddens me to see decision cowerdice here, except for say the Big Bangin* Hunter. So cautious of a concrete commitment lest panties become moist due to fear of loss of *cool*.
Although, the glass option can come later. Only precision conventional would get the job done to start with.
A few days warning to the folks on the ground would keep them on side. Remember, they hate the Cleric mullusks as much as we do. Almondjeans hi-jacked the election, right? TG
Sure, Putin would offer some glow powder to Iran, but Putin would sell his mother*s dentures too.
Doing nothing is not an option. In the 14th century thinking mode, nothing equates to white flag with Islamofacists. TG
Baggage. Let the liberals carry the baggage.
There is a job to do and no, not sloppy carpet bombing.
Time is pressing, or were you not aware of the drone flyovers from South Lebanon, marking Israeli targets.
http://www.MichaelTotten.com
Well that answers it then. Slart, Laura and I are the clear thinkers and absolutly correct.
Turning parts of Iran to glass, cutting out the cancer, so to speak, is the thing to do.
*Almondjeans* is busy marking targets in Israel with Hizbullah controlled drones from south Lebanon, so we should get to a decision promptly.
It saddens me to see decision cowerdice here, except for say the Big Bangin* Hunter. So cautious of a concrete commitment lest panties become moist due to fear of loss of *cool*.
Although, the glass option can come later. Only precision conventional would get the job done to start with.
A few days warning to the folks on the ground would keep them on side. Remember, they hate the Cleric mullusks as much as we do. Almondjeans hi-jacked the election, right? TG
Sure, Putin would offer some glow powder to Iran, but Putin would sell his mother*s dentures too.
Doing nothing is not an option. In the 14th century thinking mode, nothing equates to white flag with Islamofacists. TG
I don’t think Goldstein is proclaming knowledge of that level, but simply suggests that it might be worth asking if our current level of engagement is at the “just right” now, or if the “just right” level might involve more violence than we currently use.
BRD,
I think you were responding to me, not Bruce.
Goldstein’s post is somewhat opaque to me, I confess, but I think his position is a lot more aggressive than just “we need to evaluate.” Whether he claims to know the right level or not is hard to figure out, but it is clear that he thinks the right level is more violence than at present but not an unlimited amount.
Sebastian, I read that whole thread. And while I agree that Jes was being evasive, I have a question for you.
If she had come right out and said that no, she was not accusing anyone of murder, would you have accepted that response?
Or would you have continued to argue the point with her?
I am really curious about that.
kids… the horse, she is dead.
TGB, I’m going to have to disappoint. I’m not seeing much in your 11:46 with which I disagree. I think Dresden was over the top, because I think by February 1945 war capacity and morale in places like that weren’t in issue.
Actually, I’m going to do more than disappoint. I supported the bombing of Serbia in the 1990s, despite the complete lack of Serbian attack on the US. (Worse, I spent much of the mid-1990s arguing with my German brother-in-law that we were going to have to ‘shoot some Serbs’ to bring the situation in Bosnia under control — he took what is sometimes called the Euroweenie position). Loss of innocent life is always regrettable, but sometimes these things happen. Serbia wasn’t a war of anihilation, from our side, but then WWII very quickly went from total war to nearly a dead stop as each belligerent dropped out.
Sebastian,
It just came clear to me that there is a fundamental difference in how that “or” is being parsed by different parties here. I read it as a firmer separation that amounted to “this untenable position or whatever other position he holds, which I suspect would be equally untenable” where others read it as “this untenable position which he holds or whatever other delusional fantasy he might cook up”. That makes a pretty huge difference in how overblown and out of touch we consider the hyperbole.
As for Goldstein, I think that you have to add “and was unwilling to positively clarify to any significant degree in his comments”. When pressed he has denied things he doesn’t like, but he hasn’t offered much in the way of positive definitions, which makes his position less tenable.
For what it is worth, I agree with slart that hyperbole is generally unhelpful, which is why I chimed in at all. That and to welcome a visitor. Usually, I let the snark slide here until it gets too bad or causes a threadjack. While I wasn’t really pleased with the hyperbole migrating here, I thought it was realtively mild and could be overlooked.
As best I can tell, there are two things that keep this place civil. One is a firm commitment to the posting rules. The other, which can’t be enforced but should be encouraged, is a general willingness to allow some slippage and still stay non-aggressive. The latter didn’t occur here, which is what lead to the thread-jack.
Well, dang, CC and john miller, I guess we’ll just have to join in that group hug with Jes. I’ll try to be more controversial next time. 😉
don’t worry, TGB, I’m sure the opportunity will arise.
“Or would you have continued to argue the point with her?”
Knowing the basis of the argument, we could have then proceeded to talk about “accident”, “manslaughter”, “justifiable killing” or other similar topics. I was unwilling to fully engage those topics until I had a good sense of the parameters. I hate wasting time arguing for a day or two about (to use an example that is not as charged) the best ways to improve the US primary and secondary education systems only to find out at the end that I’m arguing with someone who doesn’t believe there are any big problems in the US education system. I prefer to figure out what we are really talking about before wasting time talking about things that apparently aren’t at issue. Furthermore I had been repeatedly burned by taking her words to obvious conclusions, so rather than do so I asked a question to ensure that I wasn’t misreading. Evasion ensued.
In the case of Jeff, it seems that he specifically took off the table the idea of nuking Iraq. Mona argued as if he didn’t do that. Now I’m not one to suggest that a simple denial completely absolves. If David Duke said “I’m not a racist”, I would disagree. But in doing so, you have to marshall good evidence. When talking about tactics in war if someone says “I believe we need to use more brutal tactics than we currently use–but those tactics should still stop short of nuclear weapons or destroying cities outright.” I don’t see how you can easily translate that into “We ought to glass the place”. First, “We ought to glass the place” is slang which tracks to nuking things. Second, nuking things is specifically a tactic he places out of bounds. So third, the person making such an argument either isn’t paying attention (hey it happens) or just doesn’t believe Jeff. If the second option, the person making the argument should offer some evidence that Jeff secretly wants to glass Iraq even though he specifically called that out as an unacceptable tactic. Or such a person could show that Jeff has previously advocated glassing as an acceptable tactic for fighting counter-insurgency. (I would probably use that tactic to fight David Duke if he claimed he were not racist.) Mona hasn’t done either. In short, Jeff specifically drew the line at somewhere before nuking (a rather easy thing to do I would hope) and Mona doesn’t seem to believe him. Slarti appears to want Mona to either retract or defend the accusation that Jeff thinks nuking is a good counter-insurgency tactic.
At this point, I’d be happy if just one other person that’s a frequent commenter here could acknowledge what Sebastian has. I don’t expect Mona to retract or acknowledge because she’s still hooked into the whole carpet-bombing idea.
Thanks, Sebastian. You nailed it, and (best of all) without once accusing me of being an apologist for mass murderers or an advocate of the use of nuclear weapons.
“In the case of Jeff, it seems that he specifically took off the table the idea of nuking Iraq.”
JFTR, where exactly? I’ve already spent more time on this than I would have wanted.
Slart, I’m already on record above disagreeing with some of Mona‘s argument as downplaying the significance of nukes. And others have as well, I think. (Don’t make me reread the thread.)
Slarti, FWIW, from a comment of mine upthread: “However, slarti is correct that to directly state that(alluding to nuking) is what he (Jeff) meant, when he has not said so is somewhat presumptuous.”
Don’t know if you consider me a frequent commenter or not.
She did? I must have missed that, and I thought I was reading the substantive posts pretty carefully.
Aside from the three inflammatory words on the left side of that “or” clause, where exactly did she argue in that way? Can you offer some quotes (two would be sufficient, though more would be preferable), Wherein Mona Makes an Argument Which Has As One of Its Premises (even an implicit premise) the Assertion That Goldstein Advocates the Use of Nukular Weapons?
Scratch that. Just one will be plenty.
Jeff’s post consist largely of quoting Steele and registering approval. The part that takes using nukes off the table is:
“For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along—if admirably—in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one—including, very likely, the insurgents themselves—believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.”
Not that I don’t appreciate it, john, but sometimes in the course of battling through a lot of unpleasantness, the ray of sunshine is missed. Maybe in another day or two I won’t be quite so irked by some of what’s been said here that I cannot see the rest.
Rilke, too: acknowledged, and thanks.
On the surface of the screen, I agree largely with what Sebastian said. However, I don’t believe JG is arguing in good faith so have some sympathy for Mona’s side of things, which put me into the awkward position of seeing Slart sticking up for a good faith interpretation of someone whom I don’t think deserves it. Explaining why I don’t think Goldstein deserves a good faith reading would require me to talk about his version of postmodernism, which makes me so angry I could spit and which I’m sure none of you could be interested in.
radish – if I say, “We need to reduce our gas consumption drastically”, and you say, “What exactly should we do?”, and I say, “I dunno”, and you say, “Well, do you want to outlaw the use of cars or just SUVs or what?”, haven’t you gone overboard in a premise-like way?
Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that I will agree with you on anything else in the future, but I will defend your right to say it. 🙂
Slart, I’ll have to disappoint you too: your comments, Mona’s, and those responding one way or the other, treat topics that are among the subjects (who’s being intellectually honest: not among public figures, but among bloggers and commenters) I try* not to follow closely enough to form an opinion. That is, I’ve been skipping them entirely, as soon as I figure out that a comment is about that. With the exception of yours of 1:59.
* I frequently fall short on this, and get embroiled. It’s always a mistake.
JM: for some reason, I don’t get the implicit conclusion of “JG is arguing in bad faith on this topic” as evidenced by “I disagree with JG on postmodernism”. I encourage you to flay him as you will over on the IHCB site.
I’m going to say this once: If you cannot bother yourself to read JG’s comments section of the post linked to by hilzoy, please don’t bother yourself with commenting on it.
And now I’m completely done with this.
I don’t see how I can be both a Bush Kultist and then be accused of thinking he is not KILLING ENOUGH BROWN PEOPLE.
All my post said was that certain contemporary philosophical assumptions have made us more circumspect and less likely to err on the side of the overwhelming force than on the side of political expediency – even in those situations where the payoff for political expediency is not as effective as the payoff for choosing overwhelming force.
And the problem with that is, in some situations, such timidity will end up costing more lives and prolonging the conflict — which is something nobody should want.
In my moral calculus, that makes me less a wannabe Hitler than preening, unserious, public moralists like Mona (and now Hilzoy), who like to appear like they care about saving innocent lives, but who aren’t willing even to consider that sometimes greater force in the short term actually saves lives in the long term. (And each situation differs, which is why I was careful to make any call for greater force conditional. I never called for a uniform use of greater force anywhere in my post, and in fact, I came out in support of the first Fallujah campaign, inasmuch as it allowed us to gauge just how ready Iraqi forces were to control and contain a bad situation, and have explained on a number of occasions to those who have wanted to fight a more uniformly aggressive campaign that there is a political balancing act that we simply must appreciate.)
To me, it is immoral, cowardly, and self-serving to shout down serious discussions about what our best strategy should be in Iraq and all other wars (my post was not about Iraq specifically). And it shows an unseriousness that people like Mona hope to obscure by lashing out at people like me, who think we should be behaving like adults who have an interest in the preservation of our country and our way of life, not like self-righteous windbags who only care about, well, looking like they care.
I have disabused her of the “turning Iraq into glass” thing a hundred times; and carpet-bombing, which you all borrow from Glenn Greenwald, is obsolete. Hell, we don’t even have the equipment to carpet bomb — not that we would, because it is inefficient and costly.
But to turn of the smart bombs does not mean we must necessarily turn on “dumb bombs” — though they can be effective from a psychological perspective. Instead, it means that, instead of trying to drop a bomb down a chimney, we use close-quarter combat. It means that, rather than announcing that mosques are not to be touched, we announce, instead, that we reserve the right to raze any mosque from which our troops are engaged by enemy fire — using, say, helicopter gunships.
After all, using mosques and civilians as cover is a war crime. And I know how you people hate those war crimes.
In short, you want to use my post as a strawman. Fine. Have at it.
But I’m sure that even among those reading here, there are those intellectually honest enough to understand my points without framing them in the ludicrous way Hilzoy and Mona and others have.
Of course, those people won’t comment, for fear of being kicked out of the Care Bear Club.
But they are out there. I’m confident.
Sebastian,
If that’s the best indication you have that Goldstein has taken nukes off the table, then I will have to disagree. He is bemoaning the fact that we do not use our full arsenal, and even the full arsenal less the nuclear component. However, it is not IMHO a clear statement that to him using nukes is anathema.
It wasn’t a logical argument, Slart: just a placeholder to indicate my general and as-yet unsubstantiated position that he’s a nihilistic nitwit. If I muster up a sustained wrath and this one wonderful article I want to quote from and seem to have misplaced, I may do so over at HoCB. Um, don’t hold your breath.
My personal favorite is Tenderheart Bear.
SH quotes Goldstein:
“For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But […] Yet […]”
What does “the nuclear option aside” mean? Or “now unimaginable”? It’s unimaginable that our political leaders would put my program into place, but I still advocate it. Aren’t we considering using nuclear bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Does “full measure” include tac nukes?
If you had written your version of the above, I would know exactly what you think and why. When Goldstein writes the above murk, he either is blurring the issue or he ought to expect being asked for clarification.
To me, it is immoral, cowardly, and self-serving to shout down serious discussions about what our best strategy should be in Iraq and all other wars
it’s also a little self-serving and silly to pretend that any discussion out here in the aether is relevant in any way to what will actually happen – it’s not like Bush hangs out reading blogs for analysis and strategy. so, be as serious as you want, but don’t pretend your “serious” discussions have any weight, in reality. it’s pretense to think they do.
“cowardly” and “immoral” ? those are pretty big accusations to level, when the entire discussion carries the real-world weight of two guys at a bus stop griping about pro sports.
BTW, Jeff, I don’t think anybody here has ever approved or condoned using civilians or mosques as cover.
And I don’t want to start another long argument, but I think the argument with what you are saying is that razing a neighborhood or a mosque would make the situation far worse, rather than better, considering what our long term objective is.
Not to mention of questionable legal and moral value.
Sebastian was that quote from JG addressed to me? Because if so I’m at a loss to see how it supports your assertion. You said (paraphrased):
Whereupon I requested an example of such an argument. Replying with an assertion that JG took nukes off the table is not only a non-sequitur but a distraction. There is no dispute about whether JG (ultimately) took nukes off the table.
What is in dispute is whether Mona misrepresented JG’s having taken nukes off the table. I am still looking for an instance wherein she argued as though he had not done so.
I can see plenty of instances in which she argued as though the distinction between nukes and other (strictly hypothetical) forms of “more thorough lethality” was tangential and where she failed to address that distinction directly. But I cannot find any instance in which her argument relies on a misrepresentation of JG’s position.
It’s all well and good for you or Slart to claim that you (or Goldstein or Steele or whoever) are the aggrieved parties here, but if you are going to accuse Mona of underhanded argument I think it’s only fair to expect either you or Slart to either
a) cite her own words as an example
b) withdraw your accusation
Thank you.
Jeff: any support for your claim that I am not “willing even to consider that sometimes greater force in the short term actually saves lives in the long term”? I would have thought that when I said “Both undue restraint and undue ruthlessness are serious mistakes in war”, I was not just considering, but agreeing with, that very point.
Also, in what way is my framing of your views “ludicrous”?
Just asking.
rilkefan see above please. The scenario you describe does not seem (to me) to correspond what happened in this thread. Specifically, Mona’s comment which corresponded “do you want to outlaw the use of cars or just SUVs or what?” was in no way used as a predicate for any other part of the argument. Mona’s original position, was predicated on the JG having said something along the lines of “we must outlaw some things in order to save gas.”
Jeff your “send more gunships” solution is fascinating, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I express some septicism that you have any idea what will happen if “more thorough lethality” translates to razing mosques/schools/hospitals which have been involved in street battles. (sayyyy, what happens if we use a mosque for cover, mr. outside-the-box armchair tactician?)
Your solution is pretty much asking me to believe that the US Army and Marine Corps need people like you to suggest “more munitions and looser ROE” because (like the terrorists who forgot that their phones might be tapped) it has not yet occurred to them. Either you are suggesting collective punishment (in which case you are asking troops to break the law) or you are not (in which case what are you offering exactly, besides a Demand That Something, Anything Be Done?).
There is a lot of hot air and attempts to be cute in this thread, with little or no product of debate. Sorry. Blunt but true.
Let*s hope for more up grading or widening of scope in the future. TG
There is a lot of hot air and attempts to be cute in this thread, with little or no product of debate. Sorry. Blunt but true.
Let*s hope for more up-grading or widening of scope in the future. TG
There is a lot of hot air and attempts to be cute in this thread, with little or no product of debate. Sorry. Blunt but true.
Let*s hope for more up-grading or widening of scope in the future. TG
OK, that’s a good chorus TonyGuitar. now how do the verses go ?
Radish, it was not a response to you.
Her words are quite clear:
“By all that is freakin’ holy, how do you do that by turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots or whatever versions of “thorough lethality” Jeff has in mind?”
I’m not even slightly convinced that legitimate hypersemantic readings of that can turn it into “By all that is feakin’ holy, how do you do that by turning vast parts of their nation into glass parking lots by which I mean that I don’t understand what Jeff means by “thorough lethality” and I am not implying that glass parking lots have anything to do with it.”
Basically to get your reading of the ‘or’ you must interpret it to mean rhetorically that “all words before this word contribute absolutely nothing to my argument, please ignore them, they are there for ornamental effect only”. I don’t buy that. Your mileage may vary.
In the comment thread at Jeff’s, Mona writes: “But then, cinder block is fine by you?” The question mark functioning precisely like my question to Jesurgislac “Are you alleging murder?”. In the question and in the context of the discussion I am stating that she is alleging murder subject to direct negation by the her. The accusation is that she thought it was murder. Mona’s accusation is that glassing is ok, or turning Iraq into a cinder block is ok. The difference in the two cases is that Jeff said that wasn’t included while Jesurgislac pointedly refused. Furthermore both Jeff’s original post and further clarifications suggests that glassing wasn’t an option while Jesurgislac’s original comments suggested that she thought it was murder.
The quote here clearly implicates glassing as an accusation. The quote there reinforces that view.
Breaching the Dike
I thought my post on Shelby Steele’s explanation of our Iraq failure (short version: we were too soft on them) was pretty good. But Hilzoy and Glenn Greenwald put me to shame.
What’s amazing, as they point out, isn’t the piece itself so much as th…
radish, likely SH was responding to my request for a pointer to where Jeff G had taken (tac) nukes off the table, because I was sort of disputing it based on what had been presented here. Note that SH points to the post itself, which if correct makes the whole controversy silly, though not if the section in question is murk.
Re my gasoline example, it’s not worth pursuing – maybe in another context.
Re this, it turns out I can.
Lord, people, this has to be the dumbest argument at Obi Wi I have ever witnessed. I tried to change the subject to something that was somewhat relevant and actually mattered and was never so proud of an attempted threadjack in all my life.
Anyway, if one didn’t want to discuss how many civilians we’re actually killing in Iraq (as opposed to parsing Slarti’s accusations about Mona’s alleged misrepresentations of Jeff G’s bloodthirsty desires), then we could have discussed the question Jeff G raised –just how ruthless should we be? (My answer–not at all, not in Iraq anyway. And I’m not crazy about TGB and Charley’s position on strategic bombing in WWII either. But this thread is a wasteland, so no use trying to talk about it here.)
I’ll return the favor of your response on my site, Hilzoy:
You wrote:
Excuse me, Hilzoy, but what do you mean by the “undue” in either “undue ruthlessness” or “undue restraint”? Your commenters seem to think that MY consideration — which would include both undue contstraint and undue ruthlessness — marked me as a Hitler wannabe who wishes to turn Iraq into glass.
You seemed to stroke their assumptions by using me as one the wingnut whipping boys engaging in such bloodthirsty fantasies, even though you, a trained professional, must certainly be aware I argued no such thing.
Therefore, because you seem to be setting yourself up at odds with my argument — and I know what my argument says, why shouldn’t I think that you’ve given the question no real consideration. Cursory and perfunctory, perhaps. After all, you must keep up appearances of being an open-minded champion of intellectual exchange. But your post belies your subsequent claim to have engaged in any kind of good faith argument.
Besides. “Undue”? Sounds kind of “airy” and evasive to me — and avoids the real specifics that Mona and others long for. Tell me: how blood thirsty are you willing to get should it save lives? Give a list of specifics.
Otherwise I’ll be forced to conclude from what you are now saying is your agreement with me that you, too, are all for carpet bombing and nuking brown children.
To me, it is immoral, cowardly, and self-serving to shout down serious discussions about what our best strategy should be in Iraq and all other wars (my post was not about Iraq specifically).
But that is exactly what Steele tries to do, and what you endorse. The whole point of Steele’s article is to claim that there are nefarious influences that cause Bush to hold back unreasonably. It is not an argument that, as you put it, “timidity will end up costing more lives and prolonging the conflict .” That he takes as given. His article is an attempt to cast blame for that “timidity.” In other words, he doesn’t discuss strategy, as you would have it. He is simply trying to shift the responsibility for failure away from the people in charge of the project.
Jeff G said:
Hmmm… Looks like my comment upthread was most prescient.
heet,
most impressive 🙂
After all, using mosques and civilians as cover is a war crime. And I know how you people hate those war crimes.
Yes–including the ones you explicitly advocated. We’ll get to that.
To me, it is immoral, cowardly, and self-serving to shout down serious discussions about what our best strategy should be in Iraq and all other wars (my post was not about Iraq specifically).
Let me know when you start up a serious discussion, then. From where I sit, you seem to be pounding the table really hard in favor of… what? You were asked, repeatedly, and danced around the issue as if you were afraid to give a real answer–and once you actually gave a real answer, it’s easy to see why, because the kind of collective punishment you advocate is not only the kind of monstrous evil we went to war to exterminate in WWII, but is in every possible way an unproductive tactic for winning a conflict which is as much political and cultural as it is military. And now again you’ve backed away from that monstrous suggestion as if ashamed of writing it–as well you should be.
The main problem with what you’ve written on this subject, Jeff, is that you make the-way-things-ought-to-be declarations without any evidence that you’ve really thought through the logical consequences of your punditry. You say things like this–
All my post said was that certain contemporary philosophical assumptions have made us more circumspect and less likely to err on the side of the overwhelming force than on the side of political expediency – even in those situations where the payoff for political expediency is not as effective as the payoff for choosing overwhelming force.
–as if you think it /means/ anything. The words sounds prima facie eloquent and insightful, but they’re empty chest-pounding without a smidgen of real thought on the subject, piggybacking on the “white guilt” thesis of someone who isn’t half as clever as they think they are and attempting to use their laughable screed as a justification for your apparent desire for the good old days of pre-Geneva warfare. You don’t stop to examine where this leads: what is an appropriate level of force to use? In what situations? At what point does our obligation to minimize collateral damage enter into the equation, and how much weight to we give it? What are the effects of collateral damage on counterinsurgency operations, and how do we weigh the possible negative effects against the possible gains from intimidating the population? If we eschew 60 years of viewing collective punishment of civilian populations as an unqualified war crime and, to use your example, raze a neighborhood to “send[…] a message to others who think it perfectly safe to allow insurgents to operate in their neighborhood”, what effect do you imagine that might have on the political processes in Iraq and the attitudes of the Iraqi people towards us? (Hint: the Germans, not much noted at the time for suffering from white guilt, didn’t have much luck with this one.)
When you say something like the above and refuse to clarify what level of violence you think is actually appropriate, you’re not engaging in serious discourse, you’re throwing chum in the water to see how many sharks you can attract. You will forgive some of us for reducing your position to “kill more people”, when that’s essentially all that you’re saying after you strip it of prettified words and look for anything resembling substance.
And if your idea of a case in point is leveling a neighborhood to teach everyone who lives there a lesson, then you ought not to be let anywhere near a position of power. Your voice /ought/ to be shouted down–which is not to say that you don’t have a right to say it, only that you should be condemned and shunned by moral, thinking people the same way that someone who mounts a cardboard box in Times Square to advocate nuking Mecca should be shunned. People who write the things that you do don’t merit consideration as part of any serious or civil discussion on the matter, Jeff. The appropriate response to the kind of things you advocate is a mixture of revulsion and contempt.
If you don’t like that, then I suggest you spend a great deal of time thinking through the logical conclusions of the things you advocate, and in what company they place you.
… you, a trained professional, must certainly be aware I argued no such thing.
well, now that you’re here, Jeff, you can tell us exactly what you mean.
i’m fascinated to hear how it is that you know better than the professionals how to calibrate the use of force in an insurgency.
i’m also fascinated by the idea that causing more death and destruction will cow the insurgents and encourage the neutrals to come onto our side. Jeff, you must have a commanding knowledge of the Iraqi psyche.
Most of her posts are framed this way. It’s her style.
JeffG: Tell me: how blood thirsty are you willing to get should it save lives? Give a list of specifics.
What, you mean like, say, reinstalling Saddam as President? It would probably help if you made explicit what spectrum of benevolent massacres you had in mind. I mean, there are infinite ways to kill lots of people, and infinite rationalizations for how those horrors might save more lives in the long run, so some parameters might be in order.
Jeff, when Hilzoy is agreeing with you embrace it. I would like to agree with Jeff however that Hilzoy’s formulation “Both undue restraint and undue ruthlessness are serious mistakes in war” really should have stoked the ire of someone here since it doesn’t explicitly say that nuclear bombing would be undue ruthlessness.
Now I would like to be clear. I think Steele’s explanation for WHY we don’t use what I think is the appropriate level of force is not particularly good, I actually do agree with him (and disagree with Hilzoy) about whether or not we actually are using the appropriate level of ruthlessness. It would have been better for everyone except the insurgents if Bush had been willing to commit a large number of soldiers to the kind of close combat which is necessary to fight an enemy that isn’t dependent on trains and factories for their ability to make war. It would have been better to not let Sadr retreat to mosques and try to start civil war two separate times. We shouldn’t just shell a mosque being used by insurgents, but that doesn’t mean we should leave it. Putting US soldiers into enemy-held mosques to root them out would be more dangerous in the very short run, but much better in the medium run. And that is what I think caused a problem–Bush wasn’t willing to have a short-term but large spike in probable US casualties by taking to the buildings. He was hoping that techno-war could win. The problem with techno-war is that if the enemy hides in ‘sacred’ places the only think you can do is blow them up.
This seems appropriate
It is a matter of the relative importance of three questions.
what are we fighting for?
How are we fighting?
Are we going to win?
To many on the right the third question is the only one that matters.
To liberals the first one matters the most because a just cause is a prerequisite for fighting at all. Then the second question matters because the just cause can be ruined by bad methods. Winning is only important if the fight is one that must be fought.
There is a certain logic to Jeff’s point of view if one doesn’t care what the war is for or whether or not the methods contradict the purpose.
Of course, as a liberal, I think that people who care more about winning than the reason for fighting have a prolem with moral blindness. War isn’t a football game.
Sebastian,
I don’t understand your formulation of ruthlessness, given the examples you provide. It seems that you feel we should have had more troops on the ground and been willing to commit them to more dangerous encounters. I agree. I think, from what I have read of her posts, hilzoy does as well. I do not see how this would be more or less ruthless, at least towards Iraqis, which seems to be the only relevant snes given that the context of this entire discussion is the “white guilt” angle from Steele.
I think that entering mosques and killing people in them would be somewhat more ruthless than we actually were (in fact so far as I know the Rule of Engagement still haven’t been changed). I think killing Sadr when he was rallying an insurgency would have been more ruthless. (And I know for a fact he isn’t dead).
On a completely different note, I am going to take a moment to point out that when I see comments like this:
After all, you must keep up appearances of being an open-minded champion of intellectual exchange. But your post belies your subsequent claim to have engaged in any kind of good faith argument.
followed by this:
Most of her posts are framed this way. It’s her style.
it makes me cringe. There are many people on the great big intarweb that don’t think very hard about their posts and are intentionally rude to those who disagree with them. They clearly have no interest in actual discussion or debate. One of hilzoy’s trademarks is her openness to debate and her evenhandedness in dealing with all commenters, even those who haven’t really warranted such. To suggest that is all just a ploy, and to do so in a comment that is loaded with vitriol, is both ballsy and obnoxious.
I see that it fits in your definition. I am not clear on why. It seems more invasive, but not necessarily more ruthless. I did a quick check just to make sure that I wasn’t too turned about in my usage and dictionary.com is giving me “without mercy or pity”.
So I see how that fits with things like bombing entire neighborhoods to make a point about harbouring terrorists. I see how that applies to shelling a mosque. I do not see how that applies to invasive infantry actions into a mosque. I also do not see how that applies to putting down a rebellion, unless you mean that we should have been more ruthless in how we did so. In that case, I may agree, though again, I think “ruthless” is a poor word choice. It just seems to suggest a general callousness about destruction that seems unhelpful in this situation.
that makes me less a wannabe Hitler than preening, unserious, public moralists like Mona (and now Hilzoy), who like to appear like they care about saving innocent lives, but who aren’t willing even to consider that sometimes greater force in the short term actually saves lives in the long term.
This is the hilzoy who’s been complaining for three years now that we didn’t send a sufficient number of troops to effectively combat the insurgency, right? Is that the hilzoy we’re talking about here? I just want to be clear, because if it is, well . . .
a higher number of troops does not necessarily mean higher level of “lethality”. a guy with a gun is pretty persuasive without having to actually use the gun.
that makes me less a wannabe Hitler than preening, unserious, public moralists like Mona (and now Hilzoy)
Jeff Goldstein: Serious.
sorry Phil. i misunderstood your comment.
Sebastian: If other people hadn’t beaten me to it, I would have said that more troops does not equal more ruthless. I’ve been for more troops since the invasion (or rather: for more troops if we had to invade at all; for zero if that was an option), for any number of reasons. One obvious one is that it would have allowed us to do a lot of things that I think we needed to do (secure the borders, keep order after the regime fell, etc.)
But another is this: I read somewhere (can’t recall where) that people who have studied counterinsurgency favor more troops precisely because they allow those troops to be less ruthless. The idea is that if troops are scarce, then they are always much more vulnerable, and have to act accordingly, and that this translates in practice into a lot more kicking down doors, shooting people who might or might not turn out to be enemies, etc. Whereas if you have more troops, those troops are likely to control things more fully in the background sort of way in which, say, an extremely competent police force keeps down crime; and this, combined with the fact that individual patrols are less likely to be isolated and frightened, makes troops need to do ruthless things a lot less often.
In any case, it made sense to me. And since I think that when you’re fighting a counterinsurgency it should go without saying that it’s a good thing not to alienate the population needlessly — and good by just about any standard one could come up with — I thought this was one more reason to have more troops.
About going into mosques: in general, I would make policy on a point like this almost entirely based on the answer to the question: will this or will it not hasten the day when the country being occupied can revert to normal, non-occupied life? If it would inflame people and push that day back, don’t do it; if it would hasten it, do. As far as I know, this is how such decisions were reached.
What really bothered me about Steele’s piece, besides its total falsity, and the idea that anyone could write that “we” haven’t conducted the war with sufficient ruthlessness because “we” are overcome by white guilt without noticing that the ‘we’ in question is Donald Rumsfeld, the least likely candidate for the Gulity White Guy award in the entire known universe, was that there are altogether too many people out there who treat questions like ‘are we being ruthless enough?’ as though there was an obvious, all-purpose answer that could be deduced from their personal story-lines about the world, and his essay seemed to me to place him squarely in their camp.
As best I can tell, the left used to do this more than the right (“all wars are wrong”, etc.), but this has been false since 9/11, when the left dropped the tattered remnants of its storyline (which had been decaying and losing their hold over us for ages, and specifically over Rwanda), while the right, which had felt like cheering on any military action undertaken by Clinton, acquired a new one. I hate it whichever side does it, since I think that wars are much too serious to be treated as fantasy playgrounds.
Hmm, fairness and restraint.
I started writing this yesterday and hesitated to post it. But this thread keeps going so…
fairness and reasoned discourse
Perhaps it’s unfair (as discussed at length above) to lump someone calling for increased ferocity in Iraq into the same category as Joe Klein insisting that tactical nuclear weapons should be on the table in response to Iran. I think, though, that these two positions may have some common basis and it’s worth considering.
Two major possible explanations occur to me for people who are willing, to take the extreme example, to contemplate use of nuclear weapons against Iran. One is a lack of understanding of the effects of even the smallest “tactical” nuclear device. The other is a careless disregard for the consequences.
There may be other explanations, so perhaps if I engage with someone who thinks using tactical nukes is a good idea I may come to understand that position as not rooted in one of my two explanations. Or perhaps that person’s opinion is rooted in ignorance I can help to dispel.
Above, Morat20 disdains discourse with people who are insane or pathologically criminal. There are, of course, some such people (only a few, I believe, and I doubt I’ve met any here on ObWi). There may be a greater number of fools, but I think greater still is the number who are ignorant or asleep.
Even when dealing with a small child, just shouting “NO!” is not usually an effective strategy. Reasoning may have to be simplified to be understandable but abandoning it for the brute force of authority should only be done when absolutely necessary — say in the path of an oncoming car.
Ferocity vs. restraint
Hilzoy aptly expresses my own view of restraint, both its absence from our policy toward Iraq as well as its value as a true measure of strength. Sure, undue restraint can be a mistake but the idea that that is our problem in Iraq doesn’t pass the laugh test. The logic behind a call to send more troops was to suppress violence, to disarm militias, to provide security that has been sorely lacking. It was not restraint that constrained our behavior in Iraq. Rather it was lack of resources.
A benefit of having obvious, overwhelming force available is that you seldom have to use it. Terrorists, on the other hand, try to make up in ferocity what they lack in strength.
One more point on ferocity: there’s something in human nature that can take pleasure in witnessing or inflicting pain and suffering. The existence of this aspect is one reason for an absolute prohibition of torture — it’s dangerous to give free rein to hate and fury. It’s also partly why we don’t allow injured parties to sit in judgment of those accused of inflicting the injuries.
I’m sorry to say that some things I have read (mostly not here on ObWi) convince me that lust for revenge is behind some calls for increased ferocity. This is wrong in so many ways, not least because it won’t even achieve the goal of enhancing our security.
A Response Demanded Provided
David Schraub at The Debate Link is horrified it seems by a comments offered by Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush who in turn was commenting on an Op-Ed piece by Shelby Steele in the Opinion Journal. Mr Schraub asks for a sane conservative vi…
Just to try — well, it’s not going to threadjack, why even pretend? — just to make as tangential a remark as the one I’m responding to, save that I’m actually responding to something said on this thread, I’d like to — having for some stupid reason wasted part of my life by reading this entire thread — thank Jesurgislac for her impressive display of honor and admirable morality by bringing my name into this thread as an insult, a thread in which I have had no part, on a blog in which I’ve said nothing in days, and little to say in recent weeks.
Absolutely gratuitious attacks on someone for no reason whatever, with no provocation whatever are certainly quite a display of one’s chosen morals and ethics.
She owes me an apology. But I don’t expect her to give me one.
On-topic, such as it is: Slart, I strongly suggest you re-examine your Proportionality Meter; I think it’s badly out of adjustment, and needs a good whack. Your behavior here has been, I’m afraid, not one that does you credit. Sheer stubbornness and clinging to trivial points over anything else are not admirable traits, and I know thereof of what I speak.
And when you’re deciding that Everyone Must Be Against You And Wrong, it’s time to back up and reconsider.
Jeff Goldstein, you say “And it shows an unseriousness that people like Mona hope to obscure….”
This is mind-reading, and you lose 5 points for it.
On tactics, you say “But to turn of the smart bombs does not mean we must necessarily turn on ‘dumb bombs’ — though they can be effective from a psychological perspective.”
I suggest doing some reading on the differences between a counter-insurgency campaign, and a total war, and then come back and give us some cites on the effectiveness of the psychological effects of bombing in counter-insurgency. Apt to help win the hearts and minds of the people who form the sea necessary for insurgents to succeed, or not?
Jeff Goldstein: “Tell me: how blood thirsty are you willing to get should it save lives? Give a list of specifics.”
My impression is that many people are first waiting for you to “give a list of specifics” as to what, exactly, you are calling for, other than razing mosques and neighborhoods. But perhaps you consider that specific enough. I’d again suggest that whole examination of “distinctions between counter-insurgency and total war” thing, and ask if it’s possible that the reason the military — and I do believe our President has many times proclaimed that he believes in “giving the generals what they ask for” (do I have that wrong?) — has not engaged in your suggested tactics might be because in fighting a counter-insurgency, such tactics would be grossly counter-productive, rather than that somehow President Bush, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the professional U.S. military, are — somehow (could you explain the mechanism, please?) — making strategic and tactical decisions based on “liberalism” and “white guilt.”
Pentultimately, I’d like to commend to your attention the articles I link to in this post, and ask how it is you — apparently — feel that your knowledge of counter-insurgency, and the situation on the ground in Iraq, is apparently greater than Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who if you are correct, must be doing things all wrong, that Kalev Sepp has it all wrong, that the training at Ft. Irwin is all wrong, and that we should instead simply engage in more ruthlessness.
Lastly, when Professor Steele says “…the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true” — may I ask if you, or he, or anyone, has a cite to as to how Professor Steel is being punished for his Bravely Speaking this Forbidden Truth?
I ask this only because I frequently read on the blogs of many of your compatriots how foolish it is when “liberals” and “leftists” make claims about how their speech is being chilled and is endangered when they are, in fact, not being locked up and punished — and indeed, there are plenty of foolish leftists who engage in absurd hyperbole in this and many matters — but surely if criticisms of that sort of thing, and mockery of it, are spot-on, you wouldn’t want to be hypocritical when someone you agree with engages in the same rhetoric, I’m sure?
There’s a reason I quote on my sidebar: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because, you know, in that is danger, Will! Danger!
(Incidentally, I linked to a case of someone criticizing the Administration actually being accused of sedition and punished for it, here; her crime? Writing a letter to a newspaper.)
Looking forward to your response.
Over at Winds Of Change, a post quotes Hirsi Ali making the point that you all failed to understand when Jeff and Shelby tried to explain:
So, do we need to shout down Hirsi Ali as well, because it’s as if Person A (Hirsi Ali) were to say “I’d really like to see bodies stacked like cordwood and don’t care if they’re individually guilty or not, because I hate the whole damn area and death would make me feel better”, right?
And now: it’s time for me to leave. Hilzoy, I’ll leave the keys to the blog under the mat. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, but it’s now clear to me that I’m temperamentally not well suited to this sort of thing. I’d have left this in a post, but I removed myself from the author list before that occurred.
Likely I’ll be back here, but not for a while, and not nearly as much.
-Slart
Well, she’s got such a megaphone it’d be hard to shout her down if we wanted to. The more important difference is what she has to say – some of which I find quite unfortunate, but I don’t see any calls for razing neighborhoods pour encourager les autres [as an example for the others] in your quote or elsewhere in what I’ve seen from her.
So, do we need to shout down Hirsi Ali as well, because it’s as if Person A (Hirsi Ali) were to say “I’d really like to see bodies stacked like cordwood and don’t care if they’re individually guilty or not, because I hate the whole damn area and death would make me feel better”, right?
Ummm… no?
I’m not really sure what more there is to say about that.
“Likely I’ll be back here, but not for a while, and not nearly as much.”
Dang.
Dang.
Double-dang.
Oh,and Gary, my comment was not directed at you, it was a general observation, that much of what is being discussed here was about Jeff in partcular, and trying to say he wants such and such number of deaths, rather than the “Will we defend ourselves, even if it means using violence” question that Hirsi posed.
Your comment was excellent, although I disagree with your notion that suppression of dissent comes mainly from the right. I might cite the suppression of the Muhammed cartoons etc, as a counterpoint but this is the bitter end of a long thread.
Triple dang.
Dang, dang, dang.
Dang.
DaveC: I suppose there are people like those Ms. Ali describes. If they had power, it’d be worth being concerned about them. But I don’t see that any part of the decision-making classes is much infected by such views, and in particular no sign that any part of the Bush administration or its key sources of support are. So it’s not that she’s wrong so much as (in this particular quote) looking at something irrelevant, in much the way that flying saucer cults exist but are irrelevant to a discussion of trends in American Christian belief and practice.
Slarti: Best wishes in finding the mode of expression that does work for you, as your good stuff is really good. (Possibly a simple no-comments when-I-post-something weblog would do it.)
Best wishes Slart. Whenever you miss the nail and hit your thumb with the hammer, I know just think of ObWi, and think “Now that was aggravating, but at least I didn’t have to soak my hand in ice afterwards.”
Ah. Those Europeans, all so peace loving. Like the French, who wouldn’t blow up a Greenpeace vessel in a friendly harbour. And the British, who weren’t prepared to blow Argentinan conscripts up. And, who can forget the Germans. No, they weren’t living on the front line of the apocalypse, with their country’s unity a sacrifice to Cold War realpolitik.
Europeans have been prepared to fight wars since WWII. They have been, in the case of the Germans, willing to give up half their country to the `Evil Empire’ for 40 years, just to win a war. Don’t lecture them about needing to understand evil.
By the way, three of the last five French Presidents served in the military. De Gaulle fought in both the Great War and the Second World War; Mitterrand was a member of the Resistance; and Chirac, the current President, fought, and was wounded, in the Algerian War of Independence.
So, as far as I can see, it is a nonsense to say that Western Europeans don’t understand evil, or war, for that matter.
Why does Steele have any legitimacy to say that I, as a member of the white West, suffer from `White guilt’? I don’t have anything to feel guilty about, and therefore, I don’t. Nor, for the record, do most Western nations. I mean, Monaco. What white guilt do they have? Or, say, Italy?
I don’t know, but I have a suspicion that when he says the `west’, he really means the Anglophone/Atlantic sphere.
Because that is the only way I can make his statements fit the data available.
Slart, I’d very much hate to see you go, and hope you’ll think about it and come back soon.
DaveC, as usual these days, I have little idea how to reply to you. Since pretty much everyone here has described the various forms of force they favor, and stated places they think it should be used, such as in Afghanistan (a battle — against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, no less! — that last I looked you seemed to feel was unimportant, or done, or something, though perhaps I completely misunderstood you, so feel free to clarify that), well, what can I say? Are you saying that Hilzoy, myself, and everyone else are liars when we say we favor more troops in Afghanistan, and otherwise specify our desires for use of force against al Qaeda and other people who threaten the United States in various cases? Or what?
And I wouldn’t “shout down” Hirsi Ali, let alone be capable of doing so, any more than your disagreeing with me is “shouting me down,” but obviously what she says applies only to a very limited number of people. I’ve many times otherwise objected to Vast Generalizations about both “conservatives” and “liberals,” and continue to fail to understand what the use of such vast accusations, when you’re talking to is , you know, actual people, who have opinions which flatly contradict the generalizations.
Also, the Appeal To Authority is a classically bad argument in most cases. Particularly since, last I looked, Ms. Ali isn’t an expert in contemporary liberalism.
Her argument has to stand or fall on its merits, and since it’s clearly false about most liberals, there you are. Now, you can cling to your bogeymen of fringe “liberals” who hold no power in this country, or you can deal with the actual beliefs of the actual people you’re conversing with. Your choice.
That’s what I mean when I refer to your bringing up non-sequiturs, among other things. You swing at some sort of ghosts of your imagination, but you’re talking to actual people, not bogeymen “liberals” who, you know, aren’t here.
And Hirsi Ali says many things I agree with. So what? [waves hands helplessly, completely not understanding the point]
“Oh,and Gary, my comment was not directed at you, it was a general observation, that much of what is being discussed here was about Jeff in partcular, and trying to say he wants such and such number of deaths, rather than the “Will we defend ourselves, even if it means using violence” question that Hirsi posed.”
Well, you know, I’m responsible for what I say, not what someone else says.
“I might cite the suppression of the Muhammed cartoons etc, as a counterpoint but this is the bitter end of a long thread.”
Editorial decisions, I can assure you, DaveC, as a former editor, are not “suppression.”
If a law were passed in the U.S. preventing the publication of the cartoons, that would be suppression. The fact that I, or anyone else, didn’t choose to print them, is blatantly not “suppression.” Sorry.
This is an old old old straw man and piece of illogic.
And I really do very much hope Slarti returns when he feels like doing so, which I hope is as soon as possible.
Slarti,
I am truly sorry you are choosing to leave, although I am less than surprised. We will miss you.
I hope Slarti comes back soon. As far as this thread goes, I have to say it’s much more enjoyable to read you guys debating the issues than debating about other bloggers. I am far less interested in Ben Domenech, Jeff Goldstein, Juan Cole, etc., than I am in the price of tea in China.
Add me to the list of those who will miss Slarti.
Much as I may disagree with him frequently, he is always able to say things in a way that makes me think, rather than just react.
DaveC is another of those, as is Sebastian, and even, occassionaly CB.
Leonidas, not so much.
Gary, those were some excellent comments. And my response to DaveC is similar. I have not seen anyone on this site disavowing the use of violence to defend ourselves. Rather the distinction seems to be more what level of violence and when it is approrpiate to use it.
For example, I don’t think going into Iraq was in any way, shape or form, a case of defending ourselves from either present or future threats.
Afghanistan was a different story, and perhaps a perfect example of undue restraint, or more probably, poor strategy.
Slarti, sad to see you go though not surprised.
I also don’t think anyone is arguing that we should not defend ourselves now that we’re in Iraq. IE, I’m not seeing anyone saying that our soldiers and Marines should be shooting back at people who shoot at them.
Count me strongly in the “sad to see slarti go” camp, and add to that a heavy dose of confusion. This debate got heated yes, but not particularly more so than many others I have seen here. The level of inanity got pretty high, but I don’t understand the anger over it. I guess I will just have to assume it was a straw and camel thing and hope I wasn’t one of the straws.
Come back, Slart! Even when things got testy it was still about a million times better here than anywhere else on the Internets. I mean, where else has left and right coexisted so successfully for so long?
Woah! Way late to the shindig. Slarti, hope you’re back soon.
Jeff G: But to turn of the smart bombs does not mean we must necessarily turn on “dumb bombs” — though they can be effective from a psychological perspective. Instead, it means that, instead of trying to drop a bomb down a chimney, we use close-quarter combat. It means that, rather than announcing that mosques are not to be touched, we announce, instead, that we reserve the right to raze any mosque from which our troops are engaged by enemy fire — using, say, helicopter gunships.
Early in the war, British commanders were complaining of a US policy that was causing some difficulties. Iraqi insurgents would use mortars to lob explosives into US bases or positions. US radar would track the trajectory, and immediately return fire, usually destroying a family home or two and the innocent inhabitants, and not touching insurgents who had either triggered the mortar remotely, or who had fled knowing there would be a response.
The British commanders privately expressed disgust at this approach, and publicly requested a change in policy, indicating that the insurgents were using the US response as a tactic to erode support among the Iraqi populace.
I find commentary like Steele’s to be a sign of desperation, which may be a good thing, in that many more minds are beginning to realize the futility of this adventure, and thrash a little while attempting to find a fix.
Commentary like Goldstein’s reminds me more of the mindstate one gets into on re-reading Heinlein’s Stormship Troopers. The giveaway is the mental gymnastics that provide a moral excuse of civilian casualties as punishment for “allowing” armed insurgents into their neighborhoods. One could imagine the insurgents excusing casualties in a similar way.
Well, the entire strategy of an insurgency is to provoke indiscriminate strikes from the ruling power against the civilian populace, thus gaining more support and recruits for the insurgency.
That’s exactly why counter-insurgency strategy calls for not giving the insurgents that, which is they want.
It’s why to fight a successful counter-insurgency, you have to convince the populace that you’re on their side, and that the insurgency isn’t, so as to get them to join with you, and not the other side. Again, see the articles I linked to here.
And here.
And here.
I could give endless numbers of other links, beyond stuff that I’ve linked to, of course. It’s almost as if there’s an entire literature on counter-insurgency, written over a century or so.
Basically, Jeff’s goal here is — entirely unwitting as he is, of course — to do what al Qaeda in Iraq and the various other insurgents desire, so as to see us lose. Only someone with no familiarity with the history of insurgencies and with counter-insurgency strategy could possibly talk such nonsense.
That’s setting aside the moral aspects of calling for us to be more like the SS.
If Jeff were actually going to bother to engage in dialogue on this, I’d also ask him if he imagine such tactics would work against us, in a hypothetical alternative universe where, say, the East and West Coasts were wiped out by tidal waves, and the U.S. is reduced to central and mountainous areas in disorganized confusion, and, say, the Chinese came and occupied us, and we were fighting a guerilla war (work with me here): if they started bombing us indiscriminately and slaughtered civilians with abandon, would this cow us, and incline us to surrender in shock and awe, and submit to superior force?
Or would it enrage us, and make endless numbers of us swear to kill as many occupying Chinese as it takes, and make us feel that our lives are worth dying for in this cause, after our mother, son, sister, cousin, dad, were ruthlessly wiped out by our neighborhood being razed?
And if Jeff agrees that we’d (many of us — not everyone, of course) go for the second option, I’d ask him if he thinks Iraqis are any different, and if so, why?
But what Starship Troopers has to do with any of this, I dunno.
But what Starship Troopers has to do with any of this, I dunno.
It makes you feel all manly and warlike, and you won’t take no stinkin’ crap from no stinkin’ bugs.
“It makes you feel all manly and warlike, and you won’t take no stinkin’ crap from no stinkin’ bugs.”
Bug-appeasor.
Objectively pro-bug.
Jes,
Regarding this comment, this is a warning for violating the posting rules. Gary is right. It was a unsolicited, gratuitous attack.
“Objectively pro-bug.”
So, you confess!
You probably believe diplomacy can get the Skinnies on our side, too, bug-lover.
Whereas clearly if we invade and occupy the Skinnies, this will strike a fatal blow against the Bugs.
Never forget Buenos Aires!
Or you’ll meet my little friend, the talking 60-second bomb.
Okay Gary, you remember waaay too much about Starship Troopers.
Especially since the last time I reread it was, I dunno, at least fifteen, maybe twenty, years ago.
But he’s a fairly vivid writer. (Less so in his late years, of course.)
But “I’m a 60-second bomb! Fifty-nine! Fifty-eight! Fifty-seven!” was actually pretty funny, as well as memorable. To me, at least. Especially given Juan kinda cursing because he’d just grabbed the nearest thing to hand in his panic.
Surprised to see this unfortunate thread still getting traffic.
Charles: Regarding this comment, this is a warning for violating the posting rules. Gary is right. It was a unsolicited, gratuitous attack.
Going to go back and warn everyone else who’s used Gary’s surname as a verb? Or is it just me who’s not allowed to do it?
Jesurgislac: “Going to go back and warn everyone else who’s used Gary’s surname as a verb? Or is it just me who’s not allowed to do it?”
From my own view, I noted John Thullen saying “You’re not an idiot. At least you tried to link, which would please Gary Farber,” which was perfectly innocuous, and Catsy referred to “Farber-caliber pedantry,” which was faintly annoying, but I’m willing to plead guilty to pedantry on occasion, if not necessarily in every given example, and in any case, again, the charge is relatively innocuous, whereas yours was distinctly a nasty slur, so from my view, it’s a matter of usage, not a matter of who did it.
That you’d try to wiggle out, and not even remotely apologize, astonishes me not at all.
If you’d like to submit evidence of other people mis-using my name behind my back, though, do feel free.
It’s actually, you know, not nice to say such things about someone. I’m not a perfect person, nor do I manage to always avoid saying stupid things I later regret, but I’ve never done that sort of thing to you, either. I’d suggest you just consider apologizing, but it seems futile.
And at this point, an apology under the gun and after multiple requests wouldn’t carry all that much weight, anyway.
Myself, I say jerky things at times, but I always try to apologize when I’ve realized it, embarrassing and painful as it is, because it would be dishonorable to do otherwise. I’m otherwise often blunt and forceful in conversation, but not, I hope, out-of-bounds. If I ever am, I have no problem with having it brought to my attention, and I always at least try to do the right thing.
You, though: congratulations on your sense of honor, and your example of good behavior. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your sense of decency?
And now I drop this again, since I don’t intend to lower myself into further personal debate. I apologize to everyone else for having this public boring silliness, which, hey, would have been avoided if Jes didn’t insult me my back, and for no reason at all, save her fanatic, and rather bizarre, grudge. I’m not enjoying this, at all. Ick.
Going to go back and warn everyone else who’s used Gary’s surname as a verb?
I can only call folks on what I see, Jes, and no, I won’t expend valuable time traipsing back to every thread where “farber” was derogatorily made into a verb. Yours was the worst offense, as Gary well mentioned upthread. You haven’t apologized to me for lying about my previous writings, so I don’t expect you to apologize for this.
Yeesh. Maybe I’ve been partying at the Watergate.
Jes — for what it’s worth, I agree with Charles. Especially now that Gary has made his views on it known.
Thank you, Hilzoy.
You have great honor.
Hilzoy: Jes — for what it’s worth, I agree with Charles. Especially now that Gary has made his views on it known.
While Charles does tend to get my back up on a personal/political level, I acknowledge I should have accepted his rebuke when he was speaking ex cathedra, as it were.
I won’t verb Gary’s surname again.
Thanks, Jes.
And by the way, I love the idea of Charles speaking ex cathedra 😉
that shit was banging