Safety Dance Part 2

Sometimes it's hard being a liberal. Hard, that is, when you have to watch other liberals miss all the really important parts of the argument or, worse yet, fail to frame the argument effectively in the first place.

If I hear one more fellow liberal talk about "how America is perceived in the world" as a primary reason not to torture people I think I'm going to jump through the television.

Joan Walsh from salon.com made this argument a while ago on Hardball, and she stuck in my mind because she sounded so lame doing it.

When people on the left argue this point, they often employ the following arguments:

(1) torture diminishes our moral standing and/or makes people hate us;
(2) torture never works.

The first argument is a trap, while the second breaks a good point -- that torture does not work reliably -- by pushing it too far.

Let's take the first: talk to a security-minded (read: scared) conservative, or even a liberal security hawk, and he or she will say -- correctly -- that moral standing is not even of secondary importance in a war, and that all sorts of atrocious things happen in wars. The firebombing of Dresden may even come up.

Now you could counter, correctly, that in a counterinsurgency war a lot of factors are more important than body count, and that public opinion is one of them, but now you're back to playing defense. Essentially, adopting this argument puts you in the position of arguing in favor of opinions rather than outcomes -- never a winning strategy in a national security debate. Not to mention that a smart conservative could gum up the works by pointing out that most of the governments running around torturing Muslims are also run by Muslims.

The second argument -- that torture never works -- goes too far because it's reasonable to assume that some non-zero percentage of the time, some guilty person will be detained and will go on to make a genuine confession or render useful information under duress. Insisting that can never happen makes us sound like we're repeating a slogan rather than cold-bloodedly analyzing reality.

When liberals talk about torture, they need to remember that they're framing an argument against an opponent who is playing to fear. So our arguments need to be about professionalism and problem-solving first, rather than moral standing.

My ideal talking point would be something like

-The name of the game is counterterrorism/counterinsurgency, and CT/CI is a zero-sum game at best. Every time you have to have an agent pick up a phone or jump in a car or do a Google search to run down some bullshit lead from a detainee who lied to get the pain to stop, you have an asset you're not fielding against the enemy, who now enjoys an additional degree of freedom against you. That's a losing strategy, and I'd actually like us to win this one if it's alright with you. So let's have the interrogating done by professionals rather than closet sadists, so we can win this one and move on.

Since a popular jumping-off point for this debate is the "ticking bomb" argument that Alan Dershowitz and others are so fond of, the following argument is also handy:

-Ticking bomb is fine if you're lucky enough to get the right guy, lucky enough to get him at the right time, and lucky enough that he breaks and tells you the truth in time; but all the other times you torture the wrong guy (or the guilty detainee lies to you) you're just running down the clock on your own side. Do you want a counterterrorism strategy based on luck, or based on science and empirical evidence?

Liberals need to flip and reframe this thing -- we should be referring to the "ticking bomb argument" as "the luck argument". Next time you're arguing the point with a torture apologist and he mentions the ticking bomb, you say "ahh, the luck argument! That's fine; you want to keep America safe with luck. I want to keep America safe using science and evidence and ruthless professionalism. But good luck with the luck thing."

This condenses very nicely down to "luck is not a security policy."

The reason I'm woofing on about how to argue a point which really shouldn't even need arguing is because this struggle -- war on extremism, overseas contingency operation, G-SAVE, whatever -- really is going to be a long game, and it's inevitable that we'll take some hits. Our enemies can't defeat us directly, but they can cause us to engage in self-defeating behavior. If the next terrorist attack sends us into some nightmare revenge spiral of secret detentions and internment camps and torture and who knows what else, the Al-Qaedas of the world will have accomplished their objective, which is to destroy American civilization. They made some headway under the Bush administration, so those of us who love our country with our eyes open have to win the argument decisively. The torture apologists need to be not just defeated, but utterly discredited, and the precedent needs to be neutralized, in order protect our most precious common posession: the structure and function of American civil society.

Safety Dance Part 1

It's been a bad patch for the GOP, but there's still some good news to be had. Republicans have finally found something they trust government to do correctly and well: torture and secret imprisonment.

Pretty amazing, when you think about it. Talk to any ten Republicans about, say, universal healthcare. At least nine of them will give a little involuntary shudder and say that your health is waaay too important to entrust to the government, which obviously Can't Do Anything Right.

Mention more aggressive emissions or fuel efficiency standards, and chances are the response will echo what Mike Huckabee said to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart when he raised the issue: "do you really want to drive a car designed by the government?"

Pick any service or activity: food aid for poor people. Civil infrastructure. Education. Wildlife preservation. Regulation of financial markets or power companies or the factories that feed the country. Regulation of anything at all. The provision of any service to anyone whose name does not end in Inc. You're sure to hear the same refrain: the government is guaranteed to screw it up. The old conservative paragon himself, Ronald Reagan, was often heard to say that the scariest words in the English language are

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Imagine the horror of the modern conservative, living in a society with such an extensive (if poorly maintained) physical and social infrastructure, complete with safety nets for the poor and the aged. A nightmare from which he struggles to awaken! Worse, actually, now that Barack Obama is president. You only have to witness his treatment of the wretched hedge fund managers of the earth to know that the man is a Socialist/Communist/Stalinist/Godknowswhatist. Doesn't he know that government Can't Do Anything Right? From Jon Voight to John Boehner, the political right is scared to death of what such a man could do.

Thankfully, there's a phrase coined by the previous administration which is the antidote to the fear:

"I'm from the government, and I can arrest people arbitrarily, detain them indefinitely, and torture them with impunity".

When conservatives hear that phrase, it doesn't strike them as the scariest in the English language. Apparently it doesn't even rate in the top ten.

When conservatives hear that phrase, it makes them feel...safe.

When Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama's presidential campaign, it
seemed to lend weight to at least a few of the favorable comparisons
between Barack Obama and JFK: both (so the narrative goes) intelligent,
charismatic, and hardworking political operators. The sentiment was
expressed in some quarters that Sen. Obama seemed a natural heir to
the Kennedy legacy. People even credited Barack Obama with having
something of Bobby Kennedy's political style. Seeing either one of
them work a crowd (no matter what you thought about their politics),
you might think: "this guy has a way with people".

Then again, if you were Geraldine Ferraro, you might not think
anything of the sort. What you might think is that Barack Obama would
never merit such a comparison, much less such an endorsement, if he
weren't lucky enough to be black.

It's not that Ms. Ferraro is racist; far from it. Some of her friend's
best friends are black. Ms. Ferraro just understands, perhaps better
than most, that a white man with as much intelligence and political
skill as Mr. Obama could never, ever hope to secure the Democratic
nomination; only with absolutely no charisma would the white guy ever
get the nod. And even then, he'd have to be somewhat ethnic. Maybe
Greek. Then he'd have a shot. Ms. Ferraro, of course, would be happy
to share that ticket, if such a crazy thing had a chance in hell of
happening.

And what are we to think of the Hillary Clinton who in 2000 beat Rick
Lazio in the contest for Pat Moynihan's empty seat in the U.S. Senate?
By some accounts it was a close race and a hard-won victory (she got
55% of the vote) against an adversary who had spent more time as an
elected official than she. (This is also true of Senator Obama, talking
points about "experience" notwithstanding.) It was said in some quarters
that she came off quite well in the debates against Mr. Lazio. There were even
rumors that she had campaigned quite aggressively and skillfully in the
suburban and rural areas of New York State.

If you were Geraldine Ferraro, however, all this talk about hard work and
political skill would be just so much noise to you. In fact, as
politically incorrect as it might be, you couldn't help but conclude
that the Clinton victory never would have happened if she weren't
lucky enough not to have a penis.

Or not. Here is where Gerry starts to deviate from her own logic. You see,
Ms. Ferraro would probably tell you that Sen. Rodham
Sen. Clinton Sen. Rodham Clinton, far from
being a tough political streetfighter with deep pockets and name
recognition, is actually the victim here. She's worked very hard for
everything she's achieved independently since some guy she happened to have married
(what was his name? Will? Phil?) got some high-profile job or other in
Washington. The sexist media, on the other hand, has downplayed not
only the resounding success of her healthcare plan but also her many 3A.M.
foreign policy achievements -- in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, not
to mention Northern Ireland -- choosing instead to sing the praises of some black
guy who was never part of a scandal-plagued, polarizing White House.

It's clear: America's media establishment hates white guys and women.

The bias is obvious and unmistakable: on the rare occasion in this
country when a white male manages to break through the glass ceiling
and become President, he often finds himself crippled by a storm of
anti-white-guy media coverage. In recent memory there was one white
President whose rationale for starting a war was endlessly questioned,
analyzed, second-guessed, and subjected to withering scrutiny to the
point where, if memory serves, he got so pissed off he choked on a
pretzel.* Shame on you, Judith Miller! (You're lucky you don't have a
penis.)

On sexism the media's record is just as shameful. Rather than focus on
the battle-hardened Senator Clinton's "experience"
while she was married to whatshisface, this country's media outlets
are fawning over a "black" man (no more black, according to some, than
the elusive and seldom-seen Mr. Clinton) who, with the invisible aid
of a vast right-wing reverse-racist sexist conspiracy, gave her a
thorough asswhipping in eleven straight primary contests and is ahead
in the delegate count. Shame on you, democratic process!

After careful study, the elegance and simplicity of Ferraro Logic
reveals itself thus: being an ethnic minority in a country with a
painful legacy of slavery and segregation is a breeze, there's
essentially no downside. Being a white man or a woman, on the other
hand, is really difficult; lacking both melanin and a penis, Senator
Clinton is really in a bad way. Sympathy is definitely in order;
perhaps some tears too, as I hear the senator has used up her yearly
quota. Some wit might be thoughtless enough to suggest that, while
there's nothing for the melanin problem, she could simply confiscate
her husband's penis, thereby forcing him to do his thinking with his brain. (I
couldn't possibly comment.)

In any case, this is less about the Clinton dynasty ("nasty" being the
operative syllable) than it is about our friend Geraldine. I applaud
Ms. Ferraro for her independence and her courage. So many of us are
silenced, in our daily lives, by the fear of looking like a complete
fool; to see someone who is undeterred by it is an inspiration.






* The chronology of the events in question does not jibe with reality.
The pretzel incident actually occurred before the start of the Iraq War.
Sense7 regrets the error, and fuck you if you can't take a joke.

Sudan's Government and its Critics

By now most readers are aware of the latest outrage from Sudan's government (which seems to have an infinite supply of them): the arrest and imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher, on charges of "inciting racial hatred" and "insulting Islam". She apparently allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, and that, to a government actively supporting genocide within its own borders, rates as a Serious Crime.

There have even been protests in the streets of Khartoum calling for a harsher sentence than the one that was handed down for this supposed insult to Islam's prophet Muhammad (some wag somewhere has probably already accused Ms. Gibbons of insulting bears, but I digress). I'm curious as to how organic and "grassroots" such street protests really are, the memory of the engineered frenzy over the Danish cartoons being fresh in my mind -- but that's another matter.

To point out how degraded and morally bankrupt this government is would be to belabor the obvious. And in any case much of the best writing about this sort of beahvior on the part of a state -- the sublime, almost surreal ridiculousness with a rich undercurrent of menace and violence -- has been done. You'd have to go back to Soviet-era dissident literature to find it, but it's there.

You can see here some of what Christopher Hitchens is talking about when he refutes the argument that all the 20th century's bloodiest regimes were secular ones: any government will behave like a gang of bloodthirsty religious fanatics if it breathes enough of its own exhaust without having the good grace to asphyxiate. You could tweak some names and transplant this episode to Khrushchev's Russia or Kim Jung Il's North Korea or Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan, and it would be just as believable, just as true to form -- because at their core, Sudan's government and these others are the same damn thing.

But all this is peripheral to the most interesting and illuminating bits of this story, which, it turns out, are in the debate itself.

Those on the left who don't understand what multiculturalism actually is, have offered up their customary threadbare apologia for the Sudanese government. Those on the right who have the same problem are ready to point out how barbaric "they" are, as if people and their political leaders are the same thing. Nothing new there. But even among those who appear to be coming down on the "right" side of this issue -- witness the anger and disgust expressed by many members of the Muslim blogging community -- people seem to have missed the point.

Some have pointed out that Ms. Gibbons didn't name the teddy bear herself, but merely allowed her students to do it (notice how even relating the episode makes one sound faintly absurd). This is correct, but completely beside the point. It implies that a crime really was committed, but they just arrested the wrong person. Perhaps the children should be brought up on charges?

Others, most notably Britain's Foreign Secretary, have said that Ms. Gibbons is only guilty of having made an error, and did not insult the prophet Muhammad on purpose. This, while probably also true, is likewise irrelevant, not to mention somewhat self-negating. Do we now believe that schoolteachers or anyone else should be arrested and imprisoned, flogged, or shot dead if they insult or offend someone's religion on purpose? By way of answering, some vintage Hitchens (in the aftermath of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons):

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Which brings me to the assertion from still other of Ms. Gibbons' defenders that this was a "cultural misunderstanding". The implication here is that if only we Westerners would study harder and mind our words and actions better, we could display the appropriate level of sensitivity and avoid unfortunate incidents like the one that befell Ms. Gibbons. (Note that this apparent defense of Ms. Gibbons, like the two previous ones, is mounted mostly by people on the political left.)

My response is that, as liberals, there is nothing left for us to understand about any rejection of universal humanity in favor of scriptural adherence or doctrinal purity -- beyond the basic realization that this is our enemy. Far from needing to be better understood, whatever is decent and just and humane in Islamic cultures around the world needs to be better defended -- from the people who always claim to be defending Islam. This latest spasm of grotesque and cynical behavior from a grotesque and cynical government may seem like a small matter -- it looks as if Ms. Gibbons will be detained for a short while and then deported -- but it points us toward the largest and most essential questions we've seen so far in this young and already troubled century.

The most important question we're faced with whenever something like this happens is not "what to do?" because there isn't always something we can do. Nor is the question "what is the law?" because lawmakers can be damn fools and often are. Anyone with a conscience knows, for example, that torture and arbitrary imprisonment are wrong no matter what damn foolishness they send up from Congress for the President to sign.

The most important question here is "what is compatible with civilization and what is not?"

I don't believe there's anything inherent in Islamic scripture that makes it any more or less bloodthirsty than, say, Judeo-Christian scripture; those who do are letting their bigotry show, not to mention plain wrong. But if we look at the world as it is, we have to admit to ourselves that something terrible is happening in, and to, the global Islamic community. The Gibbons case in Sudan is one manifestation of this. Hitchens calls it a civil war within Islam, and I think he's right. The question of how that war should be prosecuted is wide open. The question of what side we in the West are on, and who we want to win, should not be.

Back in the Saddle

It's been a long hiatus for your friendly neighborhood troublemaker. Real estate troubles (I Heart New York!) forced a series of retrenchments, holding actions, half-pincer movements, and all other types of shit. Long story short, I'm almost back to a stable business/living situation now (I'm oscillating like an electron between Greenpoint and Bed-Stuy), so it's time to resume my bloggery. (Hmmm -- that last coinage sounds vaguely unwholesome.)

To my loyal readers, I'd like to apologize for the long dry peiod. How have the two of you been?

YZ

Spend Your Loose Change On Something Else

Seeing the story about the accident in California that caused a section of the I-80 East connecting ramp to partially melt, then buckle and collapse, I am happy, for two reasons: first, that no one was killed or seriously injured; second, that some of the exponents of the "intentional demolition" theory of the 9/11 WTC collapse (yes, they're still around) might at long last -- seeing the effect of thousands of gallons of burning fuel on steel girders -- shut the fuck up. I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool lefty who has no use for the Bush administration or its half-baked policies: if I hear one more radical "progressive" say that there's no way the towers could have collapsed without the use of explosives, I'm going to use explosives, on that person.

Governments do plenty of bad things, and ours is no exception. Enough of those things are done in the open that we don't need to make shit up.

The Amusements of Randall Tobias

Who Told Randall To Buy Ass?

By now the news about Randall (aka "Randy") Tobias is all over the blogosphere. Tobias was the (reservoir) tip of the spear in Bush's foreign anti-AIDS initiative, and as a loyal Bushie he oversaw a policy that promoted abstinence and faithfulness over condom use. He resigned last week when it came to light that he was a regular customer of a D.C. "escort service" whose madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, is under indictment by a federal grand jury.

The Prostitution Rests, Your Honor

Many of the posts about this latest amusement from the Bushes mention an anti-prostitution "loyalty oath"; that provision is actually part of a law called the
"U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003". It's sometimes known as the "Global Aids Act". Here's the official press release on its signing.

That act created the post -- Global Aids Coordinator -- from which Tobias resigned. What's important to remember here, even as we savor the rich ironies on offer, is that Bush, true to form, appointed RT to this position despite his utter lack of public health or AIDS experience. (Check his bio here.) We'll hazard a guess that Mr. Tobias demonstrated his loyal-Bushie status, and therefore his worthiness to hold his post, in some yet-to-be-discovered way.

Actually, I may have misspoken about his lack of qualifications: it turns out that randy Randy received an award from the National Association of People with AIDS in 2005. It's called the "Positive Ally Award." This is fitting; he might test positive for quite a few things, given his sexual history.


F*ck You and the Whores You Rode In On

What else is there to say? I'm glad to see another unqualified political appointee leave the Bush administration, even though I don't have much hope that his replacement will be any better. With any luck, mainstream news outlets will pick this up and expose a bit more widely the hypocrisy at the core of much of what this government does. In the meantime, Mr. Tobias says he's been using a different escort service, this time with "Central American women".


In the face of Republican rhetoric about immigration and human trafficking, you should make of that what you will.


Here is some news about the ongoing effort to get rid of the "loyalty oath", which according to every source I've seen, was not well-received among organizations doing anti-AIDS work.

More on the Global AIDS Act here.