The price for keeping our hands clean

The New Neo Posted on by

Wretchard of Belmont Club has written another of his signature, deeply thoughtful, posts.

All I can say is “read the whole thing.” Well, no, actually; that’s not all I can say.

Wretchard is writing about whether we can afford the luxury of moral absolutism in fighting the terrorists/Islamofascists/jihadists (select whichever word you think best), or whether the most moral course is to choose the lesser of two evils. He quotes this article by Conor Gearty, a human rights law professor at the London School of Economics (and with whom he disagrees), on the subject:

The moment the human rights discourse moves in this way into the realm of good and evil is the moment when it has fatally compromised its integrity. For once these grand terms are deployed in the discussion, all bets are off as far as equality of esteem is concerned. If we are good and they are bad, then of course equality of esteem as between all of us is ludicrous. Why esteem the evildoer in the same way as he or she who does good?…

International humanitarian and human rights law represents the apogee of [the] civilizing trend in global affairs, with rules of decent conduct that took their colour from the fact of our shared humanity rather than the superiority of our particular cause being agreed and promulgated.

Reading this, I felt a certain “aha!” moment come upon me. Gearty’s words are an almost perfect illustration of a certain mindset I hadn’t heard articulated so well before, one I believe is behind some seemingly incomprehensible positions taken by quite a few liberals and a large number of leftists.

Gearty speaks for many, I believe, in voicing a sort of morally absolute moral relativism. Lest this seem merely to be a tongue-twisting oxymoron, I’ll try to explain.

If I’m understanding him correctly, Gearty is saying that calling one side in a conflict good and another evil–or even calling one side morally better and the other worse in the relative sense–is itself a step onto the slippery slope that inexorably leads to human rights abuses. For that reason, such statements cannot ever be allowed, because allowing any such abuses would be to fatally and utterly compromise our own moral standing, the absolute and total protection of human rights being the highest good of all, one that trumps all others.

Furthermore, Gearty believes that one cannot make judgments about good or evil while simultaneously maintaining esteem (I think by this he means “respect”) for the evildoer. And, since Geary elevates equal esteem for all humanity as the highest good because it underpins human rights, then we cannot make judgments about good and evil.

However, in writing it out that way, I think a basic contradiction becomes glaringly obvious: Geary is himself making such a “good and evil” sort of moral judgment, and that is that the greatest good is to esteem all people on earth equally, and accord them all equal and complete human rights. It’s impossible, however, if one follows his logic, to escape the notion that groups with more of a dedication to preserving human rights would be more “good” and less “evil” than those who torture freely. I think this is an illustration of the fact that it’s simply impossible to talk about moral decisions without making some sort of moral judgments.

I guess Gearty has never heard of the notion of “hating the sin but loving the sinner”–that is, in secular and less loaded terms, believing someone has done something evil and yet still believing him/her to be a human being worthy of respect and with rights to be protected. Our entire legal system is actually predicated on such notions, and it’s difficult to see how a moral legal system could work if it were not. Surely all imprisonment, however just, includes the fact of depriving people of certain rights (although not basic ones). All imprisonment involves some sort of unpleasantness (therefore, according to some, “abuse” or even “torture”), both physical and mental. In addition, all imprisonment involves judgment of the wrongdoer’s acts as–well, as wrong, or even that old-fashioned word that Gearty so detests, “evil.”

This isn’t the place for a lengthy discussion on the nature of good and evil, and what is meant by those words (although…someday…). But I believe the heart of Gearty’s problem here is that he is mistaking what might be called “person-oriented” judgments with “act-oriented” judgments.

What is meant by that? Our legal system is based almost entirely on the latter rather than the former; we actually don’t judge people to be evil, we judge their acts to be such. Even Saddam Hussein is on trial for acts, not for the crime of being an evil person.

People who continually cross moral lines and do bad things are called, in a sort of shorthand, “evildoers”–that is, those who do evil. Does this mean they are inherently evil, have lost their claim to be human beings and to be respected as such? That’s primarily a religious/philosophical rather than a legal question, and it’s much too big for this essay, but as far as the law goes (and that’s what’s being discussed here), the answer is no, they have not lost their claim to be human.

So I see no contradiction between calling someone evil and calling them human. Even psychopaths and sociopaths, who seem to lack a conscience, are still human beings, although extremely dangerous and unusual ones. As humans, they are worthy of some respect, but that respect is not absolute. For example, it can certainly be argued that, even though we consider them humans, we are well within our rights to deprive them of their freedom and their right to harm us, if they are found guilty after a fair trial. Many argue that, in extreme cases, we are well within our rights to deprive them even of their lives.

And, in the unusual and rare situation of the “ticking time bomb,” it could be argued that despite the humanity of the evildoer, the consideration of some sort of physical coercion cannot and should not be taken off the table. What the dimensions of that coercion might be (for example, might it be limited to such methods as sleep deprivation), and when it would be not only morally acceptable but morally justified to apply it, are exceedingly difficult questions of extreme moral complexity. But to shy away from those questions and to propose an absolute ban is an act that leads to moral complexities of its own, a fact which Gearty refuses to acknowledge.

If you read Gearty’s piece, you’ll find an excellent example of the ivory-tower approach to the messy business of ethical decision-making. Gearty ignores almost everything about the real world as it actually works. As human beings making choices, I don’t see how we can ever avoid making moral judgments about relative good and evil (oh, how Gearty hates that word “relative!”). Even Gearty is making them here, whether he realizes it or not.

In the real world in which we live–rather than the lofty world of the London School of Economics in which Gearty seems to live, and where I’m sure no one ever does anything unethical–moral choices are usually between the lesser of two evils (or, as I’ve written before, the least crazy of several competing crazinesses). Failure to make such choices between relative goods/evils would make us into moral monsters of another sort, trapped in a rigid rules-bound way of thinking that would lead almost inevitably to tragic consequences. (If you doubt the latter, please see my pacifism series, particularly the one on Gandhi, who exhibited a similar rigidity of thought.)

But Gearty and his ilk believe that the rules will make you free, and that these rules must be rigid, since humans are incapable of making nuanced moral decisions (in other words, morally speaking, it’s all a slippery slope). Gearty believes that the rules of international law, based on ideas of shared humanity, are superior and must supercede any ad hoc notions of the good or evil of a certain cause. (Of course, Gearty is conveniently ignoring the fact that terrorists explicitly reject all such rules of international law, as well as any notions of the human rights that underlie them, although they will use international law to suit their purposes if faced with their own trials under its rules).

And, as Wretchard points out in his post, international rules of law are only enforceable if there is some teeth behind them, or in a society in which they are generally accepted: Humanitarian law works where law is obeyed, like the electric shaver that works where there is electricity. Otherwise, they are meaningless.

So, what is behind Gearty’s ability to hold his illogical and absolutist position? After all, he doesn’t seem to lack what we usually think of as intelligence, or a concern with morality itself. Quite the contrary.

It is my firm belief that a basic motivation behind positions such as Gearty’s (whether he’s aware of it or not) is the need to keep his own moral purity, and his notion of the moral purity of the society of which he is a member. That is, he desires to keep his own hands totally clean, his own conscience morally pure.

It is very difficult for many people to think of themselves as morally compromised. Gearty clearly believes he occupies the moral high ground in being an absolutist against human rights abuses such as any form of torture under any circumstances (as Gandhi did about violence). He never explores the actual real-world consequences of his position.

After all, it is far easier to see the consequences of action: that is, we torture someone, and someone suffers. Ergo, we are guilty of causing harm and pain to another human being. That cannot be denied. But the pain and suffering caused in certain cases by inaction, by not applying some form of human rights abuse or even physical pain (which I’m not here advocating; whether that is ever necessary or effective is a separate issue) is never factored by Gearty into his equation.

But it needs to be. Of course, it’s harder to see what the consequences of inaction might be, because the results of not acting are always speculative. But it would be illogical to ignore them, although that’s exactly what people such as Gearty–and pacifists worldwide–do.

As I wrote in another context, that of a discussion about the morality of the Iraq war:

My main point is quite a simple one: advocating a pullout–or even a timetable for a pullout–without understanding or recognizing the probable consequences of such action is utterly irresponsible…Yes, indeed, there’s enough blood to go around. There always is in war; wars involve blood on everyone’s hands, including pacifists, who are responsible for some of the blood involved in feeding the crocodile.
The important question is: how much blood is on whose hands, and to what end?

Yes, it’s relativistic. But I see no other way. In the real world in which we live, rather than the ideal one that exists only in the heads of academics such as Gearty or pacifists such as Gandhi, there is blood on everyone’s hands.

Viewing the “Amnesia: a love story” video

The New Neo Posted on by

I forgot to mention the following in yesterday’s post about Clive Wearing: for those of you in the states who get cable TV, the video is scheduled to be aired again on TLC on Dec. 19 at 10:00 PM, and on Dec. 20 at 1:00 AM. Watch or set your recorders; it’s really quite an extraordinary document.

[NOTE: This is not the only post I’m writing today. I often publish in the early afternoon, but today my schedule dictates that I’ll be putting something up in the late afternoon or early evening. Just thought I’d let you know.]

Amnesia: a love story

The New Neo Posted on by

A few years ago I saw the last few minutes of a TV documentary. Those moments made a deep impression on me, although I saw so little of it I didn’t really even know who or what it was about, except that it concerned a man in England who’d lost his memory in a very profound way. Then the other day, just by chance, I came across another documentary on the same subject, and finally learned his story.

Clive Wearing was a British musician, conductor, and musicologist who came down with encephalitis about twenty years ago, a sudden attack that left him with only his short-term memory. Now short-term memory is a wonderful thing—it allows us to remember things briefly—but it’s not everything. Ordinarily, after events or facts are put in our short-term memory for a few seconds, we can either delete them or store them for future reference. It’s this long-term storage capacity that Clive Wearing utterly lacks.

And I mean utterly. Lots of people—especially the elderly—have some problems with memory. But Wearing not only has almost no long-term memory, but his extremely formidable intellectual capacity and verbal proficiency are totally intact, making his situation all the more poignant and horrific.

Why am I mentioning all this? It’s hard to explain without seeing the man himself on the tapes. There is something utterly gripping and profoundly disturbing about his plight, one that I would never wish on a living soul. His life has been shattered and blasted, and yet he is still alive—a terrible fate, indeed. But there’s another thing about Wearing, and that’s the real reason I’m writing this. He shows the extraordinary resilience human beings can sometimes exhibit, and the sustaining power of love.

Love you say? What’s love got to do with it?

In Wearing’s case, just about everything. In fact, I am convinced it’s love that keeps him alive, and keeps him sane despite his tragic and lamentable disability.

I’m not whitewashing the situation, believe me. It is terrible, and if you watch the documentary you’ll see Clive utter many remarks such as these:

Can you imagine what it’s like ”” one night 20 years long with no dreams and no thoughts. My brain has been totally inactive, day and night exactly the same. There’s no difference between this and death.

Or engage in dialogues such as this:

TARA BROWN: To live without memory makes Clive angry when you ask him to think about it. Are you a happy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Sorry?

TARA BROWN: Are you a happy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Happy? I’ve been unconscious for how many years? That doesn’t make you happy, does it?

TARA BROWN: So are you an unhappy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Of course I am. I’ve never seen a human being before. Never heard a note. Never seen anything at all. Day and night exactly the same with no dreams of any kind.

But Wearing’s story illustrates that that elusive construct, personality, seems to be something very real. Somehow, even without much memory, Clive is still himself; he retains his “Cliveness,” as his wife says. Even now his personality and intelligence are impressive; if he retains a tremendous charm under these conditions, one can only imagine how extraordinary he must have been before.

From the beginning of his illness Clive always could remember certain elements about himself and his life, even though he had no memories of a single actual event in a life filled with honors and accomplishments as well as personal fulfillment. He remembered, for example, that he’d been a musician and conductor. He remembered he was married and who his wife was; he remembered his children from a previous marriage (although not their names). That was pretty much it, however.

What is the thread that holds all three things together? I submit that it is love.

Clive Wearing seems to be a man who was unusually gifted—and blessed—with love. Actually, I don’t know why I use the past tense—he is unusually gifted with love. Here is a description of his relationship with his wife, Deborah (the interviewer is named Tara Brown):

TARA BROWN:… it’s his pleas for Deborah to visit that are the hardest to read [in his diary] for, though she visits often, he has no recollection of seeing her. You wrote here, “Please fly here at once, darling Deborah”.

CLIVE WEARING: No, “at infinite miles per hour”.

TARA BROWN: Oh, sorry.

CLIVE WEARING: She says at once.

TARA BROWN: I can’t read your writing.

CLIVE WEARING: I can, I’m used to it.

TARA BROWN: Do you remember writing that?

CLIVE WEARING: No.

TARA BROWN: Why did you implore Deborah to arrive here?

CLIVE WEARING: I love her.

TARA BROWN: You love her.

CLIVE WEARING: Didn’t you know?

TARA BROWN: I’ve been working it out.

CLIVE WEARING: Hooray!

TARA BROWN: Do you think of your relationship with him as a husband and wife or is it mother and child?

DEBORAH WEARING: Oh, no. Husband and wife. It’s, it’s, it’s a marriage, although it’s … obviously, apart. It’s not an ”¦ it’s quite an unusual marriage, let’s say. Hello.

CLIVE WEARING: Oh! Ooh! You’re the best angel on earth.

TARA BROWN: It doesn’t matter who’s in the room, they can’t hide their affection for one another. They only knew each other for six-and-a-half years before Clive got sick. He can’t remember people he’s known all his life, yet Clive can’t forget Deborah.

DEBORAH WEARING: Who needs music?

CLIVE WEARING: Who’s music?

DEBORAH WEARING: No, who needs music?

CLIVE WEARING: A madman like me.

TARA BROWN: Even in those very first days when he couldn’t communicate, he could still say to you “I love you.”

DEBORAH WEARING: Yes.

TARA BROWN: How do you explain that?

DEBORAH WEARING: Because it’s very, very important. Some words I think that are just sealed in to our minds and our hearts, some feelings are just sealed in and not ”¦ they’re not open to corruption.

If you see Clive and Deborah in action, you cannot help but come to the conclusion that she is correct, although a scientist might put it quite differently than she does. It seems that feelings can exist outside of specific memories, and can give a certain continuity—a leitmotif, as it were—to a life, even one as bereft of memory as Wearing’s.

I used the word “leitmotif” in the previous paragraph for a reason; it’s a musical term. For music is the other great love of Wearing’s life, and in this, as in his marriage (although certainly not in many other things), he has been an extraordinarily fortunate man. And this is because musical learning seems to be quite different from ordinary memory, and more likely to remain intact despite a disease such as his.

It’s not that Wearing can sit down at the piano and play all the old pieces he used to know. Or actually, perhaps he could, but he doesn’t. What he can do is read music; place a sheet of music in front of him and he sight-reads it beautifully, that capacity fully intact. While he is playing, he seems whole; the flow of the music admits of no breaks, one moment leads seamlessly to the next and gives the activity a continuity that the rest of his existence lacks.

There’s no denying that there’s been a great deal of suffering involved in Wearing’s life and that of his wife and family. It was particularly acute in the first couple of years after his illness. During that time, for example, Wearing went through a month of perpetual crying:

One day when Deborah Wearing visited her husband in the hospital, his face was a picture of complete horror at his condition. That evening he started to cry. He cried all night and all through the following days. His pillow was wet with tears; he was constantly thirsty because he had lost so much fluid. Even before he opened his eyes in bed in the mornings, his tears started to roll down his cheeks and at night he fell asleep crying. After one month he was still crying but the tears had stopped flowing…

During his crying spell, Deborah Wearing would often ask her husband: “Darling, what’s wrong? Tell me.” For a long time, he didn’t answer her question; when he did, it was just one sentence: “I am utterly incapable of thinking!”

But these scenes no longer happen; in some strange way, Wearing has adjusted emotionally to his condition, and seems relatively happy much of the time, especially when Deborah is near. And she, too–with the help of religion, which she found a few years ago—seems to have adjusted, and to be in some way happy, although it’s a very different happiness than the one they had before his illness; their present happiness has been extremely hard-won indeed.

Weighted down by the almost unimaginable sorrow and strain of it all, Deborah had actually divorced Clive some nine years after his illness and moved to America to get away, perhaps even to marry and have children. But, inexorably drawn back by the power of love, she returned and remarried him. Apparently Clive retained enough of his “Cliveness” to keep her from beginning a new life with anyone else.

As she says,

I realised that we are not just brain and processes. Clive had lost all that and yet he was still Clive. Even when we didn’t see one another, when we were six months apart and only spoke on the telephone, nothing had changed. Even when he was at his worst, most acute state, he still had that huge overwhelming love … for me. That was what survived when everything else was taken away.

Clive himself seems to agree:

Clive often says: “We aren’t two, darling, we are one.” Recently, someone asked him to state his complete name. “Clive David Deborah Wearing,” he answered. “Strange name. Who knows why my parents called me that.”

As Pascal said: The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

So, when is that next “change” post coming?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve received a number of queries from readers as to just when the next “A mind is a difficult thing to change” post is coming up. They’ve all been very polite and careful not to pressure me.

Ah, but I pressure myself, and ask, “So, you [expletive deleted] old procrastinator, when is that “change” post coming, anyway? The last one was on 9/11, and it’s December already, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

My answer, both to them and to myself, is: soon. “Soon,” as in, “within the next couple of weeks.”

The trouble is that those things seem to take an unusual marshalling of energy. It’s not just the length of the “change” posts, it’s the reliving of the experiences–at least in memory–and the effort to process them in a way that would be relevant to more people than just myself.

But I’m not complaining. I, too, am eager to take on the task. After all, it’s a self-motivated and self-appointed one.

It’s just that it’s so easy to say “manana” (although it’s apparently not so easy for me to put that little ~ thingee over the “n” in “manana.” Anyone got instructions on how to do that? It’s probably something very simple and obvious, right?)

So, bear with me, the next “change” post will be coming–soon.

It’s a conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has a good post up about how the assumed failure of pre-war intelligence on WMDs is unlikely to have been the result of a conspiracy, but is very likely to have been an error. In it, he talks about the proliferation of conspiracy theories in general, including ones hatched by those on the right about Clinton’s murdering Vince Foster, and the like.

I’m in agreement with Dean here:

Of course, I can’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But just remember: the harder you strain to make weak evidence look supportable, the weirder the places you find yourself in. Apply Occam’s Razor and all of these speculations suddenly come into sharp relief: all things considered, the simplest explanation tends to be the most correct. The amount of assumptions you need to make before believing there was some big lie and coverup on pre-war intelligence are enormous; the number you need to believe that we–yes we, including people on all sides of the political spectrum–were simply wrong are quite small.

I’ve noticed how very popular conspiracy theories have become in my lifetime. In the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” the Jack D. Ripper character who thought flouride was a Commie plot to poison our precious body fluids was a joke. But if you stay up late some night to listen to “Coast to Coast,” you’ll hear an almost endless exchange of ideas that make that one sound positively mainstream.

In my lifetime, I really think it all began (well, not began exactly, but became popularized) with the Kennedy assassination. The vast majority of Americans believed–and still believe–that Oswald did not act alone. The polls have been fairly consistent over time: three-quarters of respondents think there was a conspiracy. Three-quarters is practically a unanimity in the world of opinion polling.

I’m not here to debate the merits of assassination theories–although my personal opinion, after doing a great deal of research a while back on the subject, (including reading Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which I recommend to anyone interested), is that the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was both the lone gunman and the lone planner, improbable though that may seem.

If the demographics here are representative of the population as a whole, my guess is that the majority of readers disagree with me. My real point, though, is that the Kennedy assassination opened the door to an almost kneejerk conspiratorial explanation for many subsequent events.

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? One reason, I believe, is the decline of general (not specialized) education in science, decried by Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

For “understanding of science and technology” I would actually substitute the more general “understanding and use of critical thinking.”

But whatever the cause, there’s little doubt in my mind that conspiracy theories have become more and more commonplace. One of my most chilling experiences was a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine. We were sitting having lunch and chatting when she quite casually mentioned that she believes Bush knew all about 9/11 beforehand and let it go forward for his own purposes. A lovely person (a therapist, no less–naturally!), up until that moment she’d never shown any indication of that sort of mindset. But she could not be dissuaded from her idea, and I must say I gave her a wider berth after that.

Along with Dean, I’m an Occam’s Razor person myself. I tend to think people are far more likely to be incompetent than cannily and successfully conspiratorial. And I’m aghast that so many people seem to think otherwise.

What’s the origin of the need to see a conspiracy behind every unpleasant event? One reason is the desire for order and control–even though, paradoxically, conspiracy theories posit a shadowy world out of the control of most of us. But, like children who want everything to have a reason and an explanation, conspiracy theorists can rest assured that at least someone (if only the conspirators) is in control and that there are few accidents, few random terrible and unpredictable events that we cannot control.

The same, I believe, is true for some of the demonization of Bush: better to believe he’s evil but in control than that the situation is inherently somewhat chaotic. Nature–and people–seem to abhor the vacuum of anarchy, and conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void.

Another New England tradition bites the dust: R.I.P., Governor Dummer Academy

The New Neo Posted on by

I always used to wonder about it, whenever I’d pass the sign on the highway near Newburyport, Massachusetts that said Governor Dummer Academy.

What was it like for the students when people asked them where they attended school? What endless string of lousy puns were they subjected too, and did they take it in good stride? When the movie “Dumb and Dumber” came out, did it get better, or did it get worse?

But it’s all over now, or at least it will be on July 1, 2006. From that day forward, the nation’s oldest independent boarding school (who knew?) will just be known as the Governor’s Academy. Pick a governor, any governor:

“The board of trustees believes the long-term interests of the Academy are best served by implementation of this change in the school name,” board president Dan Morgan said in a statement.

Morgan had told alumni of plans to change the name after a preliminary vote by the trustees in December 2004, drawing questioning letters and e-mails.

But you can’t please all of the people all the time:

To appease critics, trustees agreed to include the words “Established in 1763 by Governor Wm. Dummer” on the school’s printed name and seal.

The gesture wasn’t enough for Michael Smith, a 1954 alumnus who said he has made his last donation to his alma mater.

“Why give money to a school that has no respect for history?” asked Smith, a retired federal government official who lives in McLean, Va.

They won’t be getting a penny from me.

The will to fight

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger Dan Melson is new to me. His blog, Searchlight Crusade, (which sounded vaguely evangelical, but is not) seems to be mostly about consumer and financial issues. He’s currently employed as a real estate loan officer and agent, and has past experience as a financial planner.

No doubt Mr. Melson writes great articles about insurance and investing and real estate and all that stuff. But I wouldn’t really know, since I haven’t read them. Actually, I’ve only read one post on his blog, and it’s most decidedly not about any of those things. It’s this one, entitled “Recent US Political and Military History and the War on Terror.” It was recommended to me by a reader, and he certainly didn’t steer me wrong.

If I were to summarize what that post is about, I’d say it’s about the importance of the will to fight.

I suggest you read it. Warning: it’s long–but my guess is that anyone who’s been a reader of my blog doesn’t really mind long too much.

Melson’s post is one of the best summaries of the entire post-9/11 situation that I’ve ever seen. As such, despite its length, it’s actually rather compact, compressing an impressive amount of military and political history and combining it with logic and just plain common sense.

The post is one of those things that–if any of my liberal friends were still reading anything I might forward to them on the topic of politics/world affairs–I’d send to every person on my list. But alas, no.

As it is, I’ll just recommend it to you. And if you’ve got anyone to send it to who might still listen, you could try forwarding it.

How the left lost its way

The New Neo Posted on by

As so often happens, I want to take up a question posed in the comments section of a previous thread. Reader “kcom” expressed puzzlement at the lack of condemnation of Saddam’s regime from the left and their failure to see him as a serious problem:

“It is amazing to see such self-proclaimed progressives on the side of preserving totalitarian regimes.”

This is the one point that has had me stumped from day one. I just can’t for the life of me understand it. I can see being disturbed by or even opposing the war as a solution to the Saddam problem. But what makes my head spin is how many people don’t honestly seem to believe there was a Saddam problem.

I’m going to do something I rarely do, which is to recycle part of an old post (Well, it’s Saturday, after all–plus, this post was originally written way back in March, when my readership was relatively low, so I think it bears repeating.)

The post was originally called “Dancing in a ring,” and it was a response to a similar query posted by Norm Geras, a thinker on the left who did loudly condemn Saddam and support his overthrow, and who was later puzzled by the failure of so many of his colleagues to take a similar position (you may have noticed that in my blogroll, I refer to Geras as a “principled leftist.” That, he is).

The following excerpt from my post in response to Norm can also serve to answer the query “kcom” posed, which is essentially the same question:

[Norm asked]: Why do so many “of liberal and left outlook” focus on Bush’s supposed crimes, making the Nazi comparison at the drop of a metaphor, and ignoring the far more terrible tyrants around the world for whom the Hitlerian analogy would be more apt? Why indeed have many on the left functioned as apologists for Saddam Hussein, a man whose downfall they should be applauding? When they said they were against tyranny, didn’t they mean what they said?…[M]ore deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer. But I do have a response.

First, I offer this quote from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

Now, you might say that leftists didn’t have to compromise their beliefs to have applauded the downfall of Saddam Hussein and to have realized that he and his regime were worse (and far more Nazi-like) than George Bush. Indeed, there are many leftists who have consistently said these very things. But there are others—and their numbers are not small–who have not, or who have done it with so much “throat-clearing,” as Chris Hitchens calls it, that their statements become virtually meaningless.

What is the difference between these two types of people? I think it has to do with the extent of their devotion to the circle dance, and the hierarchy of their belief system. The former group–what Norm Geras calls “principled leftists”–truly do believe what they say about hating tyrants and tyranny, and this is one of their highest values. They apply it irrespective of where the tyranny originates. But the second group, the terrorist and Saddam apologists, the relentless Bush=Hitler accusers, are quite different. It seems that they feel that their membership in the circle of the left requires them to elevate one particular guiding principle above all else, and that is this: in any power struggle between members of a third-world country and a developed Western country (especially the most powerful of all, the United States), the third-world country is always right.

Once learned, this very simple and reductionist principle makes the world easy to understand, and dictates all further responses. If one believes this principle, then oppression and tyranny can go in one direction only, and all evidence to the contrary must be ignored, suppressed, or twisted by sophistry into something almost unrecognizable. But once that price is paid, one can go on dancing in the old circle.

In the quote with which I began this essay, Norm Geras refers to “the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters.” I think the key phrase is “which matter more than just about anything else matters.” To those intent on dancing the circle dance above all else, the priorities are different. Apparently, other things matter more.

[You might also want to take a look at this recent post by Sigmund Carl & Alfred on a different aspect of the same subject.]

Comment here on previous post?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, Blogger rides again. It seems that comments for the previous post today (Part II of the two-part series on planning for the Iraq War and its aftermath) are not working. Comments on the other threads seem to be fine.

So, here’s a new post to provide a place for those who want to comment on the previous post to do so. Hope it works!

[ADDENDUM: I decided to try republishing the previous post to see if it would fix the glitch with the comments, and lo and behold–it did! I’ll leave this up, though, just in case-]

Iraq: planning for war and its aftermath (Part II of two)

The New Neo Posted on by

[The first part of this two-part series can be found here. Some of the comments on that thread were so excellent and that I almost jettisoned Part II in favor of advising you all to just read the comments and call it a day, since they were probably more informative than my post would be. But here it is anyway–although please read those comments, too.]

I mentioned that it was predicted the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk.”. But I also remember hearing an awful lot of predictions made by members of the administration that the war would be rough, and explicitly disavowing the “cakewalk” designation. For example, see this one from December of 2002:

I would just say there’s nobody involved in the military planning … that would say that this sort of endeavor — if we are asked to do it — would be a cakewalk,” said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

Myers was joined by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a news conference. Rumsfeld emphasized that any possible war is risky and that battlefield analogies to the 1991 Gulf War wouldn’t apply this time around.

“Any war is a dangerous thing, and it puts peoples’ lives at risk,” Rumsfeld said. “Second, I think that it is very difficult to have good knowledge as to exactly how Iraqi forces will behave.”

So, did someone actually say the war would be a “cakewalk?” Absolutely. His name was Ken Adelman–not, as so many seem to remember, Don Rumsfeld.

Who is Adelman? He does have an association with Rumsfeld; he was his assistant way back in the ’70s, in the Ford administration. But at the time he wrote the “cakewalk” piece, which appeared in the Washington Post of February 2002, he was neither an official member of Bush’s administration nor the Defense Department. Rather, he was one of a group of thirty policy advisors on the Defense Policy Board, an outside advisory panel charged with the task of making recommendations to the Pentagon (Adelman originally had been appointed to the Board by Rumsfeld, however).

I think Adelman’s original column was offputting and almost ridiculously cocky; calling any sort of war a “cakewalk” shows a sort of creepy frivolity about the whole endeavor. My guess is that his relationship with Rumsfeld, as well as Rumsfeld’s own tendency to swagger (and his own statments that the war might well be short in duration), caused many to attibute Adelman’s remarks to Rumsfeld.

Of course, Adelman was wrong in his prediction–right?

Well, take a look at what he actually says in his column. If you read it, you might even come to the same conclusion I did, which is that–hold onto your hats, folks, Adelman wasn’t so very far off, after all.

Please hear my explanation before you decide I’ve taken leave of my senses.

It has seemed to me for quite some time that the Iraq war had two distinct stages. The first was the war itself–the formal war, the conventional war–in other words, war as we traditionally know it, with armies and battles and gaining and losing ground. The other stage was what we can loosely call the “occupation”–that is, everything that came after.

The first war had to do with defeating the Iraqi army and deposing Saddam. The second war had to do with what might be called the reconstruction. And reconstructions–such as that which followed our own Civil War, or the Marshall Plan in Europe, or MacArthur in Japan after WWII–are notoriously long and difficult. They also have always (at least, so far as I can determine) been the end-point of long and vicious wars in which the enemy had fought desperately and was now depleted of men and arms with which to fight further. And the populations in those regions were, for the most part, weary and bitterly defeated.

As I read his “cakewalk” column, Ken Adelman seems only to be referring to the first part of the war, the overthrow of Saddam and the liberation of Iraq from his official reign of terror:

I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk….Gordon and O’Hanlon say we must not “assume that Hussein will quickly fall.” I think that’s just what is likely to happen. How would it be accomplished? By knocking out all his headquarters, communications, air defenses and fixed military facilities through precision bombing. By establishing military “no-drive zones” wherever Iraqi forces try to move. By arming the Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and his many opponents everywhere. By using U.S. special forces and some U.S. ground forces with protective gear against chemical and biological weapons.

Well, it turns out he was right as far as his prediction went (and yes, he–like nearly everyone else–was apparently wrong about WMDs). The formal war was quick and relatively easy, as wars go; Saddam was deposed and the country was liberated from his tyrannical rule in less than one month (see this timeline to refresh your memory).

The trouble, of course (in addition to his flippant tone) was that Adelman’s prediction didn’t go nearly far enough. He failed to talk about the all-important second part of the equation, the difficult task of transforming a now-liberated Iraq into a functioning and free government and society.

If the first part of the war was indeed a cakewalk, it’s clear that the second part most decidedly was not.

So, was the planning for this second part of the war deficient? Should the Defense Department have realized it was going to happen this way, and if so, could they have done anything to stop it? How do we judge?

Well, one way not to judge it is by the standard of perfection. The fact that things went wrong is not enough.

In an attempt to answer this question, I’m going to ask another: why did the first part of the war go so quickly and with such relative ease, and the second so slowly and sloppily? I believe that the ease of the first war was directly responsible for the difficulty of the second one.

The majority of the Iraqi people, as well as Saddam himself, made a choice in the first war–and that was to not fight hard to keep the US forces out of their country. This is highly unusual in a war, as far as I know; ordinarily the whole idea of the thing is to repel the invader. But the fact that the Iraqi people and army didn’t put up much of a fight, initially, means that some of them (we don’t know how many, but my impression is that it was a sizeable number) reluctantly welcomed the war as the only way to get rid of Saddam.

Another number (and Saddam was definitely among them) didn’t fight because they knew they didn’t stand a chance in a conventional war. So they were busy planning the next stage–the second war–and they had plenty of time in which to do so. Their only hope was to go underground and set up a postwar insurgency like the one we’ve faced. And, because the first part of the war was so short and relatively easy, they had plenty of men and material with which to do it, as well as fresh reinforcements from neighboring countries untouched by any war at all. This seems quite unprecendented in the annals of war, and it seems to have been a conscious strategy on their part.

I’m not sure those homegrown Baathist-type insurgents expected to be joined by so many “visitors” from other parts of the Arab world, interested not just in attacking the occupying American troops, but intent on killing many innocent Iraqis just going about their business and trying to live their lives. But I’m not sure the homegrown insurgents much cared; the more mayhem, the merrier.

At any rate, the ease of the war allowed the insurgents to create a nasty problem afterwards, because they were able to melt away into the night and implement an urban warfare based on terrorism and sabotage that had been planned for quite some time.

And it’s very hard for me to see how any sort of planning on the part of the US could have prevented that. More troops? Keep the Iraqi army intact? I’ve read many arguments both pro and con on whether either would have made a difference, and my conclusion is: it’s not at all clear that anything would have.

Strangely enough, that’s the exact conclusion of this long and complex article by Tucker and Hendrickson, two professors (Johns Hopkins and Colorado College, respectively) who were against the Iraq War in the first place, and continue to be so, so they certainly can’t be considered neocon Bush apologists. In summary, their position is that neither keeping the Iraqi Army intact nor having more troops, nor a host of other decisions made in the conduct of the war, would have made things better.

Of course, they consider the whole enterprise fatally flawed. But that’s the part of their analysis I find flawed, and the reason is that I expected this war–and every other war–to be messy, difficult, and full of errors. There is something inherent in the act and art of war, the characteristics I discussed in Part I of this essay, that dictates that it is the rare war that isn’t fraught with error and tragic miscalculations. The Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and of course Vietnam, all followed an exceptionally difficult course.

Sometimes I think the template for war that many of those opposed to this one were following was the Gulf War. That was, essentially, a war with part one, but no part two. It was easy in the same way that this war would have been easy had we not been intent on regime change, the ufinished business of the Gulf War.

But regime change and nation building was exactly and precisely what this war was about. And where Tucker/Hendrickson and I differ is that I considered this necessary, given the evidence we had before us about Saddam, and they thought it unnecessary.

It’s way beyond the scope of this essay to go into detailed arguments as to why I thought this war was necessary, but suffice to say I thought (and still think) that violations of UN resolutions and weapon inspections protocols, humanitarian reasons, and the need to try to change the political face of the region all combined to make it something that needed to be done.

But, paradoxically, I always thought it would be difficult. Very very difficult, very risky, and very possibly unsuccessful. For me, the Afghan War and/or the Vietnam War were the conflicts I feared this endeavor would resemble, even before it began: years and years of terribly bloody house-to-house fighting and guerilla warfare. And when these things failed to materialize in the “first” war, I hoped they wouldn’t happen in the second, but I feared they might. Therefore, in fact, what has come to pass in the second war so far is a good deal better than what I feared–and half expected–might happen, rather than worse.

Perhaps that’s why I’m puzzled by the cries that this war is a terrible mess. I see it as a war that undertook something almost impossible: the rebuilding of a nation whose modern history was of sectarian strife and tyrannical dictatorship, in an area with no tradition of democracy, by an outside force with little experience of the culture and people of the region. The casualty rates are much less than I expected, not more; the speed with which the beginnings of a democracy and functioning government have been implemented has far exceeded my expectations.

I guess I’m a child of the Vietnam era after all, because to me this looks so much better in comparison that I cannot help but be cautiously optimistic. Some will say I’m not hard enough on the administration, and that my expectations were ridiculously low to begin with. But I would answer them by saying that I consider myself to be a realist.

At this point what’s needed is time to combat the insurgents and terrorists, and patience, too, as well as the slowly growing cooperation of the Iraqi people in giving us intelligence and in building their own effective defense forces (as Bush stated recently in this speech).

Did the President and key members of his Administration foresee how exceedingly difficult it would actually be to accomplish this? I don’t think so. Should they have? Perhaps.

But what really matters now is: do they have the patience, intelligence, will, and determination to get it right? My answer: they do–if we do.

Iraq: planning for war and its aftermath (Part I of two)

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity has a fine rant up about how the defense mechanism of denial can serve to keep a person’s belief system intact and help avoid the difficult and threatening task of changing one’s mind in the face of evidence that contradicts that worldview.

Something tangential to her main point happened to catch my eye, and started me thinking about a different issue: how to plan for war.

Dr. Sanity writes about the buildup to the Iraq War:

It is true that the U.S. planners did not anticipate a delayed and fierce resistance from the dead-enders in Iraq. Everyone did expected a humanitarian disaster and refugee problem–which did not materialize as it turns out. But that is one one of the messy things about war –and reality. Things are not perfect. The unexpected happens.

That got me to thinking: just what did military planners expect would happen in the Iraq war? Do we really know, or do we just think we know? How does one plan for a war and its aftermath?

I have no military experience, much less military planning experience. But it’s my understanding that military planners usually try to plan for any and all eventualities in war. Some scenarios are more likely than others, of course, and that’s the tricky part–choosing the most likely.

It is often said, for example, that generals prepare for the previous war, the one already fought, rather than the one facing them. I doubt that’s because generals are so stupid. It’s just so easy for them to seem stupid, because preparing for the war you are about to enter is notoriously difficult, for the very reasons Dr. Sanity cites: the unexpected happens. Always.

But still, military planners can–and must–try to anticipate all realistic possibilities, and to have a plan for how to deal with each one. Then they have to choose which are the most likely of the lot to happen, and get the people and material in place to meet them. The best they can do if (and when) they happen to guess wrong is to try to adjust as soon as humanly possible, and to implement the alternative plans. If something happens that was totally unforeseen and unplanned for (and it will, it will!), then they better be able to scramble and quickly assemble a force that can deal with it.

We who ordinarily plan for nothing more complex than a vacation or a business start-up or a move may find it difficult to believe that war is different. But it is–although planning for those things is difficult enough!

I think this general lack of knowledge about planning for war comes from our general lack of knowledge of history, combined with the happy fact that, with the end of the draft (an end which I support, by the way), it has become the exception rather than the rule for Americans to have served in the military themselves.

Outside of war buffs, I think there’s widespread ignorance about the way wars work, and the difficulties inherent in them. I may be a good example of the typical student in this regard. When I was in school, I wasn’t all that fond of history, especially its military details. My eyes would glaze over when we’d come to the war part. I had some interest in what might cause a war (what I seem to recall they divided into “underlying causes” and “immediate causes”). But the conduct of the war itself was just a blur of dates and campaigns and battlefield names, to be memorized and forgotten, with no understanding on my part of the strategy involved, and no attempt on the part of the teachers to teach it.

One of the things I’ve learned since that time is the old saying that in war, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We civilians, the ones who read the newspapers and try to judge the course of a war, find it frustratingly difficult to listen to those words and to truly understand what they mean.

That famous quote about plans not surviving contact with the enemy is actually part of a longer passage, quoted more extensively here:

It was Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff during the wars of German unification, who observed that “no plan of operation extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. Only the layman thinks that he can see in the course of the campaign the consequent execution of the original idea with all the details thought out in advance and adhered to until the very end.”

The commander, wrote Moltke, must keep his objective in mind, “undisturbed by the vicissitudes of events….But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Throughout the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. The successive acts of war are thus not premeditated designs, but on the contrary are spontaneous acts guided by military measures. Everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate the facts, to clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then to carry them out with strength and constancy.”

Yes, war is a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. And it’s with that understanding that this war–and all wars–needs to be evaluated.

The politicians who feel a war is necessary, and the military they rely on to plan that war, do have a duty to explain the reasons why that war needs to be fought, and what will likely be involved in fighting it (and I think, by the way, that Dr. Sanity’s post makes a good case that the reasons given for fighting the war in Iraq were actually many and varied, although the left may be in denial about that fact). They also have a duty to explain that, nevertheless, the unforeseen and unexpected will happen, and that the course won’t be easy. And yet they have a concommitent duty to show a resolute and stubborn optimism about the endeavor as a whole (Churchill, for example, was the absolute master of that sort of thing). They also have a duty to be basically honest in carrying out all of these prior duties (which, by the way, is what the anger concerning the failure to find WMDs is about on the part of those who truly believe that Bush lied about them–although those people may also be in denial about the fact that most of the world agreed with Bush that Saddam had them).

One of the most common arguments against the administration’s planning and conduct of the war is that it underestimated the resistance that would be put up, saying that it would be a “cakewalk,” and that later events proved them utterly wrong. Is this true? Who made the “cakewalk” prediction? And to what aspect of the war was he actually referring? And why was that resistance or insurgency (or whatever name we give the terrorism and sabotage that has gone on in the aftermath of the war) seemingly worse than anticipated?

(Part II can be found here.)

The approach of winter

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s coming; I can feel it. A week or two ago it suddenly turned quite cold, and the grass, so recently green, is starting to show brown in patches. The autumn colors have become even more autumnal and muted.

But in its winter-is-fast-approaching slumber, the garden retains a certain spare and faded beauty. One has to get into a certain frame of mind to appreciate it–it’s not immediately accessible as in spring and summer, or early fall.

Here, take a look:

For me, the worst thing about this time of year is the early sunset. Now if I want to take my three-mile walk outside, I have to start by 3:15 PM–any later and I end up stumbling home in darkness. There aren’t as many other walkers as there used to be; just a few intrepid dog owners and the grimacing grim-faced runners who never quit, come ice or snow or sleet or wind.

Yesterday on my walk I heard a strange cacophonous cry that sounded like a bunch of small atonally yipping dogs. It took me a moment of looking around and seeing nothing to realize I had to look up, and when I did, there was a flock of Canadian geese in ragged V-formation. They sounded different from any other geese I’ve ever heard, and when I got home and did some research, I discovered that different-sized varieties of geese have different calls. These must have been the smaller ones, described as having “high-pitched cackling voices.”

The day had started out cloudy to begin with, but now that it was getting to be twilight it was even darker. Since Thanksgiving is over, people have begun to put up their Christmas lights, and there was a family–father, mother, and two-year old boy–stringing their bushes and trees with glowing colors, looking for all the world like some sappy holiday greeting card, only real.

I searched for a poem appropriate to the season, and came up with this one, Robert Frost’s “Reluctance:”

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ”˜Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Yes, we’re reluctant to embrace the end of fall and the beginning of the long cold winter. But it’s always good to remember that in the coldest darkest time, when there are so many more months of winter ahead, the days start lengthening and the sun begins its slow but inevitable return.