1. Few counterfactual histories are really erudite. Walter Laqueur's vision of Disraelia manages to titillate the historical geek reflex while providing a host of whispers for keener minds. There are quibbles -- Marx is curiously sidelined, and the four-way chat featuring (yes) Che, Solzhenitsyn, Khomeini, and bin Laden is pure shark-jumpage. But it reminds me how much better off Europe would be with the full complement of its Jews, and the vital subtext running through the whole of Laqueur's piece is Israel's most pressing issue: the demographic question.
2. Phil Klein points us to Dan Calabrese's account of Hillary Clinton's tough time at age 27 -- getting booted from the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate, because
"she was a liar," Zeifman said in an interview last week. "She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality."
3. Michael Gerson is at it again -- associating the right to life with "social justice," as if abortion were one of those times that the language of plain old justice was inadequate. But surely he is right to hold Obama's feet to the fire, or, more specifically, to associate Obama with the rest of his party's more ridiculous claims (see Boxer, Barbara) in an effort to trigger some kind of renunciation.
4. Thru Julian, I urge you to watch the hottest new joint by Richard Dawkins Feat. Charles Darwin and Christopher Hitchens. As is usually the case in situations like these, everyone looks like an ass except Hitchens, whom I hope can tell me where he got that headband.
5. For more blog reaction on the Yoo memo, see Slate; for a cogent challenge to the position I speed-sketched yesterday see John Schwenkler:
Indeed, and this is really the crucial point, it seems to me that this pair of convictions - that the right way to defeat foreign terrorists is to “impos[e] total war on the areas in which those enemies are found”, and that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia, and maybe even crushing the testicles of terrorists’ children if the president gives the go-ahead are the proper sorts of “extraordinary techniques” to use when we need to get inside their heads - are even more closely related than that. For in each case, the underlying conviction is that it is appropriate to resort to violence, not only as a direct punishment for wrongs already done, but with an eye to preventing future evils: we torture, not because the person at hand has already attacked us, but so that we can find out what he and his companions are planning to do and keep them from putting those plans into action; we invade Iraq, not because they actually did us any wrong, but because of the conviction that the best way to protect ourselves is by hitting the bad guys first. Once we have bought into the underlying idea, we find ourselves justifying torture with very much the same ease that we lend our voices to the cause of preemptive war.
I do agree with the thrust of this analysis. But in the details, it strikes me that Bush and his administration quite deliberately avoided -- and ruled out from the beginning -- a strategy of massive, comprehensive conquest in Iraq. This resulted in an artificial disruption and fragmentation of battle space. The more running around you're doing, the more times you're reinvading particular cities and hornets' nests, the more you're trying to find terrorist needles in civilian haystacks, the more you have to rely on the kind of 'inside information' that, in moments of frustration or anger or bad policy, can turn interrogations into torture.
That said, John's right that there are other reasons than liberal (even small-l liberal) ones to hate war, especially the Iraq war. Specifically, the preemptive attitude strikes a nerve of revulsion. There is a key difference between retaliatory violence and preemptive violence -- and a moral difference, I'd submit, between retaliatory torture and preemptive torture. I think viewing things this way actually sharpens my point a bit, which is to say that violence proximate to the battlefield in space and time tends to be retaliatory while violence not proximate to the battlefield tends to be preemptive. Yet these are poles on a continuum. There is no natural bright line separating them. Obviously at either end, the cases seem clear. And this is what law is for -- drawing as many bright lines as feasible and reasonable.
My claim is threefold: that (a) the current lines are an ill fit with the nature of the war we're fighting; (b) torture is bad and should be illegal; and (c) the line between retaliatory violent punishment and preemptive interrogative torture is difficult, if not impossible, to draw without some strong legal effort on our part. The Yoo memo is an example of an extraordinarily weak legal effort -- "What the President says goes." What a dereliction of duty to the hard work of the law! So my conclusion here constitutes a fourth part of my claim: (d) even if the war in Iraq ended tomorrow, the legal question of how to handle terrorists from the time of battlefield capture to t plus however many minutes, hours, or days will last for an eternity until we settle it intelligently and to our moral satisfaction.
Re: Dicky D Rap
Hitchens reminds me a bit of South Park's Timmy. And yes, his headband rocks.
Posted by: Nathan P. Origer | April 03, 2008 at 02:57 PM