Today's Logic Lesson and a Lesson in Trust

Here are two syllogisms from the Bush era.

First syllogism:

Waterboarding is torture.
Americans practice waterboarding.
Americans practice torture.

Second syllogism:

Americans do not torture.
Americans practice waterboarding.
Waterboarding is not torture.

The first one is constructed as an everyday syllogism. You place a particular activity in a larger category: Waterboarding is torture. You identify who practices the activity: Americans practice waterboarding. You conclude that the identified group falls into the larger category: Americans practice torture.

The second one is also unremarkable in its structure, except that the premise is a negative: it excludes Americans from the group of torturers. So you ask:

“How do you know Americans don’t torture?”

“It’s against their code.”

“What prevents Americans from violating their code?”

“The code is self-enforcing.”

“That sounds circular to me. Can’t you give me some independent evidence?”

“Well it’s hard to prove a negative, you know.”

“Still, can’t you tell me how you know Americans don’t torture?”

“Americans just don’t do it. It’s against their code of honor.”

“Like the pirate’s code?”

“That’s right. We have a strict code of honor.”

“But you violate the code all the time, whenever it’s convenient!”

“Remember, they’re just guidelines.”

It’s amazing how often Pirates of the Carribbean serves to explain how people think and behave! It’s the most useful tool I’ve ever run across!

That piece of dialogue does expose John Yoo’s memo for what it was: an extended effort to redefine legal guidelines about torture. That memo was so characteristic of the way we operate: forget the honor, just follow the right legal process. If you can find someone in the Justice Department to write a memo that places activities you want to practice outside the definition of torture, you’re good to go.

That brings us back to the syllogisms. Understanding that the second syllogism is a good deal weaker than the first, the Justice Department lawyers worked hard to reverse its premise. Waterboarding is torture must become Waterboarding is not torture under the guidelines.

“How do you know waterboarding is not torture?”

“Here, read this memo. It explains everything.”

“But this memo just defines things any way you want. It doesn’t make any sense. My twelve-year-old daughter could tell you that.”

“We’re the United States Justice Department. Our memo is authoritative, based on expert legal reasoning.”

“Hah! I put you way below a pickpocket for trustworthiness. Try again.”

So many issues come down to trust. If you read Yoo’s memo, you see the only reason to accept its conclusions is that you trust the source. If you don’t trust the source, the contents of the memo become nonsense.

The Big Picture

What would happen if journalists thought for themselves? Once they get on a line of thought, you can't get them off of it. One line of thought, or premise, has been that we need to counter the insurgents' attacks with attacks of our own. So we level Fallujah and defeat Sadr's forces in Najaf. We mount an offensive against the insurgents near the Syrian border, and go after them in Samarra, Baghdad, and any number of other cities. We find their weapons caches and their hideouts, we capture their leaders, and we round up suspects to bring them in for what we used to call questioning, a euphemism now for torture. None of it worked. The more we tried to limit the insurgents’ ability to fight, the worse the insurgency became.
Another broad effort is the transfer of sovereignty. Analysts reason that if the Iraqis see that they're running their country, they won't have any reason to resist our occupation. We want to bring democracy to the country, after all, and democracy means self-rule. So we have a formal transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June 2004. We have elections at the end of January 2005. The Iraqis will form a government and write a constitution. Most of all, we train Iraqi infantry and police forces to achieve the military and security objectives we haven't been able to achieve. Instead of more order, we see the beginnings of a civil war as insurgents attack poorly trained and poorly protected Iraqi forces. We have tried to reconstitute Iraq's armed forces for almost two years now, and it has not worked.
Civil reconstruction is a third broad area of effort. No one even pretends that progress in this area is a goal anymore. Courts, schools, health facilities, pipelines, water purification plants, sewage treatment plants, oil refineries, electrical power plants, roads, civil service functions, garbage pickup, street cleaning, building construction, electrical power distribution, and every service to make civil society run well: all these projects wait until someone restores order. Ask any Iraqi or American official when that will be. Their truthful answer is, “We're working on it.” Press for another answer, and they'll say, “It could take years.”
Here's something the journalists who write about Iraq miss. No matter what our opponents do, they succeed while they tie American troops down in Iraq. Yes, Iraqi insurgents aim to push the Americans out as soon as they can. Their open goal is to get rid of the occupiers. Moreover, Iraqi resistance has help from other countries. Foreign fighters in Iraq recognize that having American troops in Iraq is a bonanza for them. They can kill Americans there much more readily than they can kill them anywhere else. They know that while Americans fight in Iraq, they can't fight elsewhere. Al Qaeda knows that while we are in Iraq, they have an advantage no matter how the battle goes from day to day.
That’s the dilemma that makes our goals questionable, our strategy self-defeating. Whether we stay or go, the outcomes look bleak. The car bombs could stop tomorrow. All the other attacks: sniping, roadside bombs, hit and run ambushes, mortar attacks, every sort of skirmish and sabotage, all the assassinations and kidnappings, all these could stop suddenly, and we would still be have no clear plan to defeat the enemies who attacked us in 2001. Even a great power cannot do everything. The considerable resources tied up in Iraq are unavailable for fighting anywhere else. We've had to pull forces from other parts of the world just to maintain a force of 135,000 in Iraq. When we do leave Iraq at last, will anyone here at home want to send our young men and women out again to fight Al Qaeda somewhere else? Will we have the passion to fight the war we ought to fight? No, we'll be happy that the war in Iraq is over; we won’t remember the war we should have been fighting – the war we would have fought had we not gone into Iraq.
That's getting ahead of things, though, because the prospects for getting out of Iraq soon are nil. Supporters of the war there say we don't bear any opportunity cost when we commit our resources there. They say we are fighting the right war, for the right reasons, for the right goals. They maintain that when we leave Iraq, we won't need to fight elsewhere. Iraqi democracy will be established, and as it spreads throughout the region, to Saudi Arabia and Syria and even to Iran, Al Qaeda will have no place to hide. In the open air of free societies, Al Qaeda will wither and melt like the wicked witch of the West. No one will want to fight for Al Qaeda when the benefits of Western democracy and free enterprise are all around. That's the Wolfowitz cure: an Oz-like strategy where democracy cures all ills, the White House receives a broomstick and we all get a medal. By the time Wolfowitz and his fellow charlatans are done, Iraq will need a panacea, but it won’t come from us.
Who, in or out of our government, has made a convincing case that creating a democracy in Iraq will bring about the defeat of Al Qaeda? Why couldn't Al Qaeda operate just as effectively in an open, democratic society as it does in a more traditional one? The planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks show that Al Qaeda can operate equally effectively in Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States. We say that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that we are pressing them hard in Iraq, but where's the evidence that we have reduced its ability to fight? Who believes that a quiet Iraq will mean defeat of the organization that attacked the World Trade Center? The scary thing now, two years into the Iraqi war, is that people don't even care any more how we're doing in the fight against Al Qaeda. They just want to be done with fighting, period.
So how can we counter the prevailing presumption that a democratic, self-sufficient Iraq means victory for us? How can we keep the big picture about our goals in front of us? The big picture differs so much from the main line of thought we hear everywhere. To see the importance of the larger view, think of the prevailing line of thought that existed when Reagan entered the White House. Then most people thought that we had to reach an accommodation with the Soviets. The United States and the Soviet Union had to live on the same globe, and the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust was to work things out with them. We didn't say nasty things about them, and we tried to find ways to cooperate. Least of all, we didn't want to provoke them. With temperance and discretion, we had managed to survive the Cold War for almost two generations. Keep your head low, avoid eye contact, walk softly and don’t say anything provocative.
Reagan arrives, labels the Soviet Union an evil empire, predicts its so-called workers’ state is headed for history’s dustbin, and calls on Americans to help dump it there. He even quipped, “How's this for a strategy: we win and they lose.” You can't get much more blunt than that. Then he and his team achieved that objective, using military force and diplomacy adroitly to force the Soviet Union into conceding Eastern Europe shortly after Reagan left office. No one thought he could do it until it happened. When it did happen, people said that he must have been right after all.
The actions required now differ, but we’re in a similar conceptual box with Iraq. Everyone thinks the only way we can succeed there is to bring democracy to the people while we train a new armed force capable of containing the insurgents. How often have you heard this one: "Whatever you think of the war, we're committed now, and we have to see the job through." How often have you heard: "We can't leave now. There'd be chaos and a civil war." Well let me tell you that the civil war has already started. Everyone all over the world has concluded correctly that we can't do anything to stop it. Everyone knows the limits of our strength, the extent of our weakness.
The cubic container we’ve fashioned won't allow anyone to say we have to withdraw to fight another enemy. Even the war’s vocal opponents concede we have to stay there long enough to hand security responsibilities over to the Iraqis. That, they add, will take at least until the end of 2006. At least. When we come to the end of 2006, come back to read this essay, and ask yourself if we've achieved any of the goals the conventional strategy sets out for us. Ask if we've reduced the level of violence, turned over responsibility to the Iraqis, or made advances in the area of civil reconstruction. Even if we have made progress in any of these areas, we'll have failed if we're still tied down in Iraq, still fighting people who weren't even our enemies until we made them so.
The conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say we win and they lose, we lose and they win, or anything that could possibly be perceived as cut and run. People think that if we pull out, we are humiliated, and humiliation implies we’ve lost. We'll have failed, they say, and that outcome can’t be possible. Everyone will see that we lost, that we can't stick it out. But it's not true. The only way to win this war is to leave this battlefield and correct our mistake. The sure way to lose the war is to stick it out in Iraq. The sure way to grant our enemies just what they want is to stay in Iraq and bleed. We've gone down the wrong path here. We have to turn back if we want to win, because at the end of this path lies futility, defeat, humiliation, and a total loss of confidence in ourselves. These things will happen not because we couldn't win, but because we couldn't lose. We couldn’t lose the war. We couldn't lose our self-certainty and conviction that we've done the right thing, that we've set out on the right course. Sadly, if we try to win the war in Iraq by sticking it out, we'll lose the war against Al Qaeda that we should have fought from the start.
One of the most insightful passages from the New Testament is this teaching: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away.” The first part of the passage applies to the United States during its period of world leadership. For all its faults and mistakes, U. S. leadership offered the world wealth beyond measure, individual dignity, freedom from coercion based on natural rights, clear vision, optimism, practicality, good judgment and generous impulses, wisdom, faith, more hope for peace and prosperity than the world had known. The country had everything a human society could want, in abundance. The signs after 9/11, evidenced by the Iraq war, indicate the United States and its leaders do not have any of these precious qualities. It has not clear vision but blindness, not optimism but fire and blood, not practicality but utopian fantasies, not good judgment but thick-headed self-righteousness, not generous impulses but selfish anxiety, not wisdom but fatuous gall, not faith but gullible aggressiveness, not hope but nervous fear. As a result, everything it has will be taken away.
During the 2004 presidential debates, a friend pointed to the box that Bush created when he went to war in Iraq. President Bush challenged John Kerry, “So are you saying that our troops in Iraq have died in vain?” I wish Kerry had replied, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask that question, you slimy little criminal.” You can’t say that in a presidential debate, though. At a time when no one can say anything against our troops, Kerry was stymied. “He had him,” my friend observed. I replied that Howard Dean would have responded differently. He would have come back at Bush directly:
“Yes, Mr. President, you're right. Those troops died in vain. They died without purpose in a war you initiated.
“Our courageous young Americans died from a huge strategic blunder – a futile, wrong-headed war. You’re responsible for these useless deaths – our soldiers’ unfortunate sacrifice is on your head. These young men and women, so willing to give everything for their country, trusted you. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives and children all trusted you. The whole country looked to you after the September 11 attacks to lead us back from that dreadful loss. How did you respond? You sent our armed forces into a long, destructive war, justified it with obvious, self-serving dishonesty, and refused to admit your mistake after everyone else could see the truth about what you had done.
“You want charge me with defeatism and disloyalty? Let me ask you this. Who is not supporting our troops: the commander in chief who leads his armed forces on a foolish, misconceived mission, or the mother who tries to organize some resistance to this fanciful crusade? The vice president who suggests that critics in or out of uniform are traitors, or the sergeant who leads his platoon through danger and difficulties, no matter what he thinks of the war?
“Our troops promised to protect our Constitution. They promised to serve their country faithfully. They trusted you to lead them well. You failed to honor that trust – you betrayed it. You asked our soldiers to do something that you wouldn't do yourself when it was your turn to serve, and you asked them to do it for dishonest reasons. So I need to ask you, Mr. President: When are you going to support our troops? When are you going to send them to fight our real enemies, rather than false enemies that you cooked up because you had a grudge against Saddam Hussein? You've misled the citizens of this great country much too long now. If you can't admit your mistake, at least stop the vile suggestion that your opponents are unpatriotic traitors who don’t support our men and women in the field.”
The Democratic party thought Howard Dean couldn't win against George Bush. They thought John Kerry was a more effective fighter, more electable. Hindsight proved them wrong on that judgment. Kerry hardly talked about the war in his campaign until the fall, and even then he raised his criticisms in only a few speeches. He spent too much time in the end trying to answer Bush's question: Why did you vote for the war? After Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it seemed his campaign had little to say about military matters. Criticism of the war might appear unpatriotic. On the contrary, Kerry's criticism of the war in Iraq showed the best patriotic impulse, just as his stand against the war in Vietnam exemplified courageous patriotism. Unlike his anti-war activities in the 1970s, though, Kerry the presidential candidate acted too hesitantly. As a result, his opposition to the Iraq war appeared unfounded and equivocal. Dean would not have been such a reluctant critic.
Seventy-five years from now, analysts will recognize that some citizens saw how we erred after 9/11, while it happened. We didn’t have to wait for the war to be over in order to see our mistake. We could predict the destructive, self-defeating effects of this war, before we launched it. We could see what a bad course of action it was, as it unfolded. But seeing the truth about the war hasn't made us – as a nation – willing to do the necessary and right thing: redeploy our forces to fight the people who attacked us. When you focus your attention in the wrong place – indeed, when you focus your attention in any place, you miss the big picture. When you miss the big picture, you make big mistakes.

The Secession Papers: Introduction

I’ve been an independent in politics for a long time. I recognize, though, that parties are the organizations that get things done in the political arena, and I think with the right leadership the Libertarian party could accomplish a lot. We’ve never had a time when so many people are rightly unhappy with both major parties, or so distrust institutions of government. We need political leaders who can harness the discontent and desire for freedom to a third American revolution. The first one started in 1776, and the second one started in 1860. I don’t see any Jeffersons or Lincolns on the horizon, though, and even if we did have leaders of that caliber, it’s hard to see how they would proceed. We need someone who is stubborn, visionary, and disciplined to lead the country in a campaign of civil disobedience against Washington. Those qualities aren’t so common, especially not in one person.

Ronald Reagan and James Dean: Rare Video From 1954

Ronald Reagan and James Dean: Rare Video From 1954 - Culture - The Atlantic

Path to Labor Market Freedom and Job Growth

Reagan said the more you tax something, the less you have of it. If you tax labor and the products of labor, you'll have fewer jobs. If you tax sales contracts, you'll have fewer goods and services for sale - and therefore fewer jobs. If you tax business contracts of all kinds, you'll have fewer business transactions. We know what fewer business transactions implies for jobs.

We know how to increase the number of jobs. Everyone knows: we have to remove government from the labor market. Yes, we'll always have taxes, but we can fashion tax policy so as to minimize the impact taxes have on business contracts. Labor and sales contracts are the key types of business contracts at issue here. If we reduce taxes on labor and sales contracts, we increase the number of contracts and therefore the number of people engaged in those contracts. If we reduce government interference with labor and sales contracts, we increase the number of contracts and therefore - I don't really need to say it again - the number of jobs.

Here is a baker's dozen of things we can do to reduce taxes on business contracts and eliminate government impediments:

1. Decouple health care and employment.
2. Decouple tax collection and employment.
3. End the social security tax.
4. End the tax for Medicare and Medicaid.
5. Tax all employment at the same low rate.
6. Give employers, contractors, and independent consultants complete freedom to form business contracts. Eliminate the tax distinctions and restrictions that govern contract employment.
7. Tax all sales transactions at the same low rate. Eliminate the multitude of largely invisible taxes on sales contracts in favor of a single sales tax.
8. End the minimum wage.
9. End the permits, tax requirements, and other legal restrictions that make it difficult for entrepreneurs to start and grow a new business.
10. For any new business contract, eliminate all taxes for six months. Let any two people or parties form a legitimate business contract without regard for tax or other legal requirements.
11. End the requirement that employers pay for unemployment insurance.
12. End the requirement that employers pay for workers' compensation.
13. End all government subsidies in the form of direct payments, tax breaks, and other allowances. Reduce government payments and special considerations to zero.

Naturally we don't plan to do any of these things. Instead we will pass another stimulus bill, which reduces our ability to sustain job growth over the long term. We'll continue our unhappy discussions about how to create jobs, our sense of pessimism about how to accomplish it. But we know how to accomplish it. The path to labor market freedom lies right in front of us.

Freedom, Security, and Cost in Our Health Care Dilemma

Recently I ran across an article by Cynthia Tucker that quoted from Ronald Reagan's 1961 speech against Medicare. In the speech, Reagan accurately predicted what would happen if Medicare were enacted. She also cited Nicholas Kristof's article, where he mocks critics of Social Security and Medicare. Referring to the critics of the current health care bill before Congress, he suggests we've heard all of this before. All the predictions about socialization, higher costs, and loss of freedom were wrong then, Kristoff says, and they're wrong now. These programs proved to be hugely popular, so much so that Reagan stopped criticizing them when he ran for president.

The popularity of Social Security and Medicare doesn't mean their critics were wrong, though. Their predictions about cost, freedom of choice, and socialization came about. Their description of how our society would evolve with these programs in place was remarkably accurate. We expect and accept the high taxes, and constraints on individual freedom that these programs entail. The program's popularity doesn't mean the critics were mistaken. It means people have wanted to trade freedom for security in two key areas: retirement income and health care. Many accept the higher costs and loss of choice that public programs impose, if in return the government can ease their fears about poverty and ill-health during old age.

So defenders of the current efforts to improve our health care system can look back and say accurately that Medicare has more supporters than critics. What's popular does matter in a democracy, but truth and popularity aren't always on the same side. In this case, Reagan's warnings about Medicare have proven altogether accurate. In fact, the need to change our health care system now would not be so urgent if Medicare did not place such a strain on our government's resources. We could live with our system's faults if the bill for Medicare weren't so high. As it is, Medicare payments seem out of control, going up faster and faster as our population becomes older. Thus the urgent need, expressed so often by Washington's budget analysts, to contain costs.

Interestingly, a key element of our current cost-cutting plan is to increase the government's role in health care! If you aim to reduce costs without rationing, reduce government's role. Don't increase it. We have other goals, however: clearly universal participation in the nation's health care system precedes cost cutting as the reformers' primary goal. The outlay of public funds required to cover every person, under current proposals, won't be small. We have only two ways to limit costs: individuals who make purchasing decisions in an unregulated market, and some form of public rationing. We are a long way from the free market option, and no one speaks favorably of the R word. Consequently we are headed toward an expansion of public funding for health care, with no support for rationing. Of course the government's costs will go up. We've tried - not so successfully - to pretend they won't.

Let's return to Kristoff's confident, dismissive remark: “We've heard all of this before.” The critics were wrong then, Kristoff implies, and they're equally wrong now. Critics in the 1960s said we would look to governnent for our benefits and well-being, and we do. Critics said the costs of social health care in old age would become insupportable, and they have. Critics argued that each enhancement of the government's authority would result in a diminution of our freedom. We have seen exactly that outcome. Reagan and all the wise people who joined him spoke truthfully. We enacted public funding for old age health care, and we  have seen the results. For the most part, the intended social bargain since 1964 has worked: in return for high taxes and a substantial degree of government involvement in old age health care, Medicare participants have received the care they want.

Whatever judgments we make about Medicare's tradeoffs, though, we should recognize why Reagan and others objected to it. If we want to change the system in a way that forces everyone to participate, we certainly have to recognize what's true in the critics' warnings. The truth is that security of the type we're talking about here does come at the price of freedom. As we move to carry out health care reform, we ought to heed Reagan's warning: once we sacrifice our freedom to some other end, we're not going to get it back. We can easily relinquish our freedoms incrementally, in return for benefits we're eager to acquire. We'll have the security we crave, but will we have the life we want?

John F. Kennedy and the Unspeakable: Book Review

I lived in Nanjing, China when Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, came out. We were cut off from a lot of news over in China. You felt like you were on the other side of the world because you were. So something had to make a big stir in the U. S. for us to know about it in Nanjing. The Los Angeles riots after police beat Rodney King and the first Persian Gulf war were two events that made a stir. Oliver Stone's film did, too.

I didn't see the film until much later, well after we returned to the United States. Before that I saw an interview where a journalist asked Stone whether he believed the story he told in JFK. He  smiled slightly and said, “I just make movies.” I thought it was a good answer. I didn't feel so comfortable if, after nearly thirty years of controversy, the judgment of so many people would turn on the story presented in one film.

After we returned from China, I read Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. The controversy about Stone's film must have raised my interest, as it was the first book about the assassination I'd read. Posner's argument, that Lee Oswald acted alone and that a single bullet hit both President Kennedy and Governor Connally, seemed plausible. I hadn't been inclined to question the Warren Report to begin with, so Posner's account was convincing enough for me.

Now move forward ten years and more, to the Bush administration's response to 9/11. The regular use of torture by the CIA and the military against our enemies appalled me. It completely changed my attitude toward my own government. Where before I would give my elected representatives the benefit of the doubt in every doubtful case, now I would never do so. I completely lost faith that the government would do the right thing as it carried out its responsibilities. The government's behavior after 9/11 caused it to lose legitimacy.

Some would say, “It's about time you saw that.” Others would say, “Governments have always done bad things. These acts weren't out of the ordinary. You have to take the bad with the good.” A third bunch might comment simply, “Open your eyes and try not to be so idealistic.” Open your eyes is right, but not in the way the last group intends. Remember Saul's conversion, when the scales fell from his eyes after God struck him blind. He was a new person after that. What a conversion experience. Paul went out and converted the world after that.

Let me describe my conversion experience. Mine started in 2002, when we started down the path toward war with Iraq. I've already written a lot about that period in Ugly War. Anger preceded Bush's reelection in 2004; discouragement followed it. By 2005, though, my emotion and vehemence had played out, so the horrific events in Baghdad and elsewhere during Bush's second term didn't affect me so much. As Bush's popularity bottomed out and stayed low during 2005-2007, I thought, I was here a long time before everyone else.

Then in the summer of 2009 I read an article by Oliver Stone in praise of a new book by James Douglass. Douglass's book is titled John F. Kennedy and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. I bought the book at Amazon, and as often happens at that site, picked up another book, too, called Brothers by David Talbot. I read Brothers first, and could see it was a first class piece of journalism. I said to people, if you're interested in the Kennedys, you have to read this book - and I don't recommend books that often. Then I started Douglass's book.

As I read Talbot's account, I found myself saying, “We'll never know if there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination.” As I finish JFK and the Unspeakable, I ask, “How could anyone who considers the evidence think otherwise?” The main problem with Stone's film, and with Jim Garrison's work in the 1960s, is that they don't explicate a motive for a government conspiracy. You're left feeling that everyone was in on it. How could so many people be involved with the conspiracy, and still have it be a secret after all this time?

Well, the number of people involved, or who knew about the conspiracy, was large but not that large. As for secrecy, it's amazing how much evidence related to a conspiracy was ready at hand from the start. What a poorly kept secret! Yes, the Warren Report managed to corral enough people who would speak in favor of the lone gunman account of the crime. Its purpose from the start was to lay conspiracy theories to rest,  and it succeeded with people like me - people brought up to give our public institutions more trust than they apparently deserve. After the Bush-Cheney fiasco, I would never ever misplace my trust again.

Let me say a little about the word conspiracy before moving on to Douglass's book. The term has a bad odor after many years of dismissive put-downs: “Oh, he's just another one of those conspiracy theorists.” Remember the simple meaning of conspiracy: it refers to a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. Reduced further, it means more than one person was involved in the assassination. Was it a lone gunman or not? If you think it wasn't a lone gunman, do you have to live with the opprobrious label, conspiracy theorist?

The virtue of Douglass's book is that he explains why a conspiracy formed in the first place. It's the first book that convincingly addresses the conspirators' motives. In Case Closed, Posner recognizes that he has to accomplish that same tasks as a courtroom attorney: assemble evidence to support your case, explicate a motive, make the evidence and the motive hang together in a convincing story. Douglass does the same thing. I haven't read much of the conspiracy literature, but I can tell you that an awful lot of it focuses on evidentiary details. Jim Garrison's case is a good example of that method. One reason the jury acquitted Clay Shaw is that Garrison didn't explain why Shaw might have been involved with a conspiracy to begin with.

When you read Talbot and Douglass together, you can see that many powerful people had numerous reasons for wanting Jack and Bobby Kennedy out of the way. At bottom, they saw Jack Kennedy as treasonous, not to be trusted with the power he held. Brutus and the other conspirators in Rome had the same motive for killing Caesar. They didn't trust him. They didn't trust him with the survival of the state. In Kennedy's case, his enemies believed that if he continued as president, the United States would lose its global contest with communism.

Imagine that Barack Obama wants to open negotiations with Osama bin Laden. When challenged, told firmly he should not go down that road, Obama persists. He argues that we invite our own destruction if we don't find a way to make peace with our enemies. He argues that we should look at our own attitudes, examine our own tendency to reach for weapons of war when the methods of peace offer us our only hope for salvation. The differences between our current war and the Cold War of Kennedy's time are numerous and relevant, yet this example gives an idea of the reaction some people had toward Kennedy's moves toward reconciliation with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis. Like Kennedy, they perceived the nation's survival at stake. They concluded that Kennedy must be removed from office to protect the republic.

When you understand the conspirators' motives, the rest of the evidence becomes too strong to dismiss. Douglass assembles a huge amount of non-dismissible evidence to support the conclusion that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's murder. For me, Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Oswald on November 24 created the small voice that asked through the decades, “What's going on here? That's fishy.” How could Oswald be murdered like that? What's going on here?

Then you learn that Jack Ruby had ties to the CIA before he carried out his hit against Oswald. You learn that Oswald wasn't only a former Marine, a loner and a misfit with problems in his marriage and no steady job. His history was a lot more complicated than that. Life magazine published that black and white photograph of Oswald, standing with a rifle in his hands. There you have him, the president's killer. The evidence is right in front of you. When you find out that Oswald himself worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, had done so for quite a long time before 1963, you have to question the Life magazine account. You can't believe the Warren Report any longer when you learn that both Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald had clear ties to the CIA.

The enormity of the alternate account was too big for most people to swallow. How could our own government have been involved with this huge crime? The crime itself couldn't be believed. Political assassinations of the kind that brought Julius Caesar down just don't occur any more. Instinctive disbelief in political assassination engendered grief-stricken belief in the Life magazine account: a disturbed gunman acted alone, for reasons we could never fathom due to Jack Ruby's act of revenge.

Well what if Jack Ruby didn't act out of revenge? What if he cried that weekend not because Kennedy was dead, but because he'd been assigned to take Oswald out? He'd cry if he knew his life was over. He went to prison and died there. Oswald cried out to the press the day before, “I'm just a patsy!” Funny thing for a presidential assassin to say, actually. Funny thing to say, unless it's true.

So read Douglass's book. Read it even though the print is small and it looks a little intimidating. Good research generally does look intimidating. One Amazon reviewer commented that this book is the most important written in the last forty years. That is not an overstatement, no matter what you think of the Kennedys  and no matter what you think of the Warren Commission. JFK and the Unspeakable offers our country an opportunity to deal with the truth. The country is already immeasurably weakened now, at the beginning of 2010, compared with its strength and vitality at the end of 1999. At the least, it can muster courage to recognize the truth before it passes into history's list of deflated empires.

J. K. Rowling said that dealing with the truth is always better than accepting a lie or an evasion. Not only better - it's easier than the alternatives, no matter how hard accepting the truth might be. We don't know what might have happened in the United States if we had accepted the truth about November 22, 1963, right away. We do know what will happen if we don't accept it now. Our country will succumb to civil conflict, just as Rome did after Caesar fell. We had plenty of civil conflict in the 1960s, and we have plenty more on the horizon in 2010.

Conspiracy theorists have another kind of dismissive put-down to deal with. “You think JFK's assassination was an inside job? So what if it was? What can we do about it? Let's move on already.” Bobby Kennedy wasn't dismissive about it, but during his bitter period of grief he would say something similar. “What good would it do to prove a conspiracy? It won't bring my brother back.” Who cares if people in our own government knocked off a sitting president? It happened over forty-five years ago. Let's deal with problems we have right now.

Oliver Stone, David Talbot and James Douglass have it right, though. We can't pretend Kennedy fell to a lone nut if it's not true. We have to be clear eyed about why facing the truth matters. We have to face the enormity of this assassination. If it's the truth, we have to accept that our government executed a president, then lied to cover it up. How could anyone say that the truth doesn't matter here? We all want to love our country. We all want to be proud of our citizenship, our membership in this community of freedom and responsibility. How can love and pride ring true for us if the whole project rests on a lie?

Once you've lost faith in one area, you lose faith in every area. The government tortured people to death at Bagram air force base, and you wonder what else it can do. Once you doubt that Lee Oswald acted alone, you doubt that Sirhan Sirhan acted alone. Once you doubt the government's story about why the Kennedys died, you doubt the official story about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. When you don't believe anything the government says, that's not healthy skepticism anymore. That's a loss of faith so complete the government no longer holds legitimate authority.

Let's take one more example that brings us back to the twenty-first century. When a good friend first raised the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, I have to say my response was swift. “What's the point of even thinking such a thing?” I asked. I shook my head and said, “There's just no evidence for that at all.” That was before the stories about enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, black sites, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, and more truly sank in. That was before I turned, before the scales fell.

I went to a liberty forum a few years ago where 9/11 truth tellers were hawking their brochures and amateurish newspapers to anyone who might be interested. I thought, a bit contemptuously, why do they even let these guys in here? I believe in free speech, but they don't have to show up here, where their pet subject isn't even that relevant to the meeting. Their obsession with conspiracies rubs off on everything. Be careful: their reputation as conspiracy nuts can rub off on you.

Now I wonder a bit at my own readiness to ignore the message and brush off the messenger. Now I read the evidence about the collapse of World Trade Center building number seven, and I wonder. How could all three of those buildings collapse like that? My friend argued that the motive to destroy the World Trade Center is clear. If you want to start a war in the Middle East, and you want strong public backing for it, you couldn't do better than an attack like 9/11. I dismissed the argument. We have plenty of enemies in the world; we don't need to manufacture inside plots to account for those attacks, I said. The conspiracy nuts have to observe some limits!

Yes, but why did building number seven collapse that way, so late in the day? Why did the Bush administration resist an investigation of the 9/11 attacks for so long? Why did the government and media outlets not fully publicize the identities of all nineteen attackers, with a full biography of each one? Once you start to doubt, you doubt everything. Once you lose trust, you distrust every last element of authority you used to deem legitimate. You used to pay taxes because you wanted to support your public institutions, because you believed in their mission, and you knew your representatives carried out their responsibilities openly and in good faith. You are proud of your membership in the community, and you believe in its purpose. Once you lose trust, you pay taxes because you have to.

I know the 60s weren't easy - Vietnam stretched my patriotism hard. I was ready to leave the country if  forced to fight over there, and I don't feel ashamed of my opposition one bit. After Vietnam, I joined the Navy voluntarily, and service to country was a primary motive. My love of country survived Vietnam, but living through that time taught me that loving your country does not require loyalty to its government. You can maintain fidelity to your country's ideals while you stand against the actions of its government. The same distinction has to hold for patriots who recognize the evil behind our government's actions after 9/11. Condemnation of the government for acts that are in fact evil is not disloyal, unpatriotic, or treasonous. Let the truth come out, though the heavens may fall.

Would the heavens fall if we acknowledged the truth about JFK's assassination? Would they have fallen if we had acknowledged it forty-five years ago? We can't answer the second question, of course. We can only answer the first question if we try it out. Fourteen years after the assassination, in 1979, the House panel on assassinations wrote that JFK's murder was probably the result of a conspiracy. After Oliver Stone's film, polls started to show that more than half of the respondents believed the same thing. Does that mean we've acknowledged the truth? I don't think so. Acknowledging the truth means we open up all of the government's records on the matter. To begin with, those records belong to us. Acknowledging the truth means that the government take an active role in finding the truth, not an active role in hiding it. Acknowledging the truth means owning the crime, and figuring out where to go from here once we've done so.

I'd say we owe James Douglass a big debt of thanks. That book took a lot of work. It took special skill to do what he did. As citizens we need to read his work and reach judgments about what he has written. Honestly, you can't let your president be murdered and not face up to it. You can't let the unspeakable remain unspoken. At some point the unspeakable has to come into the open and enter the room, no matter what. When it does, you have to keep it with you, no matter how shocking, shameful, or shattering the truth is.

I'm telling you, we have one more chance, after George W. Bush, to save our country, to reestablish our commitment to its founding ideas. We have big trials ahead. Acknowledging the truth about all our government's evil acts could help us survive the coming trials as one nation. If we hide the truth, avoid it and hope it disappears, we'll shatter into a shapeless pile under the pressures we'll endure. We don't have to endure these trials alone, we don't have to succumb, but the general atmosphere of division and pessimism suggests that we prefer failure to honesty.

Lincoln's Legacy

The more you learn about Abraham Lincoln, the more you learn to admire him. He deserves his praise. Today is the two hundredth anniversary of his birth day, February 12, 1809. February 12, 2009, is only twenty-three days after another leader from Illinois stepped into Lincoln's large shoes.

We all know that Lincoln managed to hold the Union together through victory in a protracted civil war. The standard stories often don't relate how much that outcome depended on Lincoln's determination and tenacity. Right up to the fall of 1864, when Atlanta fell, people pressed Lincoln to negotiate with the South to end the war. They even suggested that he retract the Emancipation Proclamation to conciliate the South.

Outcomes of war look inevitable in retrospect, but they don't look so certain when you still have to fight for them. When we praise Lincoln now, and thank him, we recognize the material part he played to keep the United States one country and all free. The house did not divide and it did stand.

Interestingly, Lincoln's ambition to lead brought the sectional crisis over slavery to a turning point. The country split because of his election, though Lincoln himself never recognized the separate status of the Confederate states. He regarded the Confederacy's call to arms as a rebellion that had to be defeated. With wisdom and force of character, he succeeded.

Thank you, Mr. Lincoln, for the continuation of this great experiment. We may feel somewhat pessimistic about our prospects right now, but we have reasons to be hopeful, too. If Mr. Obama follows your example of leadership, as he wants to do, our hope may have some foundation.

Memories Of Robert F. Kennedy

Memories Of Robert F. Kennedy, Jeff Greenfield Worked On RFK's 1968 Campaign - Now He Shares Remembrances Of The Man

"Thomas Jefferson once wrote that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. But If I'm elected president … don't try it." ~RFK

Nature of the Global Warming Controversy

Last night I read generally about the origin of oil, greenhouse gases, and climate change on the web. What I read was not inconsistent with two points in a constellation of arguments:

People’s beliefs about global warming are just that: beliefs. The arguments about the data on climate change, the principal causes of climate change, the consequences of climate change, and our responses to it are all premised on what one might call prebeliefs. But then, many ostensibly scientific discussions carried on by people have the same character, so the global warming discussion isn’t so different that way.

In line with the first point, arguments about proper responses to global warming follow this idea of prebeliefs. People say: we can observe global warming, it’s a problem, and we have to reduce emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to address the problem. The private structure of the argument is different: we need to limit the use of non-renewable fossil fuels, and global warming supplies a strong rationale for doing so. Beliefs about oil, where it comes from and how much we have, drive beliefs about the correct response to climate change.

Analysis of Military Aircraft for Current Missions

Hi Dad,

I extracted the information below from Wikipedia. I know you’re skeptical about that online encyclopedia, but it’s actually a good collection of information. You challenged me to find some figures, so I did! I have to credit a conversation with Leslie for motivating me.

I included some extra text for general interest. It was fun doing these calculations. Thanks for suggesting I pursue these figures!

Enough for tonight.

Love,

Steve

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P-51 Mustang

Type Fighter
Manufacturer North American Aviation
Maiden flight 26 October 1940
Introduction 1942
Retired 1957, U.S. Air National Guard
Primary users United States Army Air Forces
Royal Air Force, numerous others (see below)
Number built 15,875
Unit cost US$50,985 in 1945 ($610,687 in 2008 dollars)

The North American Aviation P-51 Mustang was an American long-range single-seat fighter aircraft that entered service with Allied air forces in the middle years of World War II. The P-51 became one of the conflict's most successful and recognizable aircraft.

The P-51 flew most of its wartime missions as a bomber escort in raids over Germany, helping ensure Allied air superiority from early 1944. It also saw limited service against the Japanese in the Pacific War. The Mustang began the Korean War as the United Nations' main fighter, but was relegated to a ground attack role when superseded by jet fighters early in the conflict. Nevertheless, it remained in service with some air forces until the early-1980s.

As well as being economical to produce, the Mustang was a fast, well-made and highly durable aircraft. The definitive version of the single-seat fighter was powered by the Packard V-1650-3, a two-stage two-speed supercharged 12-cylinder Packard-built version of the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, and (the P-51D) were armed with six of the aircraft version of the .50 caliber (12.7 mm) Browning machine guns.

After World War II and the Korean conflict, many Mustangs were converted for civilian use, especially air racing. The Mustang's reputation was such that, in the mid-1960s, Ford Motor Company's Designer John Najjar proposed the name for a new youth-oriented coupe after the fighter.

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F-22 Raptor

Type Stealth Air superiority fighter
National origin United States
Manufacturers Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
Maiden flight YF-22: 29 September 1990

F-22: 7 September 1997
Introduction 15 December 2005
Status Active: 91
Planned: 187
Primary user United States Air Force
Number built 112 (as of February 2008)
Program cost US$62 billion
Unit cost US$137.5 million (2008 flyaway cost)

The Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor is a fighter aircraft that uses stealth technology. It is primarily an air superiority fighter, but has multiple capabilities that include ground attack, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence roles. The United States Air Force considers the F-22 a critical component of the U.S. strike force.

Faced with a protracted development period, the aircraft was variously designated F-22 and F/A-22 during the three years before formally entering US Air Force service in December 2005, as the F-22A. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is the prime contractor and is responsible for the majority of the airframe, weapon systems and final assembly of the F-22. Program partner Boeing Integrated Defense Systems provides the wings, aft fuselage, avionics integration, and all of the pilot and maintenance training systems.

The F-22 is claimed by multiple sources to be the world’s most effective air superiority fighter. The US Air Force claims that the F-22 cannot be matched by any known or projected fighter aircraft. Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, Chief of the Australian Defence Force, said in 2004 that the “F-22 will be the most outstanding fighter plane ever built.“

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A couple of simple ratios finishes the analysis:

F-22 unit cost divided by P-51 unit cost equals 225.

The F-22 costs 225 times as much as the P-51, in 2008 dollars.

The number P-51s built divided by the number of F-22s planned equals 84.89.

For each F-22 the air force builds now, it built 85 P-51s sixty years ago.

Note the relationship between time and money, too. For the Mustang, the time from its maiden flight in 1940 to its introduction in 1942 was two years. For the Raptor, the time from its maiden flight in 1990 to its introduction in 2005 was fifteen years. That’s thirteen extra years of development for the F-22.

A defender of current practice would say that of course the F-22 is more expensive and takes longer to develop. It’s more complex and a much more capable aircraft. That begs the question, though. We want and need simpler aircraft. Many military missions don’t require the capabilities of the F-22. A less capable aircraft – lower speed, lower weight, less everything – would serve our purposes well. Our pilots have many missions to accomplish, but they don’t need to prevail in dogfights with other jets.

Summary: Because such high performance weapons systems cost so much, we produce them in smaller quantities. If we made simplicity and lower cost primary factors in the design of our military aircraft, we would have many more of them. Our current air power rests with drones, helicopters, long-range bombers, and high performance jets. If we look at what we want to accomplish with air power in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, however, we see many missions that require simple, small, piloted aircraft.

What are those missions?
• Accurate bombing of military, not civilian targets.
• Close support of ground troops in urban warfare, not so vulnerable to ground fire as helicopters.
• Reconnaissance of all types.
• Harassment of enemy movements and communications.
• Command and control over large areas, including urban battlefields.

As I write these thoughts, I don’t even know whether these aircraft would be jets or propeller driven. I think propeller driven would be more useful. I imagine an aircraft that would operate at low to medium altitudes, at relatively low speeds. Altogether, the altitudes and speeds would be high enough to make them much less vulnerable to ground fire than helicopters. Yet the altitudes and speeds would be low enough to make them able to accomplish their support missions more capably than high-performance fighters.

I didn’t intend to write so much after the initial calculation of figures, but there you go!

Thanks again,

Steve

lib-er-tar-ian - Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch

lib¿er¿tar¿ian - washingtonpost.com

Yet Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.
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Is it a coincidence that the first prominent political leader to say something about secession, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, is from the state where Federal officials attached the Branch Davidian compound in Waco sixteen years earlier?

But I'm not sure Charen's comment indicates that "a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened." It could just mean that it's complacent and increasingly authoritarian, and leave it at that. Certainly the Obama administration, in the afterglow of its health care victory, doesn't act threatened. People are angry, thought, and the Democrats who brought this bill on us may look back on the consequences of this provocation with astonishment. This is one disunited country now. I don't feel like there's any turning back now. Civil conflict is coming, and we don't know where it will end.

A Flag for All to Flee (Thoughts for the Fourth of July)

I was driving to work today,
Saw the American flag flying over there,
Symbol of shame now every time I see it.
Symbol of prisoners piled in a pyramid,
Naked prisoners piled up for the world to see.

I admired the flag, as a Boy Scout revered it.
Raised the flag every morning in junior high,
Lowered it at the end of the day.
Don't let it touch the ground, fold it properly,
Treat it with respect.

Everyone and his neighbor
Flew that flag after 9/11,
Till they were tiny little rags
Tied off on radio antennae of cars
Going sixty miles an hour.

The skull and bones stand next to the stars and stripes.
The white red and blue meant help is on the way,
Rescue prisoners from the swastika, the sickle, the rising sun.
Now we see intimidation, murder, ruthless rape and coercion.
What do people think now when our flag comes over the horizon?

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram AFB.
Extraordinary rendition and robust interrogation,
Waterboards, electrical wires, wanton cruelty and control.
Dead prisoners everywhere, died in custody.
Our own little holocaust, take pictures for the world to see.

Our soldiers and sailors serve the flag,
Honor its spirit of freedom wherever they go.
They trust our leaders to deploy them in good faith.
Many return home with a flag around their coffin,
No pictures allowed then.

The flag's not something we revere
Only out of pride for our country.
As it matters to others, it matters to us.
It stood for all the best in the world,
Glorious, sturdy hope for good men and women.

“My dream is of a place and time
Where America will once again be seen
As the last best hope of earth.”
Lincoln wrote in the middle of a struggle
That looked so endless, so bleak and so hopeless.

Our dream vanished in Baghdad,
An appalling invasion gave it to our enemies.
One suicide bomber after another blew it up.
Our hope brittle with fear, our constitution dead,
Buried with blood under that pyramid.

The shock toppled us, scored and scared us.
The twin towers fell and we didn't know what to do.
Step up now, lead the world for the fight to come,
We chose shock and awe, fear, folly and revenge.
Our time is over, and it lasted such a short time.

Uncle Dinny Story

I just saw a reference to Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan exchanging Irish jokes over Irish coffee after 5:00 pm. That reminded me of this one. It’s an “Uncle Dinny” story about Dinny McGonicle, similar to the Ole and Sven stories of Minnesota fame:

While working as a longshoreman, Dinny, drunk as usual, fell off the dock and drowned. The union man went to his wake to see Mrs. McGonicle who was sitting with her friend Celia Brady.

“I know Dinny has given you a lot of trouble, Mrs. McGonicle,” the union man said, “him being a drinking man and all. But we all liked him on the docks, and we’ve taken up a collection for him. Here’s a check for $5,000.”

“Glory be to God, Celia,” Mrs. McGonicle said. “Can you imagine that? Why, he never had two nickels to rub together. He couldn’t hold a job. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t read.”

“Thank God,” Celia rejoined, “he couldn’t swim.”

William F. Buckley, Algeria, and Iraq

Quoted from The New Republic, March 19, 2007 - "Athwart History," by Sam Tanenhaus

But Buckley recognizes that cold war analogies of any kind are dubious. For one thing, in the age of terrorism, the "enemy" is not so easily classified or even identified. "Individual terrorists were, only yesterday, engaged in ordinary occupations, shocking friends and family when they struck as terrorists," Buckley wrote in August 2005. By this time, he had already uncovered another, more useful parallel. In October 2004, a week before Election Day, he presciently exhumed in his column a half-forgotten 1978 book, A Savage War of Peace, the classic account of the Algerian war written by Alistair Horne, the British Historian who is one of Buckley's oldest friends (the two were boarding school roommates in the early '40s). What made the book "hideously relevant to our present problems in Iraq," Buckley explained, was its description of how the French, trapped in a bloody debacle that dragged on for eight years, were losing to "a factionalist-nationalist movement using terrorism as a means of expressing contempt and hatred for modern forms." At last, in 1962, President Charles de Gaulle "surveyed that mess" and "unconditionally surrendered" rather than risk the only, and unthinkable alternative - a massive military attack. The United States now faced the identical problem and was similarly hamstrung, because, as Buckley warned both Bush and Kerry, "the insurrectionists can't be defeated by any means we would consent to use." Six months later, Bush's inner circle, and Bush himself, would claim to be studying Horne's book - though, earlier this year, Horne told Maureen Dowd that, when he had given a copy of his book to Rumsfeld with passages on torture underlined, he had received a "savage letter" in return.
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Well that's a pretty long passage. I wanted to quote the entire paragraph, though. Now here's a thought about Iraq, building from the comment above that a military victory in Iraq would require us to use methods that no Western country would consent to use. To win militarily in Iraq, we would have to do to one major city after another what we did to Fallujah. We would have to level it, then shoot any person left who misbehaves. Think of what that means: we would have to make Baghdad look as Berlin did in 1945, then keep killing people there until the city was pacified. You don't hear that much about violence in Fallujah these days, do you? It's not a center of insurgent activity the way it was before we leveled it. Well listen, we went through the decision process about attacking Fallujah twice. The first time we couldn't bring ourselves to do it. The second time we went ahead and leveled the city, and we knew afterwards we weren't going to do that again. Yet the results in Fallujah show - and our failure to secure other cities also shows - that military means by themselves won't work for us. They'll only work for us if we're willing to do to the entire country what we did to Fallujah, and we've already decided we're not going to do that. So we are stuck, and we will have to concede defeat, as de Gaulle did.

Here's an afterthought on military means versus political means in the fight we want to finish in Iraq. The Washington watchword throughout the first months of 2007 was that we have to resolve our problems in Iraq with political means, not military means. That's another way of saying what I argued above. It neglects a big qualification, though. The way out of the war in Iraq requires both military and political means, and our leadership has shown so little ability to coordinate our efforts in those two areas. That is a major part of their incompetence: they don't know how to make military power work to enhance other kinds of influence. They don't know how to make other kinds of influence work to enhance military power. They don't know how to coordinate military, economic, political, social, and diplomatic means to serve our nation's interests. They don't have these skills, and they show no evidence of acquiring them as they go along. They are, in short, incompetent.

Gonzo for Gonzo

Hmm. Maybe Alberto Gonzales was actually brilliant yesterday. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

Comments on Warrior Politics

Andrew Bacevich, a distinguished professor and analyst in international relations, wrote an article in The Atlantic (May 2007) called "Warrior Politics." Here are some comments I wrote in response:
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Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your note! After reading two of your articles, I admire your way of thinking and writing. Links for the articles are posted at the TLJ Resource Center.

Anyway, the one in The Atlantic on civil military relations makes you think. I've long agreed with the underlying premise: it's dangerous in our democracy for soldiers to become involved in politics. I served as an officer in the navy - then, like you, taught international politics. So for ordinary times, I think you're right.

These aren't ordinary times, though. We have an incompetent president. Some would also say his decisions are criminally incompetent, but that's inflammatory and the first charge is serious enough. Anyway, what do you do when a president leads his country into a catastrophic military venture, and practically no one shows sustained willingness to lead us away from it? The Democratic party, the natural source of such leadership, hasn't done it. Even after the November 2006 elections, it has moved slowly and without any creative thinking from the party leadership.

We've had Cindy Sheehan and John Murtha and a full presidential election cycle. Donald Rumsfeld is gone, the Iraq Study Group has come and gone, George Tenet, Tommy Franks, a fallen hero in Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz are all gone. Even Saddam Hussein is gone. It doesn't matter: we're still doing the same thing we did three years ago. All that has changed is that the families and communities that send our fighting units over there have become more and more fed up.

I know that's much over simplified. A lot has changed in Iraq in the meantime, and change in public opinion here makes it look as if we will actually rethink our policies next year. With a new election cycle we can't help but have some new debate. Even so, impatience sets in. If we can't have some new thinking from our civilian leaders, perhaps our uniformed service men and women can give it.

Here I'll differ directly with you. Why should protest that comes from the enlisted corps be worse than protest that comes from the officers? In these circumstances, that doesn't show insubordination or disobedience. It shows courage that officers have had trained out of them. Officers are far too conscious of what's going to enhance or hurt their careers. Enlisted men and women who stop to think about what they're doing should be able to give expression to their thoughts, even if, or especially if, they go against current thinking in the executive branch. If the war they're fighting is illegal, as this one is, our citizen soldiers ought to have a right to act against it. We have to listen to what our soldiers have to say as citizens, confident that what they think as citizens won't affect their willingness to obey as soldiers.

I joined the navy shortly after we pulled out of Vietnam. The ignominious withdrawal from Saigon in 1975 was still fresh in everyone's memories at the time, and joining the service was certainly not something people with my background did. I opposed that war just as strongly as I've opposed this one. I thought hard before joining to judge whether my attitude about Vietnam - or more broadly, judgments about my obligations as a citizen - would prevent me from serving obediently. I concluded that even though the potential for awkward conflict existed between my own sense of right and wrong and my obligations as a military officer, it was not something that should keep me from serving. I'm glad I decided the question that way. As it was, my unit, the USS KIRK, was called into service in Indian Ocean for the Iranian hostage crisis, and such a conflict didn't arise. If it had arisen, I would have served my unit just as well, and written letters like this one to express my ideas as a private citizen.

You're right that there's a difference between privately expressed thoughts and signing a public petition, or joining a public lobbying group. Ordinarily, we just don't want our citizens in uniform to become involved in political activities like that until after they've left active duty. Still, our leadership everywhere has failed the country and our soldiers. Bush and his advisors have ruined our army, marine corps and national guard, and people in our military have to speak up. At this point, they are our last resource.

John Locke said that democratic citizens have a right to resist when the government unconstitutionally exceeds its proper authority, and our government has done that. Historians still say that the officer corps in Germany should have seen what was happening in the relationship between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party, and that they should have done something about it. Historians still say that we could have prevented Vietnam if only the officers in the Pentagon had been more willing to speak up against Johnson and McNamara. At times the consequences of keeping quiet are worse than the consequences of speaking up.

Rumsfeld essentially fired Zinni, and since then - for four years - we've had only retired officers speak up. We need anyone - officer or enlisted, active duty or retired - to say something now, to show solidarity with John Murtha and all the parents that Cindy Sheehan had the courage to speak for. Yes, Cindy Sheehan and the anti-war movement found each other, and we all remember how the anti-war movement disrupted healthy, democratic political processes in the sixties and seventies. Still, we don't have a movement as such of any kind now, and Cheney still ridicules the war's opponents as unpatriotic, insinuating that they are traitors. With leadership like that, we are going to suffer a lot more, and the possibility of bad consequences from our enlisted service members speaking up aren't nearly as bad as the consequences we're already facing when so many have had to mute their thoughts and feelings about what has happened. People like me - and those soldiers - don't want to feel helpless anymore.

Thanks for writing both of your recent articles. The one titled "'Your Iraq Plan?' Is a Pointless Question" at latimes.com stated the problems with our public conversations so well. And the one on "Warrior Politics" in The Atlantic has been worth commenting on. I've enjoyed the opportunity.

Return from Vacation

Well we're back from our trip to St. John in the U. S. Virgin Islands. And it's time to move ahead with these books on the war in Iraq!

1984 Campaign Photograph

Cargo Cult Libertarianism

From an article called Cargo Cult Libertarianism:

The cargo cults are religions (or something resembling religions) which took root in South Pacific Islands after WWII. Observing that Westerners had such amenities as refrigerators, air conditioners, etc., and that Westerners were brought shiny new things by airplanes, the cargo cultists hypothesized a connection. They built elaborate replicas of technological devices — refrigerators of wood and bamboo which looked exactly like the Kenmore[TM] in your kitchen, in the hopes that, if they looked and acted enough like Westerners, the airplanes would arrive with shiny new stuff for them. Yes, this is an over-simplification, but it’ll do for the point I’m trying to make.

Cargo Cult Libertarians observe that successful Republican and Democrat politicans wear suits and power ties, that successful Republican and Democrat politicians exude confidence, that successful Republican and Democrat politicians shy from the radical, and that successful Republican and Democrat politicians take a smooth, milquetoast, middle of the road, “well, Bob” approach in media interviews.

From this, they hypothesize that if they, as Libertarians, wear suits and power ties, exude confidence, shy from the radical, and take a smooth, milquetoast, middle of the road, “well, Bob” approach in media interviews and public appearances, that they will magically become successful Libertarian politicians.

Needless to say, it doesn’t work that way. Voters who want cuddly, well-dressed, moderate, confidence-exuding, “well Bob” politicians already have them. We call them Republicans and Democrats. The LP’s future, if it has one, lies precisely with those Americans who sense a need for a radical, in your face, “well, Bob, fuck the conventional wisdom” alternative.