AFF's Doublethink

Sonny writes,

…yeah, sure. And, I think Israel actually is trying to achieve certain strategic gains.

So our disagreement is really one of policy, rather than worldview. However, he later declares that whatever our disagreement,

no sovereign nation should be forced to withstand constant bombardment/missile attacks from a neighbor on its border that wants to see it destroyed and its people pushed into the sea.

As Jack Black would say in High Fidelity, “there’s that should…” In other words, despite the caveat, it’s not actually about strategy; there’s a point at which strategy ceases to operate, and normative rules apply. Israel’s undesirable strategic situation can only lead to one policy prescription.

I would have more faith in certain neoconservatives’ beliefs in the importance of strategy in theory, if they did not so often reduce it in practice to General Westmoreland’s phrase: “Firepower.”

Halevi and Oren’s article is a case in point. Was there ever a military action of Israel’s that they have not supported? Their arguments for the war in Lebanon in 2006 read much the same as this one. Their worldview is inescapably formed by the events of the period stretching from 1948-73, during which a) the IDF was one of the most effective militaries in modern history and b) it was fighting against conventional militaries whereby Israel’s superiority in the field needed to be conclusively demonstrated.

Such is not the case today. While in some sense the belief that they are ultimately stronger than the Israelis is a crucial (and lamentable) feature of Palestinian nationalism, there is no evidence that they believe themselves stronger militarily, or that they are merely one demonstration of Israeli power away from ceding their goals.

As for the belief that the IDF can effectively excise Hamas from the Gazan body politic like a tumor, this has little basis in reality. Neither Israel nor any other nation has much of a track record in coercing foreign peoples into constituting their governments in a manner desirable to the coercers. Usually, quite the opposite is the case.

While it is possible to use military force to achieve certain material outcomes, it is exceedingly rare for punitive strikes to change an enemy at the political level; people are not that malleable.

I am more inclined to side with Diodotus, who Thucydides records as declaring that

Either then some means of terror more terrible than this must be discovered, or it must be admitted that this restraint is useless; and that as along as poverty gives men the courage of necessity, or plenty fills them with the ambition which belongs to insolence and pride, and each of the other conditions of life remains subjugated to some fatal and master passion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men into danger… In short, it is impossible to prevent human nature doing what it has set its mind upon, by force of law or by any other deterrent force whatsoever.

Partisans of the alternative might do well to make clear what level of suffering the Gazan Palestinians would need to undergo before they comply, and what specific policies Israel should enact to bring such conditions about.

Sometimes, you run across an essay that you wish you could’ve written, an essay you perhaps planned to write one day. You encounter it at first with a sense of sinking disappointment for having been beaten to the punch. But as you read it, a sense of elation comes over you as the essay articulates your points one-by-one exactly as you would’ve hoped to have done yourself.

Marko Atilla Hoare penned such an essay here. It’s a pitch-perfect critique of modern international justice, which in its quest to remain sublimely impartial, ultimately fails at its own goals. Being a Balkanist, Hoare compares the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to the Nuremberg trials and concludes that the latter were far more effective by almost every measure.

Here’s a bit on fostering reconciliation:

The UN Security Council resolution establishing [the ICTY] justified it as something that would ‘contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace’, and its supporters frequently argue that prosecution of individual war-criminals is necessary in order to free the respective former-Yugoslav peoples of the stigma of collective guilt, thereby facilitating reconciliation between them. Paradoxically, however, it was the more overtly retributive IMT and subsequent Nuremberg tribunals, by determining in advance that one side was guilty and efficiently punishing its top surviving leaders, that appear to have been more effective in achieving reconciliation between Germany and the nations it attacked. For Germany has not been allowed to escape condemnation as the side guilty for the war, while those it attacked have witnessed that justice has been done.

By contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that the ICTY - with no prior allocation of guilt to one side in the war, by treating war-crimes on a purely individual basis, and by lumping together war-criminals from all sides - has made any contribution to reconciliation between the former Yugoslavs. On the contrary. Unlike after World War II, the international community has failed to impose a narrative of who was to blame for the War of Yugoslav Succession, and to force each side to accept it. Consequently, each side continues to see itself as the victim in the conflict, and to see the tribunal’s record purely in terms of how too many of its own people and/or too few of the other sides’ have been indicted, or how the other sides’ indictees have been wrongfully acquitted or received too short sentences. According to a recent study by an international team of scholars led by Vojin Dimitrijevic and Julie Mertus: ‘The hope that it [the ICTY] might promote reconciliation between the peoples of the region does not appear to have been realised.’

The takeaway is clear: victors’ justice works. The alternatives, not so much. Read the whole thing.

On my “yet-to-be-read” shelf I have Team of Rivals, The Clash of Civilizations, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s* Prisoners. I have a feeling that they will be sitting there for a while. My question is this: How do all of my contemporaries get so much damn reading done in comparison to my own woeful book count? Is it just a function of my having to do so much extra-curricular work (i.e., watching all 4.5 hours of Che on Sunday afternoon while the NFL playoffs are on, or going to see the Notorious B.I.G. biopic Notorious tonight) that I don’t have time for pleasurable reading? Am I just a slow reader? Do I not do enough skimming? Does everyone else just pretend to have read all these books that they claim to have read? Do I read too many magazine articles, thus eliminating a key reading time (lunchtime being when I consume my New Yorkers and Weekly Standards and Atlantics, for the most part)? Do I simply need to carve out a “reading time” that must be honored every evening? How do all you smart jerks get your reading done in a timely fashion?

*I’ve been slow to the Jeffrey Goldberg bandwagon for reasons that aren’t quite clear; posts like this one make me sad that I’ve been missing out.

Again, with a nod to Tyler Cowen, I present two excellent quotations I came across today.

First one comes from the recently late Samuel Huntington’s magnificent Political Order in Changing Societies:

“The abjectly poor, too,” Eric Hoffer observed, “stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change… There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.”

Some might read this passage as a call to try harder at changing the world. Huntington, of course, is not having any of that. If you, like me, have been putting off tackling this moderately dense book, don’t put it off any longer.

Next up, Martin Wolf attributes the following to Hyman Minsky:

“A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.”

Zing! So much for the brilliance of financiers. Wolf’s article is worth reading in full, by the way: the chief economics commentator of the stalwart Financial Times has discovered his inner Keynes.

David writes: 

That one is justified in responding when provoked, does not mean one should respond. As Brzezinski once grumbled, world politics is not a kindergarten. Military action is not undertaken out of mere justification, but in the interest of achieving certain strategic gains.

I mean, yeah, sure. And, I think Israel actually is trying to achieve certain strategic gains. From a piece in the LA Times coauthored by Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren:

If Israel successfully overthrows Hamas in Gaza, it would strengthen anti-Iranian forces throughout the Mideast and signal the region that Iranian momentum can be reversed. The Israeli military operation could begin the process that topples a terrorist regime that seized power in the Gaza Stripin 2007 and has fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli neighborhoods.

And whether or not Hamas is ultimately overthrown, Israel can achieve substantial goals. The first is an absolute cease-fire. Previous cease-fires allowed Hamas to launch two or three rockets a week into Israel and to smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels. To obtain a cease-fire now, the international community should recognize Israel’s right to respond to any aggression over its international border and monitor the closure of Hamas’ weapons-smuggling tunnels.

Now, we can argue all day (or all week!) about whether or not these bombings and the subsequent ground invasion will achieve any or all of those goals. But I think we can all agree on the following facts: no sovereign nation should be forced to withstand constant bombardment/missile attacks from a neighbor on its border that wants to see it destroyed and its people pushed into the sea, and that Israel isn’t attacking Hamas just for kicks.

Again, I ask the critics of Israel how they think the United States would/should respond if we were in their shoes. To argue that we’d respond any differently is disingenuous (see: Afghanistan after 9/11).

Some thoughts for those reading the Sonny and Freddie imbroglio (the bloggers, not the Corleones):

I see a bit of a problem not uncommon to the blogosphere of two serious people talking past one another. Freddie is concerned with the problem of civilian casualties; Sonny is weighing the two combatants morally and finds the Palestinians wanting.

Taking Sonny’s position first, I think there is a bit of willful obtuseness on his part in addressing Israel’s handling of collateral damage. At this point in the struggle, civilian casulaties are built into almost any action Israel takes — not merely because Hamas “hides amongst its own people,” but because Gaza encompasses less than 140 square miles, and Israel is conducting air strikes over one of the most heavily populated areas on Earth (nor will the ground invasion much improve matters in this area, I think).

The Israelis understand this. They are not naifs. It is almost mistaken to speak of accidental civilian casualties at this point, because the Israelis can expect with near absolute certainty that its attacks, however precise, will generate such casualties. That they are not actively targeting such civilians is somewhat beside the point — unless the only point is to demonstrate Israel’s moral superiority to Hamas, which is a given.

The obvious rejoinder, that Israel has a right to respond militarily when rockets are fired into its territory from Gaza, also misses the point. That one is justified in responding when provoked, does not mean one should respond. As Brzezinski once grumbled, world politics is not a kindergarten. Military action is not undertaken out of mere justification, but in the interest of achieving certain strategic gains. Such considerations go a long way toward preventing military engagements from degenerating into total war.

The sheer unlikeliness of a positive outcome to this round (from Israel’s standpoint) only increases the moral burden on its leaders for the casualties on all sides.

If Freddie’s post also remains rather unsatisfying, I suspect it is because he is on the whole more interested in preserving his own delicate moral position than in seriously considering the strategic concerns of the actors involved on the ground. But then, most discussions in this country about the Israel-Palestine conflict have more to do with ourselves than with Israelis or Palestinians.

After a restful holiday, I’m going to ease my way back into blogging rather than dive headfirst into the maw of politics. On that note, I saw a fine performance from My Morning Jacket at the lovely Chicago Theater last week — whose live show I would commend to almost anyone.

They played every song I wanted to hear. Except this one:

Ralph Peters’ latest is an ugly, emotional and irrational screed in which he acknowledges that the Israeli attacks in Gaza will have a very limited effect, yet comes very close to arguing in favor of killing the greatest number of Arabs anyway:

The bad news is that it still won’t be enough. While Israel has delivered a painful blow against Hamas, it’s still not a paralyzing hit. The only way to neuter such a terror threat - even temporarily - is to go in on the ground and scour every room, basement and underground tunnel in a region.

That would mean high Israeli casualties and, of course, condemnation of Israel’s self-defense efforts by every self-righteous, corrupt and bigoted organization and government on earth, from Turtle Bay to Tehran.

So in other words, Peters thinks it’s self-righteous, corrupt and bigoted to note that all this suffering will essentially preserve the status quo between Israel and Gaza, as he himself just has.

What have been Israel’s “crimes?” Not “stealing Palestinian land,” but making that land productive, while exposing the incompetence and sloth of Arab culture.

Let’s rewrite that slightly: “What have been the South Africans’ ‘crimes?’ Not ’stealing black land,’ but making that land productive, while exposing the incompetence and sloth of black culture.”

What if Peters had written that? Someone might accuse him of being self-righteous, corrupt and bigoted.

Israel’s crime isn’t striking back at terror, but demonstrating, year after year, that a country in the Middle East can be governed without resort to terror. Israel’s crime hasn’t been denying Arab rights, but insisting on human rights for women and minorities.

Been to east Jerusalem lately, to the other side of the wall? Any idea how hard it is to get from a home there to a job in Jerusalem?

Indeed, Arab and regional jealousy toward Israel is so all-consuming, so necessary to excuse the Arab art of failure, that even these judicious airstrikes will hardly make a dent in the terrorist threat.

Unless Israel sends in ground forces for the long haul - and thousands of IDF reservists are being mobilized - there will be, at best, a temporary respite from terror attacks. Even a new occupation of Gaza would not fully solve the problem.

If that’s the case, shouldn’t the U.S. and others of like mind be pushing for an outcome that might fully solve the problem?

It’s a rare conflict that results in an enduring peace. Unintended consequences abound. At times, you fight just to buy time, to gain breathing space - or merely to frustrate an enemy’s designs for a limited period.

Ah, lebensraum. No doubt this is just the kind of language the Israelis want thrown around in their defense. If I were the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., I think I’d want Peters off my side.

(Hat tip: JB)

Peter Berkowitz writes that social conservatives and fiscal conservatives need each other to win elections, and they can coalesce around the Constitution. I’ve known Peter for years, and like him a lot, but he’s spilled an awful lot of ink here addressing everything that isn’t at issue:

Some social conservatives point to the ballot initiatives this year in Arizona, California and Florida that rejected same-sex marriage as evidence that the country is and remains socially conservative, and that any deviation from the social conservative agenda is politically suicidal. . . .

Meanwhile, more than a few libertarian-leaning conservatives are disgusted by Republican profligacy. . . .

In addition, many are still angry about the Republican-led intervention by the federal government in the 2005 controversy over whether Terri Schiavo’s husband could lawfully remove the feeding tubes that were keeping his comatose wife alive. These libertarian conservatives entertain dreams of a coalition that jettisons social conservatives and joins forces with moderates and independents of libertarian persuasion.

But the purists in both camps ignore simple electoral math. Slice and dice citizens’ opinions and voting patterns in the 50 states as you like, neither social conservatives nor libertarian conservatives can get to 50% plus one without the aid of the other.

Yet they, and the national security hawks who are also crucial to conservative electoral hopes, do not merely form a coalition of convenience. Theirs can and should be a coalition of principle, and a constitutional conservatism provides the surest ones.

The principles are familiar: individual freedom and individual responsibility, limited but energetic government, economic opportunity and strong national defense. They are embedded in the Constitution and flow out of the political ideas from which it was fashioned. They were central to Frank Meyer’s celebrated fusion of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism in the 1960s. And they inspired Ronald Reagan’s consolidation of conservatism in the 1980s.

The fact is, Barack Obama won a significant number of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives in North Carolina, Virginia, and the entire midwest. The only people he couldn’t win over were foreign policy hawks, and therein lies the real debate: how should we use American power?

Peter completely elides the actual constitutional questions of George W. Bush’s presidency, which was more than a little controversial. You’ll recall Mr. Bush ordering the NSA to monitor the electronic communications of thousands of American citizens on American soil without warrants, and using FBI “national security letters” to pressure domestic telecommunications companies to turn over private customer records. You’ll recall detention issues, like Padilla and Hamdan. Tell us, what is a conservative who supports the Constitution supposed to believe about all this? That so long as it’s all done in the interest of national security, it’s okay?

It’s a little late in the game here for milquetoast cries of “can’t we all just get along?” There are actual issues that have to be hashed out.

Thank you, Peter, for 1,000 words dedicated to the proposition of constitutionalism without the Constitution. For an appeal to limited government without the limitations. And for an endorsement of a “strong” national defense, without any explanation of whether that strong defense is actually going to be used in the advancement of American interests instead of Iranian ones.

Shorter Freddie: I have never supported a military action in my lifetime or any other military action in the history of mankind because innocent civilians were unintentionally killed in those operations.

I’m not trying to be glib; the death of innocents is a serious subject. But there is something fundamentally unserious about this paragraph:

I know this with a certainty that I feel in my heart and my bones: if you support this assault, and justify its collateral damage, but will not come out and state the actual logical conclusion of what you are saying– that you justify the killing of innocent Palestinian children– then you are an intellectual coward, in the most damning and complete sense. If you justify the attack and its collateral damage you justify the consequences. So all of you, have the courage to stand for what you mean. Have the basic integrity to stand behind what you are saying. Look me in my face, so to speak, and tell me about the justice of another dead Palestinian child.

Previously in the post, Freddie argues that the deaths of an Israeli child and a Palestinian are equal tragedies and should be condemned equally. I suppose that’s true in the cosmic, “Hey man, we’re all people and God loves us all the same” sort of way. But the differences are greater than the similarities. It’s like someone arguing that first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter are equal crimes because both end with a snuffed out life.

I think you’ll have a hard time finding many supporters of Israel who thinks that killing innocent Palestinians is a good thing. There’s no “justice” in an innocent dying for reasons they can’t possibly comprehend. If, however, you can’t understand the fundamental difference between Hamas intentionally killing an Israeli child and Israelis accidentally killing a Palestinian child because the cowards that comprise Hamas’s security force intentionally hide themselves and their weapons amongst their own people in order to stir up international outrage when Israel inevitably responds to unwarranted acts of aggression, either your moral compass is broken or you’re being obtuse.

Israel deserves security and freedom from peril. Israel deserves to have its borders respected. Israel deserves the right to exist. And if, in the pursuit of those goals, a Palestinian child is accidentally killed, then so be it. It’s a tragedy, but one that child’s own people brought into existence by electing a terrorist organization and sitting idly by while said organization rained death upon the Israeli people.