Category: Politics

The current issue of The Nation magazine is dedicated to “food issues” – farming practices, consumption habits, environmental concerns, etc. Contributors include Wendell Berry, Peter Singer, and Eric Schlosser among others. A good portion of it is available online.

Alan Bock tries to draw some. In a nutshell: solid police work, um, works. Police state tactics aren’t necessary. And invading and occupying Muslim lands is counterproductive.

He also makes a frequently neglected point, that over the long term the U.S. stands a better chance of encouraging cultural change in the Muslim world by being an example of freedom, rather than trying to impose it (a rather paradoxical idea to begin with).

The summer issue of The American Conservative consists of a symposium on the meaning of “right” and “left” in our current context and what value, if any, these distinctions retain. You can now read the entire thing online. I venture to say that this may be the only time the writing of left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale has appeared in the same forum as that of conservative matriarch Phyllis Shclafly.

The pieces that resonate the most with me are those by Andrew Bacevich and Scott McConnell who focus on the way the war on terrorism, and particularly the war in Iraq are redefining the political landscape.

Here’s McConnell:

The defining issue of our day is the Iraq War and American foreign policy. It has been so since the shocking attack of 9/11, an event that showed that the survival of the United States as a free society was unexpectedly at risk. Foreign policy, when the stakes are war, peace, and national survival, inevitably becomes the deciding issue when it moves to center stage. The division in this case was whether the United States would seek to isolate al-Qaeda from the Arab world in order to marginalize and destroy it. Or would it pursue policies that inevitably pushed more and more of the world’s one billion Muslims towards al-Qaeda’s view of America and the world? Astonishingly and recklessly, George W. Bush, influenced by neoconservative advisers who believe the only thing Arabs understand is force, chose the latter course. Under false pretenses, he invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, while abandoning America’s long-time effort to serve as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. These policies and their consequences now dominate our age, pushing all the elements of the Left/Right division into the background.

I might put it a bit less polemically than that, but otherwise that sounds about right. Early on after 9/11 it wasn’t clear what path the U.S. was going to follow: a narrow focus on al-Qaeda and its supporters and enablers (such as the Taliban), along with an effort at reducing the American footprint in the Middle East, or a wider war against all terrorist groups, even those that didn’t directly threaten the U.S., along with various “rogue states” accused of pursuing weapons of mass destruction?

Charles Peña’s recent book Winning the Un-War goes into some detail about how the Bush administration elided the distinction between al-Qaeda and states like Iraq during the months after the invasion of Afghanistan and finally leading up to the war in Iraq. In his view, the conflation of these distinct issues has distracted us from what the U.S. government’s primary focus should’ve been, namely pursuing the people who actually attacked us. An alternative strategy to the one the Bush administration has been pursuing would be focused on distinguishing those groups or states which pose an actual threat to us, like al-Qaeda, from those that don’t. Rather than widening the war, he argues, we should be narrowing it.

Other pieces from the symposium I found interesting or worthwhile are Jeremy Beer’s piece on how local preservationist and conservation groups represent a more “conservative” spirit than anything coming out of Washington, Michael Lind on the ethno-religious character of the two parties, Sale’s proposal for an alliance between left-wing populists and right-wing libertarians under an umbrella of local self-determination, and Phillip Weiss with a left-wing perspective on cooperation between antiwar liberals and conservatives.

Brandon has a good discussion of the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in light of G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (which is, as far as I can tell, not available on the web).

Brandon is right to distinguish Truman’s moral culpability from the question of the justness of the act itself. The former is ultimately not up to us to judge, but the latter is necessary for us to make judgments about.

I posted some excerpts from Anscombe’s “War and Murder” here.

Political scientist Robert Pape, who’s written a book on the logic of suicide terrorism, has a piece in the NY Times on the nature of Hezbollah.

At Slate Jacob Weisberg writes on the failure of economic sanctions as a method of undermining the rule of dictators.

Charles Peña, whose new book on counterterrorism I just got from the library, writes on “The Lebanon Conundrum.”

Sen. Chuck Hagel breaks with Bush on the Middle East.

Hagel is about the only Republican I could see myself voting for in ’08. Well, I guess I’m still agnostic on Romney since I don’t know anything about his foreign policy views.

Jonathan Schell has a lengthy piece in the Nation arguing that the U.S. can’t be an empire even if it wants to. He attributes this to the fact that recent history has imposed limits on the use of force which prevent any country from being the new Rome or British Empire. The two most important constraints are nuclear weapons, which make great power wars like the World Wars all but unthinkable, and the anti-colonialist mentality which encourages people who might be absorbed into a world empire to fight for self-determination.

However, Schell says, many policymakers, presidents, and pundits are reluctant to concede any inherent limitations on our power. They prefer to see lack of will displayed in a reluctance to use that power as the only things holding us back (compare Matthew Yglesias’ “Green Lantern theory of politics”). Schell traces a line of thought going back at least to Joseph McCarthy which blames American failure and decline on subversive elements within who are sapping our will to prevail. The danger, he argues, is that this can result in a backlash against liberty at home as authorities seek to restrain those subversive elements.

Interesting NY Times article about a megachurch pastor in St. Paul who preached a series of sermons against the identification of Christianity with American nationalism and how it cost him a fifth of his congregation.

The Times article sort of tries to spin it as a conservative vs. liberal thing, but the pastor, Gregory A. Boyd, seems to be promoting something more radical. He seems to be essentially calling Christians to give up the whole idea of exercising political power. This is a “Church as counterculture” model more in line with the thought of Stanley Hauerwas than with Jim Wallis-style religious progressivism.

Of course, I’m skeptical that Christians can avoid exercising power over others as long as we’re not prepared to beat a retreat from society. But I admire Pastor Boyd’s refusal to turn his pulpit into a platform for nationalist politics.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Granted that neither of these authors is a Christian, they are both writers well within the mainstream of American conservative politics. And both essentially advocate an “anything goes” approach to waging war.

Again, I’m not interested in arguing whether the Israeli response in the current situation is “proportionate,” or meets other just war criteria. What concerns me is that influential writers on the American Right are openly advocating (or at least strongly suggesting) the abandonment of jus in bello criteria in principle.

I’ve noticed in recent days, mostly in various blog comment threads about the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, that whenever anyone brings up traditional just war notions like proportionality or non-combatant immunity, almost inevitably someone will say, with an air of triumph as if delivering an unassailable argument-stopper, something like “So, you’re saying the Allies were wrong to carpet bomb during World War II or to use atomic weapons on Japan?”

What’s curious about this response is that those who make it seem to be implying that those acts were manifestly right and just and only some kind of kook could possibly think otherwise. But even at the time those were controversial tactics. Maybe it’s because World War II has been enshrined in our national mythology as the “Good War” that people appeal to it as a kind of paradigm of a just war. But a just cause doesn’t guarantee that all the means used to fight will be just.

One thing that might be going on is that people are appealing to an idea of “military necessity” – that if the cause is just, then whatever means are necessary to win are ipso facto just. With respect to the bombing campaigns in WWII, though, there is naturally some debate about whether they were necessary to win.

This exposes a fundamental divide between a consequentialist moral outlook that evaluates actions based on their expected consequences, and a more deontological one that deems certain actions to be intrinsically right or wrong. The just war tradition is deontological in that it forbids certain actions even if they appear to be necessary for victory. To a consequentialist this may look foolish, or even evil, because it might allow a just cause to go down to defeat. This is why I’m skeptical that just war thinking can really effectively function once it’s been detached from Christian moorings (or at least from some other robustly deontological moral perspective).

In his book When War Is Unjust: Being Honest in Just War Thinking, John Howard Yoder argues that the rise of the secular state resulted in the values of “national survival” becoming paramount in thinking about war. Whereas for Christians it was considered preferable to suffer rather than sin, this makes less sense in the context of a materialistic worldview. Once reasons of state became the driving force in national policy, self-imposed restraints during war started to seem irrational. If this life is all there is, then using whatever means seem necessary to protect and prolong it makes more sense. Thus a more consequentialist outlook came to prevail. This obviously has implications beyond questions of war and peace; it’s reflected in debates about using human life in medical research, for instance.

It should be instructive for Christians who think of themselves as being on the “Right” that the Right is where most of the voices for abandoning just war constraints are coming from. The Right is broadly the party of nationalism. I mean that in a more or less morally neutral sense, but it has a tendency to elevate the nation to a transcendent value. And when that happens you end up with wars that are structurally indistinguishable from a “holy” war or crusade: the transcendent value for which we’re suppsed to be fighting justifies using whatever means are available to ensure victory.