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This article by Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive estimates the human cost of using “merely” a tactical, “bunker buster” nuke on Iran. Terrifying stuff.

(via Conservative Green)

Matthew Yglesias has a good article on what’s wrong with the concept of “guest worker” programs:

The details of these proposals vary quite a bit and, as ever, the details are important. But all varieties of the concept share some factors in common. Unlike regular immigrants, guest workers are only allowed into their host country for a limited period of time and have no chance of ever becoming citizens. Guest workers are also typically the “guests” of some specific employer who’s agreed to sponsor their stay in the United States. This leaves them unable to bargain credibly with their employers, start small businesses of their own, or even just take risks around the workplace that stand some chance of getting them fired.

If you’re an employer, this is ideal. You have an utterly captive work force, unable to negotiate with you or even really complain. A work force that’s utterly under your thumb because you cannot only fire them but, in effect, have them deported. Needless to say, the prospects of such a work force unionizing are nil. Consequently, they have an even more negative impact on working-class wages than do regular immigrants.

[…]

Historically, migration to this country has mostly been unlimited. That era came to an end for good and bad reasons in the 1920s, but under modern conditions we almost certainly can’t return to the old ways. But the restriction era, in both its pre- and post-reformed versions has always tried to hold true to the basic vision of America as “a nation of immigrants.” The essence of this vision is the expectation that people who come to American will become Americans — applying for citizenship when eligible and starting families here whose children will be, by right, citizens of the country in which they were born. This vision is good for immigrants, of course, but importantly it’s integral to our shared identity as a nation.

Guest workers would undermine this vision of America, creating a semi-permanent underclass of hired hands who are neither citizens, nor on the path to citizenship, with no incentive to seek assimilation or for the native-born to treat them as equals. Sectors of the economy featuring large numbers of guest workers really would become jobs Americans “won’t do,” the fields in which they work stigmatized as beneath the dignity of proper Americans.

That seems right to me. Of course, it may be that there are would-be “guest workers” who don’t want to become Americans, but would like to come here, work, save some money, and then return to their home country. After all, as Camassia pointed out, it’s not as though people are generally eager to pull up roots and leave their homes. Many, if not most, would, other things being equal, probably prefer to stay in their country of origin. But a program that forecloses the possibility of becoming a citizen certainly is open to Yglesias’ objections.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all the claims in this Seymour Hersh article on the Bush administration’s approach to Iran given all the unnamed sources. But the suggestion that the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites is even being considered is scary.

P.S. This Slate article attempts to weigh how likely this all is.

I’m anti-war, but I’m pro-troop. The soldiers are good boys and girls doing what they’re told. It’s not their war — they’re just fighting it. I don’t have a beef with them. It’s Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney I have questions for. But a guy in the army? A twenty-one-year-old kid from Illinois? He could vote for Bush all day long. I have no argument with this guy. And I’ve also met a lot of soldiers who said, “This war’s bullshit, but I’m fighting it.” All these Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly types who claim to be the only ones who’re patriotic and who think that if you want to question the government you’re a Taliban sympathizer or a commie spy — it offends me. And it also offends me that if you say you’re patriotic someone on the other side might say you’re a psycho conservative, Fox News-loving jerk. I think America’s great. I mean, how could it not be? The Ramones come from here. – Henry Rollins

(Link via Thunderstruck)

I recently read an article by philosopher Andrew Fiala called “Citizenship, Epistemology, and the Just War Theory”* which attempts to flesh out an argument for what he calls “pacifism in practice.” Fiala says that those who are committed to the just war tradition should, for all intents and purposes, be “antiwar pacifists”** due to the nature of modern political life. He notes that some have tried to show that just war principles entail a commitment to pacifism due to the uniquely horrific nature of modern war, but Fiala is more interested in the limitations on what the average citizen can know in a modern democracy, and how those limits constrain whether or not she can give her support to a war undertaken by her government.

Fiala argues that, in practice, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for a citizen to know whether the ad bellum and in bello criteria of just war theory are met by any particular war. Therefore, the prudent thing to do is to “err on the side of peace” and oppose all (or nearly all) wars. Regarding ad bellum, he says that apart from the issue of just cause there are the questions of proportionality and prospects of success (meaning not just victory, but the attainment of a stable peace), as well as whether the war is being waged by legitimate authority and whether that authority possesses right intention. Fiala points out that right intention must extend to the means by which the authority intends to carry out the conlfict. To support a given war, he says, a citizen would have to be reasonably certain of the purity of his leaders’ motives, with respect to ends and means.

Turning to the in bello criteria, of which discrimination, or non-combatant immunity, is arguably the most important, Fiala says that to justifiably support a war, a citizen has to have adequate knowledge of military strategy in order to be confident that the limits of jus in bello will be adhered to. But this is something that she hardly ever has:

I am skeptical about the ability of ordinary citizens to evaluate claims made about the intention of the military to constrain its operations in light of the principle of discrimination. Ordinary citizens are excluded (for good strategic reasons) from having access both to battle plans and to a concrete analysis of the “facts on the ground” that could inform a decision about whether this principle were respected.

[…]

[T]he history of warfare shows us the amount of force used often exceeds the means that could be justified, especially when military objectives (such as absolute victory) overshadow moral concerns. One could discuss the use of atomic bombs in Japan or the firebombing of Dresden to make this point. Thus, unless we blindly trust our leaders, healthy skepticism about the use of war is rational. We should resist the drive to war until our leaders have demonstrated their good intentions and their ability to make the morla judgments required by the just war theory.

One could strengthen this argument, it seems to me, by noting that not only is it difficult to know whether our leaders will act within the parameters of just war theory, but they, in fact, seem institutionally committed to violating them by the adoption of certain strategies. For instance, the policy of nuclear deterrence rests on the (at least hypothetical) willingness of our government to launch a massive counterstrike against anyone who attacks us with nuclear weapons. Such a strike would almost certainly involve the targeting of civilian population centers.*** A less extreme example might be the somtimes stated policy that “we don’t do body counts” of civilian casualties, thus making it impossible in practice to know if the criteria of discrimination and proportionality are being respected.

In general, while it is possible for ordinary citizens to judge that there are good causes for war, we do not have access to the kind of information we would need in order to know whether the means of war–even a war proposed for a just cause–were justifiable.

It’s important to note that Fiala isn’t saying that no war is justified. A given war is either just or not, and it may well be, he says, that our leaders, who are privy to information that the average citizen isn’t, know that a particular war is justified. The problem, he thinks, is that the average citizen can’t under normal circumstances know if the war is justified, and therefore should refrain from supporting it.

The strength of Fiala’s argument derives from the belief that the burden of proof for going to war – which, after all, typically results in maiming and killing a large number of people – should be extraordinarily high. Certainly the burden of proof falls on those advocating war rather than those opposing it. War is at least prima facie wrong and especially in a democracy the leaders proposing to go to war in the people’s name and on their behalf should make the case.

In a liberal democracy, it is not a citizen’s immediate duty to support a war. Rather, it is the government’s duty to convince the citizens they should support the war by offering proof about the justice of the cause and the intention to utilize just means.

Fiala considers the objection that we should trust our leaders and support the government even if we can’t know that the course of action it’s pursuing is right. His (in my view correct) response is that liberal governance rests on reasons, not on blind obedience. In a liberal society the government is obliged to provide reasons for the policies it undertakes, not simply demand that we trust it. As Fiala says:

I admit that my position hinges on a certain amount of distrust of those in power. This distrust is rational, however, in light of a long history that shows a tendency toward manipulation and abuse of power by those in power. In liberal states–which, since Locke, have been understood as fiduciary institutions–citizens have a right and a duty to raise skeptical objections to ensure their trust is not abused. This is especially true with regard to actions as momentous as war.

[…]

The relation between the practical pacifist and the state is like Socrates’ relation to Athens: a relation of questioning aimed at justice. Like Socrates, practical pacifists admit that their knowledge is far from perfect. They believe their duty is to serve society by questioning and clarifying evidence and arguments. … Because of strategic necessities, our leaders cannot provide us with full access to all of the evidence that would support their claims about the prudence of their proposed response to a supposed just cause, nor can they provide us with access to battle plans that would help to support the claim that war will be conducted in a just manner.

Certainly, I think, Fiala’s argument is persuasive in commending a higher degree of skepticism toward any proposed war than many of us typically display. Since war is a “capital case,” shouldn’t we be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt before throwing our support behind it?
——————————————-
*Logos, vol. 7, issue 2, Spring 2004; for a similar argument see Paul Griffiths, “Just War: An Exchange”

**By “antiwar pacifist” I mean someone who opposes war, but not necessarily all lethal violence. One might think war is never justified, but that the use of lethal violence by the police or in the immediate defense of self or others is sometimes justified.

***See Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism by John Finnis, Germaine Grisez, and Joseph M. Boyle, Jr.

Interesting piece by Garry Wills on attempts from Right and Left to turn Jesus into a political mascot:

The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.

It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.

Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: “Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah” (Matthew 23:8-10).

If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O’Connor described as “the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus” and “a wild ragged figure” who flits “from tree to tree in the back” of the mind.

Read the rest here.

The lack of sophistication in the reporting on the Gospel of Judas has been nothing short of astounding. For instance, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer there is an inane story asking the proverbial man (and woman) in the pew how the “news” that Judas may not have betrayed Jesus after will affect their faith. Most of the people are admirably skeptical and dismissive of the importance of it, except for one lapsed-Catholic-turned-atheist who darkly intones that “the Catholics won’t like this.” Call in Opus Dei! Time for another cover-up! Where’s Dan Brown when you need him?

Very little attempt in the story to put any of this in context, explain what gnosticism is or why orthodox Christianity regards it as heretical. And then we get this stellar quote from The Rev. Beverly Dale, of the Christian Association at the University of Pennsylvania (which is the liberal/progressive campus Christian group):

“It points to the need for every generation to find their own meaning of the good news,” she said. “This can shake loose those who want to keep Christianity in a rigid box. If your faith can’t be pushed or be tested, it’s not much of a faith.”

Now, in fairness to Pr. Dale, this quote may well have been taken out of context, but couldn’t she have made some effort to say something like “It points to the need of every generation to substitute its own spurious ‘revelation’ for the mercy and love of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God”? Nah, that’d probably be asking too much.

Good article in The American Conservative by Christopher Layne, a professor of international relations at Texas A&M, on Iran. He argues that, one, it’s far from clear how close Iran is to having nukes, two, it’s far from clear that we could actually prevent them from getting them with airstrikes, three, any kind of military engagement with Iran is likely to be very costly to the U.S. and, finally, undesirable though it may be, we can live with a nuclear Iran because even “rogue” states are not immune to the “logic of deterrence.”

The administration’s strategy, he says, has illicitly conflated the threat from terrorist groups, who are very hard to deter, and the threat from rogue states. Even a regime that doesn’t care about it’s own people’s well-being still cares about its own survivial. He makes an instructive comparison with Mao’s China on this score:

The very notion that undeterrable rogue states exist is the second questionable assumption on which the administration’s strategy is based. In an important article in the Winter 2004/2005 issue of International Security, Francis Gavin points out that the post-9/11 era is not the only time that American policymakers have believed that the U.S. faced a lethal threat from a rogue state. During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the People’s Republic of China was perceived by Washington in very much the same way as the U.S. perceived Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or, currently, Iran. Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party imposed harsh repression and killed millions of Chinese citizens, and Beijing—which had entered the Korean War in 1950, menaced Taiwan, gone to war with India in 1962, and seemingly was poised to intervene in Vietnam—was viewed as an aggressor. For Washington, Mao’s China was the epitome of a rogue state, and during the Johnson administration, the United States seriously considered launching a preventive war to destroy China’s embryonic nuclear program.

In many ways, Mao was seen by U.S. policymakers as the Saddam Hussein of his time. Like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made outrageous comments denying the Holocaust and threatening Israel’s destruction, Mao also indulged in irresponsible rhetoric, even cavalierly embracing the possibility of nuclear war. “If the worse came to worst and half of mankind died,” Mao said, “the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” Once China became a nuclear power, however, where nuclear weapons were concerned both its rhetoric and its policy quickly became circumspect. In fact, a mere five years after the Johnson administration pondered the possibility of striking China preventively, the U.S. and China were engaged in secret negotiations that, in 1972, culminated in President Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing and Sino-American co-operation to contain the Soviet Union.

The U.S. experience with China illustrates an important point: the reasons states acquire nuclear weapons are primarily to gain security and, secondarily, to enhance their prestige. This certainly was true of China, which believed its security was threatened by the United States and by the Soviet Union. It was also true of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and is true of Iran. As Gavin writes, “In some ways, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ early analysis of China mirrors the Bush administration’s public portrayal of Iraq in the lead-up to the war. Insofar as Iraq was surrounded by potential nuclear adversaries (Iran and Israel) and threatened by regime change by the most powerful country in the world, Saddam Hussein’s desire to develop nuclear weapons may be seen as understandable.” The same can be said for Iran, which is ringed by U.S. conventional forces in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq and in the Persian Gulf, and which is a stated target of the Bush administration’s policy of regime change and democratization. Tehran may be paranoid, but in the United States and Israel, it has real enemies. It is Iran’s fear for its security that drives its quest to obtain nuclear weapons.

Layne also points out that, administration rhetoric about Iranian masses yearning to breathe free notwithstanding, nothing could be more calculated to fan the flames of anti-American nationalism in Iran than U.S. military intervention. The Iranians have neither forgotten nor forgiven the long history of U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that pretty much all these arguments would’ve applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq prior to the war, if not more so considering that Hussein’s regime was much further from acquiring nuclear capacity than Iran currently is by all accounts.

First, Jacob Weisberg argues that we don’t really need a major overhaul of immigration policy, and that the proposals currently on the table will likely make things worse.

Second, Fareed Zakaria says that a permanent class of guest-workers without a path to citizenship is a bad idea, and un-American to boot.

Radley Balko writes at Slate on the troubling increase in the use of “no-knock” raids by police:

In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that at least in principle, the Fourth Amendment requires police to knock and announce themselves before entering a private home. In doing so, the court acknowledged the centuries-old “Castle Doctrine” from English common law, which states that a man has the right to defend his home and his family from intruders. The announcement requirement gives an innocent suspect the opportunity to persuade the police that they’ve targeted the wrong residence before having his home invaded. It also protects police from being targeted by innocent homeowners who have mistaken them for criminal intruders and those same homeowners from the burden of determining if the armed intruders in their home are police or criminals.

But Wilson didn’t eliminate no-knocks. In the same decision, the court recognized three broad exceptions, called “exigent circumstances,” to the announcement requirement. The most pertinent of these state that if police believe announcing themselves before entering would present a threat to officer safety, or if they believe a suspect is particularly likely to destroy evidence, they may enter a home without first announcing their presence.

A legal no-knock raid, then, can happen in one of two ways. Police can make the case for exigent circumstances to a judge, who then issues a no-knock warrant; or police can determine at the scene that the exigent circumstances exist and make the call for a no-knock raid on the spot. In the latter case, courts will determine after the fact if the raid was legal.

In the real world, the exigent-circumstances exceptions have been so broadly interpreted since Wilson, they’ve overwhelmed the rule. No-knock raids have been justified on the flimsiest of reasons, including that the suspect was a licensed, registered gun owner (NRA, take note!), or that the mere presence of indoor plumbing could be enough to trigger the “destruction of evidence” exception.

In fact, in many places the announcement requirement is now treated more like an antiquated ritual than compliance with a suspect’s constitutional rights. In 1999, for example, the assistant police chief of El Monte, Calif., explained his department’s preferred procedure to the Los Angeles Times: “We do bang on the door and make an announcement—’It’s the police’—but it kind of runs together. If you’re sitting on the couch, it would be difficult to get to the door before they knock it down.”

That comment came in a story about a mistaken raid in which Mario Paz, an innocent man, was shot dead by a raiding SWAT team when he mistook them for criminal intruders and reached for a gun to defend himself.

Read more…