Speedkill

I’ll quote from Jonathan Chait’s article that ran in the Missoulian this morning:

WE ARE LIVING in an age of moral authority. It’s not the strength of the argument that matters, it’s the strength of the arguer. Nobody has exploited this more effectively than Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen Iraq war soldier, who took command of the national agenda by camping outside President Bush’s ranch and demanding to meet with him.

Everybody, of course, ought to feel horrible for Sheehan, and to honor her son’s bravery. But Sheehan’s supporters don’t just want us to sympathize with her. They believe that her loss gives her views on the Iraq war more sway than the views of the rest of us. As Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.”

…

So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry’s candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on “chicken hawk” conservatives who support the war but never served in the military. A recent story in the antiwar magazine Nation attacked my New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, a supporter of the Iraq war, for having “no national security experience,” as if Nation editors routinely served in the Marine Corps.

The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing.

The whole column is good, but you’ll need to register to read it.

I just finished up Robert Pape’s new book, Dying to Win. It’s garnered some attention due to the fact that Pape has amassed a database of every suicide attack since 1980, containing all sorts of information on the individuals involved. The book is absolutely excellent; so much so that I’m going to outline the book and summarize some of Pape’s arguments.

The book is divided into three main sections: strategic logic, social logic, and individual logic. Essentially, that means why suicide terrorism is used, what kind of social conditions it arises from, and what kind of people engage in it, respectively.

The first section is probably the least contrarian (for lack of a better word). He notes that suicide terrorism is more deadly than other forms of terrorism and that it’s normally directed toward democracies. Not too surprising. Democracies are perceived as soft and vulnerable to coercion and are targeted with the most destructive tactic. Pape argues that suicide terrorism is a strategic phenomenon, rather than irrational religious fanaticism or hatred, proposing these three reasons:

1. Timing. Nearly all suicide attacks occur in organized, coherent campaigns, not as isolated or randomly timed incidents.
2. Nationalist goals. Suicide terrorist campaigns are directed at gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland, and specifically at ejecting foreign forces from that territory.
3. Target selection. All suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorists’ point of view. Nationalist movements that face non-democratic opponents have not resorted to suicide attack as a means of coercion. (pg. 39)

For the first reason, Pape tells us that 95% of suicide attacks since 1980 have been part of an organized campaign. For the second reason, he notes that every suicide campaign is associated with a foreign occupation of some sort. Some might quibble with his assertion that the U.S. is occupying the Arabian Peninsula, but his definition of occupation is pretty broad, allowing partly for the perception of occupation. Pape discusses a couple of specific campaigns (Hamas and al Qaeda) and finds that suicide terrorism there is associated with a deepening of occupations, such as Israeli settlers and increases in troop numbers during the Gulf War. Pape also makes the claim that suicide terrorism has brought plenty of concessions (or at least apparent concessions) from target states, further strengthening the idea that suicide terrorism is used because it works.

The next section deals with what kind of social conditions give rise to suicide terrorism. Pape’s claim is that occupation by a democracy with a different religion, preceded by a national rebellion that fails to gain concessions gives rise to suicide terrorism. Religious difference is important because it is a crucial factor in national identity and makes the occupier an easy target for demonization and the legitimization of martyrdom operations. As per the case Pape made in the last section, suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic and shouldn’t be used (due to cultural taboos on suicide and the killing of innocents) except as a last resort. Pape’s analysis shows that suicide campaigns generally conform to his theory. The next chapter in this section deals with al Qaeda specifically. First, it compares the effects of American military presence compared to Islamic fundamentalism as the cause of al Qaeda’s terrorism. Pape does this by dividing Islamic fundamentalism. Instead of taking it as a monolithic ideology, he looks at bin Laden’s specific form of fundamentalism, Salafism. Pape looks at the level of Salafi-influence in countries in the Middle East and compares that with American troop levels. First off, he finds that there’s no statistically significant relationship between Salafism and suicide terrorism. There is, however, a statistically significant relationship between American military presence and terrorism. Pape also notes that simply being allied with America is linked to the production of suicide terrorists. The final chapter in the section, the longest in the book, deals with several suicide terrorist organizations and compares their campaigns to his theory. An important point he makes is that these organizations typically have broad community support.

The final section looks at reasons for suicide terrorism on an individual level. This is probably the most interesting and contrarian section of the book. Far from being lonely and suicidal outcasts, suicide terrorists appear to be normal people. The first chapter in the section looks at the role of altruism in suicide terrorism. Pape notes that suicide levels in societies that have produced suicide terrorism campaigns are not extraordinarily high, except in the case of Sri Lanka, where the elevated levels are probably due to the occupation. Pape presents as evidence against the idea that suicide terrorists are typical suicidal people the fact that they often work in teams, a rarity for typical “egoistic” suicides. He also shows that the suicide terrorists frequently justify themselves as defending a community. The community typically supports these efforts, as well. In the next chapter Pape’s database becomes even more useful, when he looks at demographic profiles of suicide terrorists. His best data are for the campaign by Hezbollah in Lebanon, where he finds that most terrorists were associated with some sort of socialist or communist movement, followed by Islamist organizations, and then a handful of Christian terrorists (as a side note, the chart of pg. 205 seems to incorrectly label the composition of Lebanese attackers). His overall data are equally surprising. The average age is slightly higher than the conventional wisdom, at 22.7 years old and approaches 30 years old for Chechen terrorists. Pape’s data also shows that most suicide attackers are secular rather than religious. Pape’s data isn’t comprehensive, but concluding all unaccounted for terrorists have religious motives, the breakdown is still just 50-50. Further, the data indicates that most suicide terrorists have some education beyond high school, far out of proportion for the societies they come from. They also tend to be working class, with very few being poor or unemployed. Oddly enough, the religious terrorists are better educated on the whole than the secular terrorists. The final chapter of the looks in-depth at three suicide terrorists and their lives, finding that they don’t really fit the conventional wisdom. I found myself wondering exactly how he differentiated between secular and religious terrorists in this section (I’m guessing just by what group they were in), as he doesn’t explain it at all, but this is a minor criticism.

Finally, Pape outlines his solution for anti-American suicide terrorism. Pape looks at some opinion polls that make clear the Arab world dislikes us for our foreign policies and not our other values in the service of refuting David Frum and Richard Perle’s explanation for anti-American terrorism. Pape argues that democratizing the Middle East is not the correct way to combat anti-American terrorism, as the increase in foreign troops is likely to increase suicide attacks against us. Pape basically recommends withdrawing troops from the Arabian peninsula, though he gives a fairly nuanced discussion of the problems with that. He also recommends strengthening homeland security, suggesting a fence for the Mexican border as a possibility. All in all, there’s not much that’s new here. His solution is very close to what some on the Left have suggested previously.

I really can’t recommend the book enough. It’s a quick and easy read (250 pages excluding back matter) on a very important subject.

For more information, Kevin Drum has a post with links to an interview with American Conservative and a review by Michael Scheuer.

Now that I’m home, I get to read the Missoulian. The Missoulian doesn’t seem to publish the kind of crazy or bizarre letters the Chronicle does, so it’s normally pretty dull. I wanted to post these a couple days ago, but the letters weren’t online when I was looking:

If someone leads, the world will follow

A blueprint to world peace:

…

- Absolve the national debt and replace an economic system based primarily on the military/industrial complex with a social/agra-industrial economic system that addresses hunger, poverty, disease, education, technology, science and the environment.

- Apply the world’s military resources to serve a presently indentured civilization transforming a belligerent, chaotic world into societies free from fear, want and injustice. And through pacification, a world consigned to harmony, understanding and tolerance.

- Pardon personal debt so all of humanity can enjoy and contribute to the benefits provided in peace.

Maybe we should give everyone a lollipop and a pat on the back while we’re at it? Also, isn’t that a misuse of the term “military/industrial complex”?

And of course, the ever popular anti-evolution letter:

Confusion surrounds non-believers

In the May 6 Missoulian, there appeared yet another pro-evolution, anti-creationism letter.

I must admit confusion.

Although it is the moral obligation of a Christian to make others aware of the Lord God and Jesus Christ, I am fairly certain that Charles Darwin never asked his faithful to go out and preach his theory.

So what doubt, I wonder, impels the believer in evolutionism to continuously espouse his conviction that there is no God, no supernatural, no realm of the miraculous, no ground for faith?

Yes, what doubt is it with which they wrestle, all those who demand we worship at the altar of nothingness?

Common strawman plus slight twist on the “evolution is a religion” talking point….slightly above average, I think.

Touchy subject, I suppose. I was watching Sam Harris on BookTV this Sunday. His book, The End of Faith, which I was planning on reading at one point, is fairly controversial. Essentially, he argues that Islam is the root of our problem with terrorism. Not very novel, but he’s pretty convincing, and I like the overall critique of faith.

Is he right, though? It seems like the causes of Islamic terrorism are pretty complex. Harris said as much, if I remember correctly, in the BookTV talk. I haven’t read his book, so I don’t know his entire argument, but I’m going to try to sketch out the role I think Islam plays in this.
Read more…

Somebody in the Chronicle wrote:

It takes an extraordinary person to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, and there’s an extraordinary gal coming to Bozeman who I want to share with our community. Kathy Kelly has become known the world over for her dedication to creating peaceful solutions to U.S. armed interventions.

Three times she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been arrested more than 60 times and fined many thousands of dollars (which she refuses to pay) for ferrying medicine to Iraq in defiance of U.S. sanctions. Two years ago Kathy chose to stay with civilian families in Baghdad during our intense “shock and awe” bombing of the city.

Except, it really doesn’t take much to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Consider some 2004 nominees I doubt Kelly would like:

Other nominees are varied and include: … former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler; … former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic; …

Not to mention Bush and Blair, which I’m fairly sure Kelly would disagree with as well.

While it’s not easy to be nominated, it’s not that extraordinary. Nominators include anyone in government or any foreign policy institute, among others. I don’t know that much about Kelly, but she appears to be something of a typical pacifist activist, the kind I simultaneously dislike and sympathesize with, though with maybe a slightly higher profile than many of them. If she was going to be in Bozeman after I get done with Spring break, I would consider going to a speech, but she doesn’t seem to be that interesting.

Missile Defense System Fails Another Test

WASHINGTON – A test of the national ballistic missile defense system failed Monday when an interceptor missile didn’t get out of its silo, the second failure in as many months.

The failed test came less than a week after North Korea (news – web sites) declared it had nuclear weapons, giving new attention to a possible threat from that nation.

An initial test evaluation blamed equipment at a Pacific island site rather than the interceptor itself. If that assessment bears out, it would come as a relief to defense officials because it would mean no new problems had been discovered with the missile.

Well then. I’m shocked, shocked that it failed again.

From a letter in today’s Chronicle:

I read with interest and a smile on my face the letter by Mr. Don McLarty (“Oppose Gonzales,” Jan 8 ). He led a diatribe against the appointment of Mr. Gonzalez to the post of U.S. attorney general. His reasons for his opposition centered upon his misunderstanding of the Geneva Convention on Warfare, applicable U.S. laws and various reasons for a certain memo’s having been generated by Mr. Gonzales as White House legal counsel.

First, it is quite obvious that Mr. McLarty has never read even the abstract of the Geneva Convention, much less the full document. Had he, he would have learned that it applies only to uniformed combatants. There is very little indicated in the convention concerning those not dressed in acceptable uniforms, except that they can be treated as spies or saboteurs and dealt with accordingly.

Apparently, this guy hasn’t ever read the document either. While only uniformed combatants may be classified as POWs, there are other classifications. The letter this guy is referring to did not say anything about POWs. From an ICRC brief, found through Media Matters:

A further argument for the application of GC IV to “unlawful combatants” can be drawn from Article 45 (3) of PI. The provision reads as follows :

“Any person who has taken part in hostilities, who is not entitled to prisoner-of-war status and who does not benefit from more favourable treatment in accordance with the Fourth Convention shall have the right at all times to the protection of Article 75 of this Protocol. In occupied territory, any such person, unless he is held as a spy, shall also be entitled, notwithstanding Article 5 of the Fourth Convention, to his rights of communication under that Convention.”

This provision of Additional Protocol I, which was adopted by consensus, 16 contains an implicit confirmation of our interpretation of GC IV that “unlawful combatants” are protected persons under GC IV if they fulfil the above-mentioned nationality criteria. By stating in Article 45 (3) of PI that “any person who has taken part in hostilities, who is not entitled to prisonerofwar status and who does not benefit from more favourable treatment in accordance with the Fourth Convention shall have the right at all times to the protection of Article 75 of this Protocol”, it recognizes that GC IV is in fact applicable to some categories of unlawful combatants — otherwise the formulation “who does not benefit from more favourable treatment in accordance with the Fourth Convention” would be meaningless. The second sentence of that paragraph (“In occupied territory, any such person, unless he is held as a spy, shall also be entitled, notwithstanding Article 5 of the Fourth Convention, to his rights of communication under that Convention”) implicitly recognizes that especially unlawful combatants in occupied territory (i.e. protected persons participating directly in hostilities in occupied territory without being entitled to POW status) are protected by GC IV. If unlawful combatants in occupied territories were not covered by GC IV, there would be no reason to restrict the scope of its Article 5.

That’s one reason, at least. There’s really no way to quote a meaningful section of their argument, so you can read it yourself.

As for what “protected person” implies for protections (Part III, Article 27):

Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

Without prejudice to the provisions relating to their state of health, age and sex, all protected persons shall be treated with the same consideration by the Party to the conflict in whose power they are, without any adverse distinction based, in particular, on race, religion or political opinion.

However, the Parties to the conflict may take such measures of control and security in regard to protected persons as may be necessary as a result of the war.

So, yeah. It turns out to be a very ironic letter.

Is the Oil for Food scandal a repeat of the Clinton-era “scandals?” Maybe so. The Nation has a good article on the subject. They have another earlier article, which is better for explaining why it’s not much of a scandal. Quoting from that:

Rarely mentioned, either at the hearings or in the press coverage, was the fundamental distinction between the policies established by the Secretariat and the UN agencies and those that result from decisions of particular member states within the highly politicized Security Council. For example, the CIA report says that the bulk of the illicit transactions were “government to government agreements” between Iraq and a few other countries, for trade outside the OFF program. According to the report, they resulted in income to Iraq of $7.5 billion.

The largest of these arrangements was with Jordan–revenue from which totaled about $4.5 billion. This trade arrangement was the single largest source of Iraqi income outside the OFF program. From 1990 until the OFF program began in late 1996, “Jordan was the key to Iraq’s financial survival,” according to the report. Why didn’t “the UN” do something about it? Because the Security Council–where the United States was by far the single most influential member–decided in May 1991 that no action would be taken to interfere in Iraq’s trade with Jordan, America’s closest ally in the Arab world.

Likewise, the maritime smuggling that took place under the nose of “the UN” in fact took place under the nose of something called the Multinational Interception Force, a group of member nations that responded to the general invitation of the Security Council for nations to interdict Iraqi smuggling. The “UN” Multinational Interception Force turns out to have consisted almost entirely of the US Navy. The commander of the MIF was at every point, from 1991 to 2003, a rear admiral or vice admiral from the US Fifth Fleet. The United States contributed the overwhelming majority of ships–hundreds in fact. Britain provided the deputy commander and some naval forces and other countries contributed a few ships. The UN itself provided no forces or commanders. “The UN” failure to interdict Saddam’s tankers of illicit oil turns out, in nearly every regard, to have been a US naval operation.

The much-vaunted kickbacks on import contracts also turn out to be not quite as advertised. Saddam, the claim goes, inflated the price of import contracts by 5 to 10 percent, then received the difference in cash from the contractors. Thousands of contracts, stretching over years, were involved; how could the UN have been so incompetent as not to notice? In fact, prices inflated by only 5 or 10 percent were difficult to detect precisely because the amounts were so small and often within the normal range of market prices. But when pricing irregularities were large enough that they might have indicated kickbacks, the UN staff did notice. On more than seventy occasions, the staff brought these to the attention of the 661 Committee, the Security Council body charged with implementing the sanctions. On no occasion did the United States block or delay the contracts to prevent the kickbacks from occurring. Although the United States, citing security concerns, blocked billions of dollars of humanitarian contracts–$5 billion were on hold as of July 2002–it never took action to stop kickbacks, even when they were obvious and well documented.

I’m at home, so I get to read the Missoulian daily. That means I come across Mona Charen columns. Today’s was pretty interesting.

America the greedy and cruel

The school movie. What a glorious thing it was to a student eager to avoid real work. The lights were dimmed, and nothing was expected from us except to gaze at a screen. (Later, we understood that lazy teachers liked movies for the same reason.)

But at least the films we saw conveyed good information, unlike so much of the leftist drivel that is marketed to our kids today. I remember in particular the films about American aid to the Third World. I recall those huge white sacks of grain with “gift of the USA” printed on the sides. And the faces of the starving children (Biafra was the starvation current when I was in elementary school), as their bowls were filled with nutritious food. You wondered whether it was too late for those hollow-cheeked, haunted faces.

Silly me. I was proud of the United States for trying to help those people in distant lands. I did not have the benefit of the tendentious, anti-American claptrap that is routinely served up in American schools today.

Hmm, me neither. We watched Saving Private Ryan. Damn those anti-American bastards.

Paging through The New York Times yesterday, I came upon just the same sort of spin in a news story about world food aid. “U.S. Cutting Food Aid That Is Aimed at Self-Sufficiency” announced the headline. Reading on, one learns that, “In one of the first signs of the effects of the ever tightening federal budget, in the past two months the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty.” Nowhere in this page 3 article does the New York Times reporter Elizabeth Becker place these cutbacks in context.

The Times does not tell readers that the United States is the world’s largest food aid donor by far. In 2004, the United States provided $826,469,172 — almost a billion dollars — to the United Nations World Food Program. The next largest donor, the European Union, contributed $187,102,068. This, despite the fact that the European Union has a total population of 453 million, compared with the USA’s 281 million, and a gross domestic product that is larger than that of the United States.

Japan was third on the list, giving $126,906,097, and the United Kingdom was fourth, with donations totaling $109,247,050. Iran gave $40,000. The Saudi Kingdom gave $3,345,325 — about the cost of one trip to Paris for the Crown Prince. And Kuwait, the OPEC fund and the Russian Federation gave nothing.

I suppose the reporter could have put it in the context that tax cuts for the rich are more important than food for starving children. I don’t think Charen would have liked that, though. In any case, one point made in the article is that we promised the agencies the aid, then changed our mind:

“We have between five and seven million people who have been affected by these cuts,” said Lisa Kuennen, a food aid expert at Catholic Relief Services. “We had approval for all of these programs, often a year in advance. We hired staff, signed agreements with governments and with local partners, and now we have had to delay everything.”

Ms. Kuennen said Catholic Relief Services had to cut back programs in Indonesia, Malawi and Madagascar, among other countries.

Officials of several charities, some Republican members of Congress and some administration officials say the food aid budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 was at least $600 million less than what charities and aid agencies would need to carry out current programs.

Also, we aren’t talking about the UN WFP, where Charen’s statistics are from. I think that gives me enough of an excuse to use overall economic aid statistics (slightly older ones, though I doubt they’ve changed much). The U.S. is 20th in economic aid per capita and 21st per dollar of GDP (second in absolute dollars, however). We give 15% of what France gives per person.

In any case, I think we can all agree that cutting food aid is not good. Charen would like to obscure that, apparently, but it’s clearly something we would rather avoid.

Peter Beinart has an article in TNR today that’s gotten some attention around the blogosphere. It’s called A Fighting Faith (available to everyone, btw) about liberalism and Islamist totalitarianism. Pretty interesting overall, I’ll give my opinions on the subject in a second, first I wanted to link to some interesting comments on it:

Kevin Drum
Tom Tomorrow

I wanted to find some farther left responses, but I can’t find any in the normal places I look (Tomorrow is the closest, though he misses the point of what he is objecting to). Right-wing responses are not particularly interesting to me. Oh well.

Anyway, I think the article is generally pretty good. I used to be pretty dovish, disagreeing with the war in Afghanistan and being a fan of Chomsky and all. Drum’s critique makes a good point that incidents involving Islamist terrorism haven’t risen to what liberals saw before the Cold War. Drum takes this as meaning liberals get something of a pass on the problem Beinhart writes about. I would ask if it means something more like Islamist totalitarianism isn’t as big a threat as communism was to the world in the 40s and that it should be treated accordingly. Obviously it’s bad and we should combat it. Should we really treat the same as early Cold War communism, though? I don’t know. Democrats could be a lot better at articulating a foreign policy, of course, but how hawkish should it really be?

In any case, this post is essentially me rambling on without any kind of answers, because I lack a real coherent vision of what a liberal foreign policy should look like. I should get on that.