Reflections of the End of the Iraq War

The US war in Iraq is now officially over. It will go down in history as the greatest US foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War. In my lifetime I witnessed two lengthy and illegal wars of choice that the US blundered into. Both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars ended in ignominy and disaster, both for the US and for the countries that we went to war to "save".

Along with millions of other Americans, mainly on the political left, I opposed these wars. But the people who thought like me were ignored, vilified, called unpatriotic, and our concerns about the immorality and folly of these conflicts were discounted. On the other hand, those who ordered our young men and women into unnecessary combat were lionized and were never punished for their crimes, war crimes, in particular, the crime of aggression. In neither case were the main objectives for going to war accomplished. We failed miserably in both cases and these failures were bought at great cost in terms of treasure and lives. 

The goal of the Vietnam war was to stop this country from becoming a socialist state and preventing a "domino effect" leading other Southeast Asian nations to fall into the Communist column. By the end of this stupid war, 58,000 Americans and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese died. The conflict set up the conditions for a genocide in neighboring Cambodia in which another 1.7 million Cambodians died. In the end, the People's Socialist Republic of Vietnam won the war, but like its traditional enemy and neighbor to the north, the People's Republic of China, it is now a socialist state in name only. Vietnam is "open for business" and is in no way a threat to global capitalism. The irony is that this probably would have happened anyway and the war that was fought to prevent Vietnam from going communist merely delayed the transition of that nation to a market economy. Had the US done nothing instead of waging a stupid costly war, we probably would have ended up with the same result, a Vietnam that is hospitable to US businesses.

In the case of Iraq the Bush administration invaded this country in order to rid it of weapons of mass destruction (which did not exist) which it was feared might fall into the hands of terrorists groups such as Al Qaeda (which had no ties with the Iraqi government). The real underlying motive for this war was to surround and contain Iran by establishing a set of permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and securing their vast oil reserves for exploitation by US and British companies such as Exxon and BP. The Bush-Cheney cabal thought we needed more US military bases in the region to guard "our oil", particularly after Saudi Arabia dis-invited us because of concerns raised by Osama bin Laden (among others) about having infidel soldiers stationed on holy land.

But in the end none of these objectives were achieved. The new Shiite-led Iraqi government has stronger ties to Iran that the Sunni-led regime of Saddam Hussein ever did or would have had. This government has also decided that there will be no permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and has dis-invited us from maintaining any military presence in their country. They did this mainly because of the US insistence that our soldiers be immune from Iraqi law. The US will not allow other countries punish its citizens for war crimes, such as occurred in Haditha in 2005 and Nisour Square in 2007, and we do not punish them either. American insistence on impunity is the reason why American troops are now leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, the oil fields are still not producing up to their potential and the leases for future production have been sold off to China, Malaysia, Russia and other countries that opposed the US-led war in the first place. It is true that some oil leases have been sold to US and British companies, but who would suggest that this "benefit" was worth the price paid in lives and treasure. If the costs of this war, estimated at over 1 trillion dollars, were factored into the price of gasoline at the pump when we fill up our SUVs, we Americans would appreciate the real cost of our dependence on oil.

Some will point out that we did succeed in toppling Saddam's murderous regime and killing both him and his odious sons. One must, however, wonder whether this would not have happened in due course anyway without US and British meddling. The Arab spring revolutions that took the region by storm in 2011 swept away murderous authoritarian dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Other middle eastern family dictatorships, such as the Assad regime in Syria, are now under siege from their own people. Historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but isn't it hard to believe that had the US not invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam, the Iraqi people themselves would not have risen up against him by 2011?  The irony in this case is that it might well have been the case that the Iraqi's themselves would have won their freedom from an oppressive dictator had we not decided to do the job for them.

Iraq is now "democratic", but the US is now far weaker, militarily, politically, economically, and morally, than it was before this war was launched. We Americans are victims of self-inflicted wounds.

China and other nations often accuse the US of improperly meddling in other countries' internal affairs. This criticism is correct as it concerns America's record of waging foolish wars of choice by invading other nations to save them from some threat, real or imagined. Political leaders in the United States need to think long and hard about these lessons of history before launching more such foolish wars. 

But curbing US military adventurism is not at all the same thing as arguing for US isolationism. The US must remain engaged in international affairs, but can do far more than it does currently to reshape the world to suit its interests and its values by dramatically increasing its humanitarian and development assistance, budget priorities that have been beggared by the gargantuan cost of maintaining our military dominance. We need to dramatically reduce the size of our bloated and wasteful military establishment. When people talk about shrinking the size of government to "starve the beast" I tend to agree with them if by the "beast" one means the Pentagon and the military industrial complex -- to this is one of the branches of government that does need to be starved and shrunken down to size.

But the question is, as it always has been, not whether our government is "too big" or "too small", but whether it is a good government. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, I do not think our government has been all that good in either its foreign or domestic policies. To say this is not to be unpatriotic -- it is merely stating a truth that is obvious to all unbiased observers. This is why I always laugh to myself when people talk about exporting democracy to other nations. If our system of government is so great why are Congress's approval ratings so low?

The people in this country who think like me have been saying these things for more than fifty years. I have thought this way since I was twelve, in 1961. I am now 62 and have not changed my mind. Indeed the events of history I have witnessed in my lifetime have only strengthened my conviction and my willingness to speak my mind. Perhaps now, at the end of yet another stupid, immoral, and wasteful US military adventure, more people in this country will begin to listen and take action.  No more (stupid) wars. 

Occupy TCNJ Talk

Last February we all viewed with amazement the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which quickly spread to other Middle Eastern nations such as Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The protesters were united by their common desire for human rights and democracy, putting an end to authoritarian dictatorships that had held them down for decades, and in the hope that their children might enjoy a better future. Another important theme of these protests was economic inequality, unemployment, and the lack of hope on the part of the young that economic conditions would enable them to prosper. The Arab spring represented the awakening of a social movement of citizens who were tired of waiting for these political, social, and economic conditions to change -- they decided to take matters into their own hands and force them to change.

Now we see popular protests taking place here in America and around the world. These protests are also led by young people and are also a response to injustice and inequality.  The American autumn is an awakening of a populist movement which is tired of waiting  for a corrupt and dysfunctional political system to address the real problems of this country: unemployment and underemployment, the debt burdens of families and students, the lack of real opportunity for many, and the concentration of wealth and political power among the 1% -- the rich men who rule the world -- the plutocrats who have taken control of the Republic  and have deployed the resources of both the State and the Market to entrench their own wealth, privilege, and power.

In a poll conducted the The Hill nearly three-quarters of the respondents said that income inequality is a problem in the United States (The Huffington Post, 31 Oct 2011). The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the income of the top 1% of the income distribution has increased 243% from1979 to 2007, while that of the bottom 90% grew by only 5%. The top 10% of Americans control two-thirds of the wealth, and the richest 400 Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of households, while at the same time 46 million Americans, or 15.1%, live below the poverty line, and half of those who do have jobs earn less than $27,000 a year. The most popular slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, “We are the 99%” is obviously a reference to the fact that most of us are not among the super-rich. But it also expresses the truth that we the people are also the democratic majority. If so, how did we get to this place?

The answer is that in America, and much of the rest of the world, we live in a plutocracy, that is, under a system of domination and exploitation in which the richest also control the levers of political power of the State. This combination and concentration of wealth and political power we see among the plutocratic ruling classes in contemporary societies is not a new phenomenon; has been seen many times before in history.

In Athens of 594 BC, according to Plutarch, "the disparity of fortune between the rich and poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances…..seemed possible but despotic power" (The Life of Solon). Things began to get tense in Athens with the poor preparing to revolt and the rich preparing repress them with force, but in this case, violent class warfare was avoided by the election of Solon who eased the burden on all debtors by devaluing the currency; “he also reduced all personal debts and ended imprisonment for debt, cancelled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest, decreed that the sons of those who had died in Athens wars would be educated at government expense, and he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay twelve times that required by the poor” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History 56). The poor complained that he did not divide the land, and the rich whined that he had confiscated their property, but by redistributing wealth Solon averted a revolution and ushered in a Golden Age.

Whenever the poor begin to complain about wealth and income inequality, the representatives of the rich ruling class accuse them of engaging in “class warfare”. The progressive magazine The Nation recently had a cover proclaiming that Wall Street invented class warfare. But, in fact, class struggle that sometimes erupts into class warfare is much older than that.  If you want to know what class warfare is really like, reflect on how the historian Barbara Tuchman described what happened in 1358 when the Jacqueries revolted against the lords of the Oise Valley: 

At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her. (A Distant Mirror)

Now that is class warfare! Anyone who has ever visited Versailles understands immediately that the main cause of the French Revolution was social injustice and in particular the inequality and wealth and political power.  But the French Jacobin’s Reign of Terror made liberal use of the guillotine, and the revolution ended badly, ushering in the Napoleonic wars. Things went somewhat better on this side of the Atlantic; the American Revolution succeeded in throwing off the yoke of the British aristocracy without lopping off a lot of aristocratic heads.

But, observing the French and American revolutions Karl Marx concluded that their chief results was not greater wealth and income equality, but rather the transfer of wealth and political power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Marx was among those who understood that these cycles in which wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, which produces a backlash of popular discontent and revolution, are recurring features of human history. He made it the basis of his theory of class struggle and saw the competition between classes as the main driver of history. But Marx also thought that the class struggle could be ended by a communist revolution leading to the final victory of the proletariat in which the ownership and control of the means of production would be shared democratically among the workers themselves.

But things have not turned out that way (except perhaps in a few cooperative, employee owned enterprises such as Spain’s Mondragon). Instead, in the late twentieth century capitalism was triumphant.  In the former Soviet Union, and in post Maoist China, capitalism destroyed communism. In America, and much of the rest of the world, capitalism is now destroying democracy. This is why we are now experiencing another cycle in which wealth and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Unlike Marx, I do not believe that these historical cycles of concentration and redistribution of wealth and political power can be eliminated entirely. But I do think they can be managed more rationally and peacefully than in the past. I see these cyclic oscillations in terms of systems theory as features of a regulatory process that involves both positive and negative feedback loops. Wealth and power in society tends to get concentrated in the hands of a few because power can be self-reinforcing; the wealthier and more powerful some people become the more they are able to use these advantages to preserve and enhance their own power and privilege. Small and temporary differences in power can thus be amplified over time into large and permanent ones.

We have understood for a long time now that in order to compensate for this tendency it is necessary for human societies to institute a compensatory negative feedback loop that works to equalize power and wealth in society. In the modern era we learned to do this through democratic institutions that provide for equal basic rights and equality of opportunity, as well as through programs and agencies that provide all citizens a degree of economic security. We have these institutions not only because of the requirements of justice and fairness, although that is one important reason why they exist, but also because we know that greater economic and political equality is conducive to social peace and economic prosperity.  

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Rutgers University economic historian James Livingston presented evidence that shows that private investment is not in fact the thing that drives economic growth; rather it is consumer spending and government spending (“It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid” October 25, 2011). Between 1900 and 2000 real domestic product per capita grew more than 600%, but during that same period, net business investment decreased by 70%. Contrary to the “common sense” peddled by conservative economists and most Republicans, corporate profits are not the real source of prosperity. The argument that we should cut corporate taxes to jumpstart economic growth is bull-pucky; it is a lie used by the plutocrats and their apologists to justify the transfer of even more wealth from the poor and the middle classes into their own pockets. As a result of these kinds of lies and deception, the USA now ranks 27^th among OECD countries in measures of basic social justice, just ahead of Chile, Mexico, and Turkey (Social Justice in the OECD: How Do Member States Compare? Bertelsmann Siftung, 2011).

So the question we face is how will this crisis of social injustice and economic inequality be resolved? Will we elect wise leaders, who like modern Solons will broker some kind of moderate plan of wealth redistribution which dilutes the power and privilege of our plutocrats, or will the rich men who rule the country (and the world) use the police and military power of the State to repress popular discontent?

We saw these two approaches in the responses to the Arab spring uprisings earlier this year. Given what happened to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who is now on trial, and also the fate of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who is now resting in an unmarked grave, it looks like Tunisia's Ben-Ali was the smart one who got out while the getting was good. On the other hand, in Syria President Assad is deploying his military and secret police to kill protesters by the thousands and is getting away with it.  Repression of popular dissent does work, but only for a while. Once it is used on a large scale, the prospects for violent civil war or revolution increase markedly, and history suggests that popular forces are usually ultimately victorious, but often at an enormous cost in human death and suffering.

Here in America we are already witnessing the potential for the Occupy Protests to be violently repressed by the police, as recently happened in Oakland California, Denver Colorado, Atlanta Georgia and elsewhere. On the other hand, in many cities, the local officials are following a more moderate and tolerant course of action, and in Nashville the ACLU has successfully defended the first amendment rights of the protesters and forced the city council to rescind a curfew law designed to remove the Occupy Nashville protest camp.

Because of our first amendment freedoms, there is some reason for hope that here in America that the current crisis of inequality and social injustice will be resolved peacefully through political compromise and equitable wealth redistribution that will reduce the current vast inequalities of wealth and power that we now have in this country. But I think that the only realistic hope for will be if we all, and especially young people like yourselves, occupy the voting booth. Don't let your friends vote for fools and demagogues. Don't buy into the economic dogmas and lies that many politicians are peddling.  Don't let the "money power" in American politics overwhelm the "people power." Let your elected representatives know what you think, and why you are angry.

But, let me say, that I am really quite worried that the deep corruption and dysfunction of the American political system will prevent any meaningful compromise solution from emerging. Our political system is deeply corrupted by the money power of the plutocrats, and the electoral system is rigged in their favor. But, the longer we go on not addressing the real problems affecting our nation, the more the popular pressure for radical change will build.  We the people are tired of waiting for Republicans and Democrats to get their acts together and govern this country responsibly. Many of us no longer believe that President Obama is the agent of change some people were hoping he would be. We no longer trust the Supreme Court to decide justly when so often they side with the plutocracy and the corporations against the people.

The 2008 election popularized the slogan "We are the people we are waiting for." Let me suggest that the slogan for the 2012 election should be, "We are the people. We are tired of waiting, and we are the 99%”.

9/11 and Human Rights

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was riding in a NJ Transit train bound for Manhattan when my cell phone rang. It was my wife Sally calling from Baltimore; she was watching CNN while getting dressed for work and saw a breaking news alert saying that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am. She urged me to get off the train and turn around. But I had appointments that morning at the Amnesty International USA offices to interview job candidates.  I told her it was probably just a small plane accident and not to worry. As the train pulled out of Newark NJ station I looked over my right shoulder and saw the black smoke pouring from the crash site into the cerulean September sky and began to wonder whether I had made the right decision.

By the time I made my way from Pennsylvania Station to the AIUSA offices on 26^th street the second plane had crashed into the South Tower and everyone knew that this was no accident. The people who made it into the office were huddled around television sets or staring out of the south-facing windows through which the burning towers were clearly visible. I was standing next to Curt Goering, Deputy Executive Director of AIUSA, looking out of his office window when the South Tower began to collapse in an enormous cloud of dust and smoke. At that moment I had a visceral sensation in the pit of my stomach; I realized that I was witnessing an event in which thousands of people were perishing. These eye-witness images are seared into my memory with devastating intensity. It is the worst thing I have ever seen.

Several days later, on September 14, 2001 I participated in a hastily arranged faculty panel at The College of New Jersey, where I teach philosophy. I titled my remarks “The Impending Moral Slide” and talked about the risk that American policy makers would respond to this ghastly provocation with a “war on terror” in which important moral and legal boundaries would be transgressed. I observed that officials in the Bush administration were already framing these events as “acts of war” rather than as “crimes against humanity” and were preparing for a military response. I speculated that America might be led to disregard the UN Charter and unilaterally invade other states in order to hunt and kill “terrorists”. I speculated that our government might engage in ethnic profiling of Muslims, detain people without charges and trial, suspend habeas corpus, assassinate suspected terrorists, and engage in torture in order to respond to the threat of further devastating attacks. But I argued, perhaps naively, that a moral slide of this kind was neither necessary nor inevitable, and that it was still possible to prevent the USA from sliding into this moral abyss.

We know now, of course, that my fears were well-founded; the moral slide that I warned about did indeed occur. The list of human rights violations, crimes, and abuses that can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration is long and includes: the “disappearance” of suspected terrorists into CIA-run secret prisons, the denial of the right of habeas corpus of detainees, the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods, otherwise known as torture, such as water-boarding, by military interrogators and the CIA,  the indefinite detention without charges or trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo, the use of Predator drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, the detention of an American citizen, Jose Padilla, without charges or trial for more than three years, the irregular rendition of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria where he was tortured,  the torture of  Khalid Al Masri in a secret CIA prison, ill-treatment and deaths of detainees held at Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq and Baghram airbase in Afghanistan, and the secret and illegal eavesdropping on American citizens by the National Security Agency in violation of the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among others.

Some of these human rights abuses have been the subject of high-level special reports on U.S. human rights violations prepared by the charter-based bodies of the United Nations. The Special Rapporteur for the Mission to the United States of America, Martin Scheinin, identified, "serious situations of incompatibility between international human rights obligations and the counter-terrorism law and practice of the United States. Such situations include the prohibition against torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the right to life; and the right to a fair trial." This report and many others, both by agencies of the United Nations and by private nongovernmental human rights organizations, both in the U.S. and abroad, provides compelling evidence that senior officials in the George W. Bush administration conspired to systematically transgress international human rights obligations, violated US federal law, and authorized the commission of war crimes.

But this is neither the time nor the place to argue this case in detail. Instead I want to share with you the results of a conference I participated in that was organized to address the question whether the moral back-sliding that occurred in the USA produced significant and lasting damage to the overall international human rights regime.  In April 2008 I was invited to participate in a small conference at the University of Pittsburgh that addressed this question. A group of distinguished human rights scholars both from North America and Europe were invited to attend, and to present discussion papers defending a view on this question. Following the conference the participants were invited to revise their discussion papers for inclusion in a book. This is that book: Human Rights in the 21^st Century: Continuity and Change Since 9/11, edited by Michael Goodhart and Anja Mihr. I will begin by describing my own contribution and then discuss those of several of the other authors.

I titled my chapter “Why Human Rights Will Prevail in the War on Terror” and in it I argued that while 9/11 and the reaction to it had indeed produced a spate of serious human rights violations, that the counter-terrorism and security policies of the Bush administration did not delegitimize and undermine the global consensus about human rights, rather, those policies were themselves de-legitimized because they violated human rights. In the end, what was seriously damaged was the credibility of America’s claim to be a champion of human rights.

Allow me to clarify this claim. There is no doubt that the past decade has been characterized by patterns of major human rights violations. The terrorist attacks that took place ten years ago were themselves a crime against humanity – a systematic attack against a civilian population. The epidemic of subsequent suicide bombings in London, Madrid, Bali, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are also major human rights violations which have taken the lives and maimed thousands of innocent people who were treated as pawns in a political game. So it is unquestionably true that terrorism has been a cause of human rights violations in the past decade. And it is also true that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against these kinds of wanton crimes.

However, rather than responding to these violations in a proportionate and lawful fashion, one which affirmed human rights norms and values against those who would flout them, the Bush administration adopted counter-terrorism policies that flew in the face of globally accepted human rights standards. The architects of these policies justified them by the same “ends justify the means” logic that terrorists use. As noted above, there is no question that these policies produced human rights violations and that those officials of the government of the United States who authorized and carried them out have thus far escaped accountability for these crimes. What is questionable, and open to serious debate, is whether this pattern of action and over-reaction has done serious and lasting damage to the human rights paradigm itself, that is, to the global consensus on human rights. 

Although it turned out not to be possible to prevent American policy-makers from back-sliding on their human rights obligations, the “push-back” against Bush’s security and counter-terrorism policies from the global human rights movement, leading international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and domestic civil and human rights NGOs such as the ACLU and Human Rights First, has been vigorous, sustained, and I think largely successful in discrediting, and in some cases, reversing these policies.  The legal academy, both in the United States and elsewhere has responded as well with hundreds of articles in law reviews and the more general scholarly literature condemning the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies.

Self-correction also came from a series of important U.S. Supreme Court decisions which rebuked the Bush administration’s Guantanamo detention policies. In four important cases: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumediene v. Bush (2008) the high court rejected the specious arguments put forward by Bush administration lawyers such as David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Alberto Gonzalez, that the inherent powers of the president as commander in chief of the armed forces places him above the law and justifies the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of the Bill of Rights, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and international human rights and humanitarian laws to which the United States is a party.

In addition, evidence from polling data that supported my contention that by 2008 public opinion both domestically and abroad, had turned sharply against the policies of the Bush administration, but continued to show strong support for human rights. Public opinion polls conducted in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and in the United States itself, demonstrate that global public opinion firmly rejected the policies of the Bush administration regarding human rights.  For instance, a poll conducted by the BBC of more than 27,000 people in 25 countries found that a majority believe that torture is not justified even if it is used to obtain information that could save innocent lives from terrorist attacks (World Public Opinion 2006b).  Other polls found that two in three Americans say the United States should change the way it treats detainees at Guantánamo Bay as prescribed by the UN Commission on Human Rights (World Public Opinion 2008a: ;World Public Opinion 2006a), and that a sizable majority of Americas oppose the rendition of suspects to countries that practice torture and reject the argument that suspected terrorists should not have the same due-process rights as U.S. citizens (World Public Opinion 2007b).  Another poll conducted in 2006 showed that a large majority of Americans believe that the U.S. is viewed more negatively by people in other countries as a result of the policies of the Bush administration (World Public Opinion 2007c).  The same poll found that 73% of Americans were somewhat or very worried that the U.S. might be losing the trust and friendship of people in other countries.  This belief was confirmed by another poll in 2007 that found that in 20 of 26 countries surveyed the most common view is that America is having a mainly negative influence on the world.

These polling data, as well are other more recent studies, show that the norms embodied in the contemporary human rights paradigm have not been weakened or delegitimized by their being violated, even by one of the most powerful nations.  Human rights, particularly civil and political rights, function as a shield against tyranny and the abuse of power by governments.  They are designed to thwart systematic or institutionalized oppression by state authorities, and as such, the fact that they are violated or ignored does not undermine their validity as moral and legal norms.  Instead it highlights and reinforces the perception of why the effective protection of human rights is necessary and why the selective application of human rights standards by states must be firmly resisted, even, and perhaps especially, when the state that violates them is a “superpower.” The contemporary international human rights paradigm has proven more robust and resilient than many people feared; in the confrontation between the policies of the government of the United States of America and the contemporary human rights paradigm, the United States lost and human rights won.

Several of the other contributors shared my perspective. Jack Donnelly (University of Denver) argued that while the “war on terror” certainly harmed human rights, the global state of human rights has not changed fundamentally. At the international level of multilateral institutions there is no evidence of decline. Similarly, data on national human rights practices from Freedom House and the Cingranelli-Richards human rights data project show some evidence of decline, particularly in freedom of expression, but it is “modest, uneven, and incomplete” (18). While bad things did happen because of the “war on terror”, Donnelly contends that “it has not been a human rights disaster.”

Michael Goodhart (University of Pittsburgh) who was one of the organizers of the conference and a co-editor of the book, argued that the back-sliding on human rights that took place during the Bush years represented a “reversion to form” of long-running theme in American politics – American exceptionalism. He traces this theme back to the Puritans who believed that (like the Blues Brothers) the colonists were on a mission from God to create a model “city on a hill” that would be an example to other nations. He calls this view “Providential exceptionalism” and argues that it tends to produce foreign policies characterized by a “messianic engagement” with other countries, particularly when America feels itself threatened. 

According to Goodhart, the period between the fall of the Berlin wall (11/9) and the fall of the twin towers (9/11), was a period of significant expansion and consolidation of the international human rights regime. During this period American policy, both under the first President Bush and President Clinton, became more pragmatic and more supportive of multilateralism. But the shock of the 9/11 attacks produced a sharp reversion to the stance of unilateral messianic engagement that had dominated American foreign policy during most of the Cold War. He noted that, “the war on terror” had a clearly redemptive aim as articulated by the second president Bush, namely to rid the world of “evil doers”. He argued that this has been reversed again to some degree by president Obama, who has stopped using the term “war on terror”, and reverted to a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, but who has at the same time, continued many Bush-era counter-terrorism policies.

The general consensus of the conference, and the overall conclusion of the book, was that the countries of Western Europe and Canada experienced much less back-sliding on human rights than the United States, and that the likely reason for this was the greater degree of the institutionalization and domestication of human rights norms and values into the laws and cultures of these societies. The distinguished Dutch scholar, Peter Baehr (who passed away while this volume was being prepared for print) argued that in light of its perceived vulnerability to Islamic terrorism, the Netherlands did enact several counter-terrorism policies that are on the face of it at odds with human rights. But that it did not go nearly as far down this path as the United States. Similarly, Yan St. Pierre (Universite de Montreal) argued that as a “middle power” Canada can be used as a barometer to measure the impact of attitudes about the trade-offs between national security and human rights. He noted that Canada did enact tougher and more restrictive immigration and border control policies, largely due to criticism from the USA, and also that the government demonstrated “complicity to torture and inaction towards human rights abuses” to an extent that is not in keeping with Canada’s historical stance on human rights. But Canada’s regression was seen as “simply reflecting the stronger policy changes imposed by major powers” (199).

The overall assessment of the editors is that, important exceptions notwithstanding, “the [human rights] regime has survived a major shock intact” (266). Human rights remains the dominant global normative discourse and it has not been displaced by the new discourse on counter-terrorism and national security that 9/11 spawned. States will always be tempted to back-slide on their human rights obligations when threatened, and the experience of the past decade shows that the best way to prevent this from happening is to create “thicker layers of institutionalization” of human rights norms and values within the fabrics of national ethical cultures.  That this process is continuing despite the setbacks of the past decade is the silver-lining behind the dark cloud of fear that obscured our hopes for a more just and peaceful world in the 21^st century following the horrifying attacks of September 11, 2001.

On Musement

Spinoza's distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (nature naturing and nature natured) refers to two aspects of God or Nature considered as the realm of both actuality and potentiality. Robert Corrington (1992) calls this view "ecstatic naturalism":

The most basic division affirmed by ecstatic naturalism is that between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). Nature naturing is here defined as the unlimited realm of potencies. The potencies are not yet possibilities because possibilities can only arise within and among actualities, that is, within the orders of the world (nature natured). Nature natured is the created orders of the world: that is, the manifest orders within which the human process finds itself....The difference between nature naturing and nature natured is the fundamental divide within nature itself. That is, this divide does not separate off nature from some alleged realm of the non- or super-natural but lives out of the heart of a self-transforming nature (209).

The border between these two realms of Nature is always in flux. As potencies become actualities through Nature's self-transfiguring evolutionary process, new orders of being create new potencies that in turn allow for still newer orders of being to emerge. The created world that is manifest to us is the living record of this evolutionary process of Nature's self-transformation and self-actualization.

Human intelligence participates in Nature's self-creative evolutionary process by means of a reasoning process originally described by Peirce as "interpretive musement." Musement is a species of abductive reasoning (reasoning that move from cases to general hypotheses that apply backwards to the case and others like it) in which the,

semiotic world of empirical knowledge becomes open to novel possibilities when musement works in its seemingly random fashion to let complex and different signs interact in ways that could not have been possible for the other more restricted forms of method. Interpretive musement opens up a free semiotic zone in which the self is actually brought into interaction with the depth structures of nature (212).

Musement mines novelty from the realm of potentiality and transmits it into the realm of actuality. Musement is the creative play of the spirit as it strives to make itself manifest. It is the source of the creative processes by which human imagination becomes reality.

Music, amusement, amusing, musical, museum, bemusement....In ancient Greek mythology the Muses are goddesses that inspire the creation of poetry, literature and art. They were regarded as the sources of knowledge that humans pass from one generation to the next. In modern usage, a muse (uncapitalized) is said the be the source of inspiration for artists and writers. Museums are shrines to the muses that inspired artists of the past to create form and meaning out of matter. Libraries are the shrines to the muses that inspired writers to create form and meaning out of ideas.

But there are other forms of human creativity, for instance, science and technology, in which the hidden potentialities of Nature can become manifest. Culture, considered in the largest sense, as all of the knowledge and information that can be passed from one human generation to the next, the sum of all memes, is itself an emergent order of Nature. Culture is natura naturata as it has been expressed through human action. But we also are continually creating culture; it is self-transfiguring like Nature itself. This is perhaps why we place such a high value on novelty in art and literature and science. We are always seeking the ecstatic experience of discovery.

I find these thoughts quite amusing.

Corrington, Robert S. (1992). "Ecstatic naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good". In Randolph Crump Miller (Ed.) Empirical Theology: A Handbook. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, pp. 203-221.

After the Rapture

The beginning of the end of the world did indeed occur yesterday May 21, 2011 just as Harold Camping had predicted. But not a single person was miraculously raised from earth into God's arms. This demonstrates once again that there are no righteous people and that the doctrine of salvation is a myth. Neither faith, nor good works, nor God's grace will save us from ourselves. We are the only ones who can do that. So what are we waiting for? You know we have limited time. None of us is getting out of this place alive. Let's get started.

Hannah Arendt's Intellectual Courage

The trial of Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago this week, on 11 April 1961. There is a huge secondary literature on the trial, of which Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is certainly the most famous contribution.[1] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in a five part series published in the New Yorker magazine in February and March 1963. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1963 by Viking Press which contained several technical corrections, some additional material concerning the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, and a Postscript dealing with the controversy that followed the original publication. I believe that this work should be a “core text”, particularly for courses and curricula dealing with the Holocaust and genocide studies. It’s value lies not only in the historical information it provides. Arendt’s book is important because of the controversy her analysis of Eichmann’s motivation provoked, and the intellectual courage she demonstrated in writing her book and responding to its critics.

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolph Otto Eichmann (1906-1962) played an important role within the Third Reich in the implementation of the Final Solution for the “Jewish Problem”. As the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration he organized and managed the deportation and transport of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria to Eastern European ghettos where many became victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Following the Wansee Conference of 20 January 1942 (which Eichmann attended as recording secretary) he was given the job of Transportation Administrator of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a position in which he arranged shipments of Jews to concentration camps where they were murdered on an industrial scale. At the end of the war he was captured by the U.S. army but escaped under a false identity. He fled to Argentina in 1950 using a fraudulent International Red Cross passport and worked at various jobs under the name Ricardo Klement. He was living in Buenos Aires with his wife and their four sons in 1960 when he was captured by Mossad agents and taken to stand trial in an Israeli court on fifteen criminal charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging.

As Arendt attended much of his 1961 trial, read transcripts, and listened to the testimony unfold, she came to be focused on the question of the character of Eichmann’s conscience (or apparent lack thereof). How could a “good German” who was raised on the Ten Commandment (Thou shalt not murder) send thousands of innocent people to their deaths? If Eichmann was indeed “evil” in what did his evil consist?

Arendt’s answer to this question was shocking: she argued that Eichmann was an “ordinary man” whose head was swimming with empty clichés that he called “winged words”. He was a family man and a careerist who wished only to conform himself to the requirements of “respectable society” as it was understood in Nazi Germany at the time:

Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors....What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler;...Hitler, he said “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million....His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him. (Peter Baehr Ed, The Portable Hannah Arendt. 355)

In Arendt’s portrayal, Adolph Eichmann was far from being a “moral monster” that many thought he must have been -- his brand of evil was boring and ordinary -- it was banal.

Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s moral character, as well as her comments on the role of the Jewish Councils (the Judenrate) which had cooperated with the Nazi’s in sending their fellow Jews to their deaths, provoked a series of vicious attacks on her, mainly by American Jews. She was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of the B.nai B’rith and labeled as “self-hating Jewess”:

For their part, critics claimed that the expression “banality of evil” seemed to exonerate Eichmann and blame the victims. Others accused her of bad taste, triviality, an insultingly harsh and ironical tone, a perverse unwillingness to understand the depth of the dilemmas facing the Jewish Councils, and of failing to show love for her own kind. A “lapse into uncomprehending arrogance” was how one scholar described the report eight years after Arendt’s death (in 1974?), and compared with some of the comments she had to endure during her lifetime this was putting it mildly. (Baehr, xxvi)

According to Peter Baehr, Arendt was “shocked and dismayed by the maelstrom her report had provoked.” Yet in the Postscript she wrote for the Viking edition she blandly observed:

Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology - as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came "out of a mimeographing machine" (Mary McCarthy) - was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the "image" of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.

Arendt goes on to argue that the report does not attempt to address in any systematic manner the “larger questions” about the Holocaust, the German people, Jewish complicity, original sin, or other general matters, but was only about “the person of the defendant, a man of flesh and blood with an individual history, with an always unique set of qualities, peculiarities, behavior patterns, and circumstances.” She does admit that:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

But then she says,

That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

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What are we to make of this lesson today? Do we have any theory about it that can help us understand how men can behave so thoughtlessly? Recent research in moral psychology suggests a theory about the kind of “banal evil” that Eichmann represents. The work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes that morality both “binds” and “blinds” us.[2] Haidt has described the pull of group cohesion on individual as a kind of force field, comparing it to the lines of a magnetic field. This force is what makes human social life possible -- it is the basis of group cohesion. Human beings, unlike other social animals, have the ability to build cohesive groups around beliefs and symbols, not just around kinship relations. We create group solidarity, and hence the basis for social cooperation among human individuals who are not related by kinship by anointing some object or belief as “sacred” or inviolable. The sacred object can be something like the Quaaba in Mecca, the image of the crucified Jesus, the flag, or the corporate logo. As individuals drawn into these force fields they are taught that success requires conformity to the belief system that characterizes the group. Deviation, disloyalty, or dissent is regarded as suspect and can lead to ostracism or worse. Those members of the group who dare to step across the line of what the group considered to be “acceptable thoughts” are quickly and violently rebuked for undermining group cohesion. Public disloyalty to the group’s ideology is a great sin -- blasphemers must be stoned, heretics burned at the stake, traitors much have their noses cut off, and dissident intellectuals must be shunned and discredited.

When mass societies are drawn into totalitarian ideologies such as fascism or communism, one has the potential to mobilize millions of humans to fight and die for their sacred symbols, or to kill millions of other humans in the name of their beliefs. What was shocking about Arendt’s insights into the origins of totalitarianism was that she realized that monstrous evil could come about simply through the normal functioning of the human moral sense. It was not an aberration that ordinary men like Eichmann could become mass murders; rather it was something to be expected because of the way the force field of social cohesion characteristically functions in human societies.

Arendt herself fell victim to this kind of attack because she asserted that the “really horrific discovery of totalitarian regimes has been that mass conformists ---”job holders and good family men” -- were much more pliant, dedicated, loyal, and abundant agents of extermination than the criminals, ‘fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots’ and social failures of the mob” (xliii). The greatest irony is that she herself was punished for disloyalty, for violating the taboos of the tribal group morality of Jewish intellectuals, for saying this.

Arendt is not the only intellectual whose ideas have been denounced because they deny some tenet of a tribal moral code. Haidt provides several examples of intellectuals who have met similar responses to their ideas.[3] Daniel Patrick Moynihan was vilified for having suggested that African-American culture might be one reason for the impoverishment of the black community. Lawrence Summer’s was hounded from the presidency of Harvard University after commenting in a speech that the reason there are no more women in science and mathematics might be due to a statistical observation that males are more likely than females to be on both the lower and the higher ends of the bell curves of intellectual achievement. Noam Chomsky, has met a similar fate after he signed a petition for the Holocaust denier Robert Fourissan. Chomsky denied that he was defending Holocaust denial; he saw himself as a defender of the principles of freedom of thought and opinion and argued that even ideas that he hates should be heard. Chomsky later wrote a short essay on the principle of freedom of speech that was included without his knowledge in a book by Faurisson. When he learned of this, Chomsky asked that it be removed. But he was nevertheless viciously attacked in a book by Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (1995). In his usual matter of fact manner Chomsky has responded by saying, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”

In her book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Temple University Press, 2010) Susan Herbst argues that political discourse in America has become intensely partisan, uncivil, debased, and deceitful.[4] This is not a new phenomenon – American politics have always been nasty – but the cable news channels, the 24-hour news cycle, and the Internet have made the mass dissemination of toxic nonsense much easier. The Information Revolution has enabled a culture of mendacity to supplant reasoned and deliberative political discourse in the public arena. She notes that the early media theorists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarfeld predicted that radio and television would send us into a state of “narcotizing dysfunction” in which citizens would become cynically disengaged from strong political engagement But they could not imagine the extent to which we are now drowning in a sea “information” that is false, misleading, distorted, and deceptive.

So much of what passes for political discourse in the present media-saturated culture is really nothing more than the partisans of different tribal moral codes insisting on beliefs that members of their moral tribes believe in which members of other moral tribes deny. The discussion is not about truth; it is about loyalty to the tribal belief system. In order to be a member in good standing of the Republican party one must now believe that Obama is not an American citizen, that global warming is a hoax, and that the way to create jobs is to lower taxes for the rich and cut government spending. People invent elaborate rationalizations for continuing to be loyal to their tribal belief systems even though there abundant evidence that their beliefs are false. Like Eichmann they convince themselves that since all those important and successful people believe these things that they should too. Such is the power of the force fields that align people like mindless iron filings into conformity with the pattern of a group ideology.

Is there anything that can effectively counterbalance and thwart these tendencies towards enforcing mass intellectual conformity? Like many liberal college philosophy professors, I tend to believe that one can do so by teaching young people the arts of critical thinking and logical reasoning. Knowing about the rules of evidence, logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks, and taking part on reasoned debates about social, political, and ethical issues can allow young people to learn how to defend themselves against the daily tsunami of intellectual rubbish. But recent empirical research on learning outcomes among college graduates suggests most students show little if any improvement in their critical reasoning skills.[5]

Herbst argues that, “We cannot rely on standard, even if excellent, civics courses or Introduction to Political Science. We need to teach young people how to argue with vigor, intelligence, and panache.” This is what Arendt did in Eichmann in Jerusalem: she argued with vigor, intelligence, and panache that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen in any human society when the mass media are deployed in order to induce mass ideological conformity to a false tribal morality. That is why Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ought to be required reading. But there is also the example of her own intellectual courage. Herbst writes that, “being a citizen of a democracy always demanded a sort of courage....the bravery it takes to express opinions and do so civilly.” The example of intellectual courage that Arendt provided in writing her report it is what today’s students should come to know and emulate. But they should also heed her warning about the potential for ordinary men to commit crimes against humanity by not thinking for themselves and simply going along with their tribal moral code. This timeless lesson is particularly timely right now.

Postscript (4/17/2011) I presented this short essay at the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Text and Courses, New Haven CT on Friday 4/15/2011 as part of a panel on the concept of evil. The comments and discussion brought out more sharply the contrast between Eichmann's moral character and Arendt's --the one being an intellectual conformist and the other a non-conformist, indeed, an iconoclast who was willing to take the risk of criticizing the ideas of the members of her own "tribe." This morning I found this short essay by Ralph Seliger "Hannah Arendt: From Iconocast to Icon" that makes a similar point.

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[1] A new study of the trial by Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, has just been published. Some 400 hours of the entire trial are available in the English language on Youtube . For the trial transcripts, click here. There is also a film by Eyal Sivan, The Specialist. The two judgments, of the District Court of Jerusalemand the Supreme Court, are also available.

[2] Jonathan Haidt. “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology”. Delivered to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, January 27, 2011. Available online: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/postpartisan.html. Visited 9 April 2011.

[3] Haidt himself commented that he went out on a limb in this talk, and declined to give any further examples from his own field of social psychology, saying it was “too risky” for him to do so. But he did go on to demonstrate that the ratio between social psychologists who describe themselves as politically liberal is 266 times greater than those who describe themselves as politically conservative, even though poll results consistently show that within the general population the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 1 to 2.

[4] Susan Herbst. “Rude Democracy in America: Can We Overcome it?” Phi Beta Kappa, Key Reporter, Spring 2011, pp. 8-9.

[5]Richard Arum, et. al., Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (University of Chicago, 2011) studied 2322 college students at 24 colleges and universities over four years. They found that, “large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education”. After four years 36% showed no significant improvement in higher order thinking skills. They did find, however, that, “Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.” See Sara Rimer, The Hechinger Report. “Study: Many college students not Learning to think critically,” January 17, 2011.

The Responsibility to Protect

At the conclusion of the UN Summit in September 2005, the Heads of State agreed to the following text concerning the responsibility to protect:

"The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VII and VIII of the Charter, to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII , on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya, and also the use of all necessary means to protect the civilian population, was passed unanimously (albeit with five abstentions) under the authority of Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Chapter VII, Article 42 of the UN Charter says: "Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations."

The UN Charter is a treaty and all members are bound by its provisions. The United States was founding member of the United Nations and the US Senate has ratified the UN Charter.

The US Constitution, Article Six says that: "treaties of the United States made according to it, [are] the supreme law of the land." This statement is found in the Supremacy Clause which created the Union by making the Constitution, Federal Statutes and Treaties, supreme over state laws. In other words, there is nothing more fundamental than this clause to the United States Constitution.

UN SC Res. 1973, which you can read here, authorizes Member States to take" all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights".

So the involvement of the United States in this UN action undertaken for the purpose of human rights protection, is LEGAL under international law. The Korean War under President Harry Truman was also authorized in this way, as was the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, was ILLEGAL under the terms of the UN Charter. It was also, therefore, ILLEGAL under the US Constitution, since the UN Charter binds all member states, and the US is a member state which has ratified the Charter, making it the "supreme law" of the land.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows US presidents to commit US military forces to action without a formal declaration of war, but requires that he notify the Congress within 48 hours of committing US forces to action and requires that those forces shall not remain in action for more than 60 days without a congressional authorization of the use of force or a declaration of war. Incidentally, this resolution was vetoed by President Nixon, but his veto was overridden.

President Obama officially informed Congress that he had taken the actions that began on Friday March 19th, on Monday March 22nd. (see this ABC news report). So he was a little late, but he did comply with the requirements of the War Powers Act.

So the answer is, "yes" what President Obama did was legal under both international and US law. It was also the morally right thing to do. It will also, I believe, prove to be very much in the US's national interest to get on the right side of history in the making. It also, as a matter of fact, probably saved thousands of lives. Finally, it denied Gadhafi the opportunity to send the message to other tyrants that they can prevail through ruthless repression of popular dissent and protest.

So, for those of you who are concerned about this UN action, what is your problem? Would you rather have waited longer for him to act? Had he done so, on Monday we would be cleaning up after the bloodbath that Colonel Gadhafi had vowed he would create in Benghazi. Remember, he said last week, "There will be no mercy". This sounds to me like a statement of intent to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity. If he ever faces the ICC Tribunal, this statement can be used as evidence. Would you rather have prevented this humanitarian catastrophe or did what Clinton did in Rwanda and Bosnia, and sit idly by while tens of thousands were murdered?

The Stakes in Libya

 

If Qadhafi succeeds in squashing this revolt though the use of massive force, it will send the wrong message to dictators and tyrants elsewhere. They will say: “In Egypt Mubarak did not use violence to hold on to power, and he is gone. In Libya, Qadhafi called in mercenaries and cracked down ruthlessly, and he survived.” What message will other dictators draw from this?

But it is better if the Libyan people succeed in liberating their country themselves, than if foreign governments, particularly those with economic interests in the country, were to send in their own troops to oust Qadhafi. But at what price in human life?

Federal Judge In D.C. Upholds Health Care Reform, Says Some Arguments 'Ignore Reality'

This article explains the opinion of U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act:

Federal Judge In D.C. Upholds Health Care Reform, Says Some Arguments 'Ignore Reality'

The gist of the argument she relies on is when a person chooses not to purchase health insurance this is an "affirmative action" which has real consequences for interstate commerce which the Federal Government has the constitutional power to regulate. The main real consequence is that it drives up the cost of private health insurance because it forces those individuals and families who do buy it to pay higher costs in order to cover the cost of the "free riders" who use health care services but do not pay for them.

Where else does this "free rider" issue crop up? Well it arises in relation to union collective bargaining agreements as well. In a collective bargaining agreement a union negotiates for favorable terms and conditions of employment on behalf of all of the employees in a bargaining unit. The benefits gained through these negotiations are enjoyed by all employees. But in some states, legislatures have passed so-called "right to work" laws that stipulate that workers who benefit from union agreements cannot be required to pay an agency fee to the union to compensate it for acting on their behalves.

This AFL-CIO page provides a short primer on the reasons why it opposes "right to work" laws. The key point is that allowing bargaining unit members to not pay for benefits they derive from union representation is in fact unfair to the workers who join the union and pay dues. The real consequence of "right to work" is to allow some people the "right to be free riders."

This is one of the ideas that motivates Libertarians and Tea Party Populists: they argue that individuals should enjoy the right to be free riders, that they should not have to pay for benefits that they enjoy that result from public policies and other collective agreements. The more thoughtful proponents of this view say they would rather not enjoy the benefits in the first place, or pay for them themselves, which is one way of avoiding free riding. But the muddled mass of conservatives what to have it both ways -- they want to enjoy to benefits of collective agreements while avoiding the costs of paying for them.

Welfare liberals, on the other hand, want to have publicly negotiated shared social benefits, such as public education and public health care, and insist that in order for these programs to be fair and cost effective, the burden of paying for them must be shared equitably among all of those who benefit.

So why are Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea Party Populists against the unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere? Why are they opposing the affordable health care law? Why are the trying to defund public education? Public broadcasting? And virtually every other public program except those associated with the military industrial complex?

It is because they claim the right to be free riders. This is really the great irony: libertarians often say paying taxes is tantamount to slavery. But, in reality, it is the liberty to free ride that forces other people to pay to support the ones who want to ride for free. Free riding is really a form of economic exploitation that disguises itself as personal liberty.

Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs' Plan to Break Labor's Back

Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs' Plan to Break Labor's Back | News & Politics | AlterNet

This article provide more direct evidence for the idea that the plutocracy is intent on destroying the last bastion of unionism in America -- public sector employees. Their strategy is to employ the politics of resentment to pit one segment of the middle class (read working class) against another, in this case, private sector employees most of who are not unionized against public sector employees where 1 in 3 are members of unions such as the AFT.

The propaganda talking point is to suggest that public sector employees who enjoy decent benefits they struggled to get over many decades of tough labor negotiations are somehow responsible for the fiscal problems many states are now facing. The real cause of the state deficits, of course, is the Great Recession, which public employees had no role in producing.

It was produced by greed, lax government regulation of the financial services industry, and the economic ideology known as "market fundamentalism". According to this winners-take-all mentality, there must be no part of the economy that is not subject to corporate rule. That is why the Republicans, who are an entirely owned and controlled subsidiary of Corporate America, are now attacking public sector unions, public broadcasting, public radio, and indeed any social formation that is not directly subservient to corporate control.

But truth has no bearing on this political strategy: it is driven by the idea that one can gain political support among private sector workers by making them resentful of the slightly better benefits that some public sector workers have. This is a classic "leveling-down" strategy of class warfare; the goal is to break public sector unions by convincing non-union workers that their plight is caused by there fellow workers, not by the corpocracy that runs America (and much of the rest of the world). If this campaign is successful it will mark the final triumph of the investing class over the working class and will ensure that income and wealth inequality will not be effectively challenged by the labor movement.

Here is how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker expressed this divide and rule strategy:

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

This is utter rubbish. Government workers -- civil servants -- are taxpayers too. They are also voters: the latter is what rankles Governor Walker because as voters they did not support him in the election. So this is also political payback: if one wants to ensure that Republicans control even more of the state governments than they presently do, bust the labor unions which (usually) support the Democrats.

However, as the demonstrations in Wisconsin are showing, these union workers are not going down without a fight. Now is the time for solidarity, not only with the demonstrators in the Mideast, but also those in the Midwest.

How the middle class became the underclass - Feb. 16, 2011

How the middle class became the underclass - Feb. 16, 2011

Heading towards class warfare? We have been engaged in class warfare, as this article demonstrates, for several decades. The plutocrats are winning. They have decreed that one can only refer to the struggle as "class warfare" when the middle class and the poor fight back.