Let's you and him fight, Part 2

This is a direct continuation of my previous post, "Let's you and him fight," which I strongly recommend reading before this one if you haven't. 

The subject at hand is the strange argument often seen, mostly but not exclusively on the political Left, that a military draft is desirable because it would encourage a less bellicose American foreign policy. I talked about some reasons to believe that this is wrong last time, but such arguments are unavoidably speculative. 

So let's get more empirical. Proponents of the idea that conscription will strengthen antiwar opinion and encourage peace frequently claim to have the evidence of history on their side, comparing the relatively flaccid antiwar movement of conscriptionless present-day America to larger antiwar movements of the past. History does not allow controlled experiments. It does, however, provide us with a series of wars the United States has fought with conscript troops over the past century and a half.  Let's have a look, shall we?

Vietnam War 

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 8 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Withdrawal and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to turn responsibility for the war over to local allyAmerican Deaths: 58,220

Korean War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Successful prevention of communist takeover of South Korea and expulsion of invading North Korean forces, establishment of permanent US military presence.American Deaths: 33, 686

Second World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 years, 8 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with:  Total victory, unconditional surrender of Japan, conquest of Germany and complete destruction of German state. (Fun fact: The war between the United States and Germany did not legally end until 1951, since there was no one left in Germany with the recognized authority to surrender.)American Deaths: 405, 000 (Does not include merchant marine)

First World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 1 year, 7 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total victory, unconditional surrender of hostile powersAmerican Deaths: 116,000

The Civil War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 4 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total Union victory, dissolution of Confederate government, forcible reincorporation of all Confederate territory into United StatesAmerican Deaths: 620,000; 360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate (possibly underestimates)
(Due to the much smaller population of the era, these casualties represent over two percent of the entire combined Union and Confederate population at the time, equivalent to the death of over six million Americans today.)

Of five wars fought with conscripts, US involvement ended for reasons other than the successful filament of the war's objectives in only one of them, Vietnam. The only other example of an American government with a conscript army giving up the fight was the Confederate States of America, which resorted to conscription sooner and much more extensively than the Union but only capitulated after its economic infrastructure had been systematically wrecked by invading armies, its territories overrun, and over 10% of its male citizens- not “military-age,”, 10% of all of them- killed. Comparing the losses of other countries in detail is beyond our scope here, so I will merely point out that each the four wars above fought against foreign states also had higher total non-American deaths than even the most extreme excess mortality estimates for Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

So, as one can clearly once one remembers that American history did not begin during the Kennedy administration, the idea that the country loses its stomach for war when conscription is in effect is not merely unsupported by the evidence, it is overwhelmingly contradicted by it. The usual result when America fields conscripted soldiers is that the war continues until the original objective is fully achieved, even if it requires hundreds of thousands of dead Americans.

The supposed value of the draft as a means of encouraging peace becomes even weaker when one considers something the idea's supporters invariably leave out when they compare Vietnam to post-draft conflicts: Scale. At the time I write this, about 7,000 Americans have been killed in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks out of a population of (as of the 2010 Census) over 308,000,000 people. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam- out of a population that was smaller by about 100,000,000.

So the fact that Vietnam eventually spawned a much more vigorous antiwar movement than the War on Terror is hardly surprising or noteworthy. Even if the beliefs of conscription advocates about conscription's effects weren't historical nonsense, claiming that the absence of conscription is the explanation for the relative lack of an antiwar movement now is highly dubious simply because it presupposes that some further explanation is actually needed in the first place. It's like looking for some deep, subconscious reason rooted in my relationship with my mother to explain why being punched in the stomach would bother me less than being doused with molten steel. If you can do basic arithmetic, you already have a quite solid explanation of why the antiwar movement of the 21st century has fallen short of the Vietnam era.

If anything, the discrepancy calling for explanation is how strong antiwar sentiment been at times in this century, when American casualties have been a small fraction of what they were in Vietnam and the justification offered for today's wars is so much more viscerally appealing. The Vietnam-era antiwar movement also benefited from the fact that a not-insignificant portion of the American intelligentsia was to at least some degree sympathetic to the Vietnamese Communists, or Communism more generally, while the number of Americans who feel any affinity for Ba'athism or the Taliban- even in a vague “They're noble ideals that haven't worked in practice” sort of way- is effectively nil. If we're going to leap wildly from correlation to causation, it would be more reasonable to conclude that the draft makes the country more supportive of war, not less.

Nevertheless, let us briefly imagine that conscription really does have the pacifying effects some of its advocates claim for it, taking Vietnam as our model. Granting all that there's still no reason to believe that a draft would have made any difference to American foreign policy as of yet.

As previously mentioned, around 7,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date. The 7,000th American soldier killed in action in Vietnam died sometime in 1966; the American military presence in Vietnam would grow for several years thereafter, peaking at over half a million troops. More Americans soldiers were killed in Vietnam in 1967 alone than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 12 years. In 1968, American deaths were more than twice those of the entire War on Terror. American deaths in 1969 were also higher in a single year than they've been in the entire past 12. By 1970, the American military presence in Vietnam was diminishing (though still larger than in 1966), and “only” 6,000 Americans were killed in a single year. In 1971, with Vietnamization of the war effort well under way, there were still over 2,000 American deaths, far more than any single year in the War on Terror. The US was still involved enough for the number of Americans killed to reach triple digits in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, when American involvement was finally forced to a complete halt by the lack of a South Vietnam to continue defending.

If we're to take Vietnam as our model, as conscription advocates suggest, the draft still needs another 51,000 American corpses to fully work it's peacemaking magic. And that's assuming we're being generous and not adjusting for population growth.

So again, the mystery: Why does the idea that the draft would have prevented or more rapidly hastened the end of American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or prevent American military intervention in Syria (which the American public opposed by a substantial margin, the fact that the risks would be borne by volunteers notwithstanding) have such currency?

It's not just baseless. It's stupidly, embarrassingly, obviously baseless. Basic historical facts demonstrate that it's nonsense. It doesn't even have the thin superficial plausibility that most widely believed nonsense has. The idea that you can help the poor by making it illegal to pay low wages or minimize the harm caused by cocaine by making it illegal makes sense if you don't think beyond the most obvious, immediate effects, whereas “politicians will fight fewer wars if they're guaranteed an unlimited supply of the young men needed to fight them whether those men are willing or not” doesn't even rise to that level.

More to come.

Let's you and him fight, Part 1

(Note: This article turned out a lot longer than I planned, so I'm breaking it into multiple parts.)

There's a question I've long been interested by, and with talk of possible American military intervention in Syria over the past few months it's taken greater prominence again: Where the hell did so many ostensibly anti-war people left of political center- from garden-variety liberals/progressives to more radical sorts to “anarchists”- get the idea that the draft is a good idea as an anti-war measure?

You certainly don't have to look far for examples. Renowned scholar, activist, and alleged anarchist Noam Chomsky has endorsed the draft on that basis. It's the perennial obsession of Congressmen Charles Rangel (lifetimes ratings of 4% from the American Conservative Union, 95% from the AFL-CIO, 92% from the Brady Campaign, 91% lifetime yearly average from American for Democratic Action) of New York. MSNBC talking head and self-described "practical European socialist" Lawrence O'Donnell is a fan. And it's easy enough to find it supported in publications like In These Times, Mother Jones, or London Progressive Journal. You can hardly take a metaphorical step in the comments sections of most major "progressive" sites without tripping over a horde of boosters for the idea when the military and foreign policy are the issue at hand. It may not be a majority opinion, but it's certainly not a rare one

Now, I wouldn't be surprised by folks like that liking the draft as a matter of general principle, as indeed many openly are. If you're a big fan of forcing people to do things in groups, fetishize things like "shared" sacrifice for the state, and/or want to decisively repudiate the idea that a man's life belongs to him and not the rulers of some collective, it doesn't get much better than conscription. But the idea that it would encourage a more peaceful foreign policy as well is still pretty common.

The argument is usually that conscription gives more Americans a direct stake in decisions to use military force by raising the threat that they or someone they love will be drafted and possibly killed, and so will prevent the public from supporting war without good reason. The volunteer military, on the other hand, is said to insulate much of the public from the costs of war by drawing a disproportionate amount of its personnel from particular subsets of society,  typically said to be racial minorities and the poor, who join for lack of other options.

Now, one problem with this is that it's not actually accurate in the modern United States. The poorest fifth of Americans are actually underrepresented in the US military; enlistment rules concerning education and criminal records make a disproportionately large percentage of them ineligible. The military is disproportionately black, but- due to relatively lower Hispanic and Asians enlistment- not disproportionately nonwhite. The actual disparity most worth noting (other than sex, which a draft wouldn't change*) is regional, with a disproportionate number of military personnel coming from the South or the states around the Rocky Mountains. Inconveniently, these are also the parts of the country that are most pro-war, so the supposed mechanism by which the draft would discourage support for war is questionable.

(If any American military draft included women, I'd be very surprised. If that draft were continued into a war of any significant size and length and didn't offer females enough exemptions to make their inclusion a dead letter, I'd be even more surprised. If it actually put female conscripts into the line of fire in any significant numbers, I'd be absolutely shocked. If someone invented some sort of superdrug that gave the average woman the upper body strength and bone density of the average man, those predictions would not change. American conservatives are antsy enough about women's current degree of involvement in the military when they're all volunteers and there's nearly 49 dead men for every dead woman. Actually existing American feminism has a habit of recoiling in horror upon contact with anything resembling equality with non-elite men and retreating into leftish-sounding justifications for traditional protections and privileges. Women currently aren't even required to register for a draft that hasn't actually been used in decades; the idea that any restoration of conscription in the United States would be done in anything resembling a gender-neutral fashion is laughable, and the claims of some conscription advocates that it would or should be are empty showboating.)

And, more generally, the popular cliché about how the wealthy and powerful would lose their taste for war if it were their sons in harm's way doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny very well. Young men of the upper and upper-middle classes have suffered disproportionately in many wars, and not just in pre-industrial societies where the nobility was also the warrior class or where the army was composed of those who could afford to provide their own arms. It's typically been more dangerous in modern armies to be a junior officer then an enlisted man, which historically didn't prevent the ranks of freshly commissioned lieutenants from being filled with the sons of aristocrats or the upper bourgeoisie, and even in the enlisted ranks front-line combatants have often disproportionately been men from comfortable backgrounds simply because they were healthier. Casualties were disproportionately high among men from upper and upper-middle class families in First World War Britain, to cite one conspicuous example; those in power still thought the conflict was worth the lives of well over 800,000 British men.

Joe Biden's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Sarah Palin's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. John McCain's son served in Iraq. The period of all three deployments partially overlapped with the 2008 Presidential race. If any of them experienced some sort of epiphany about the horrors of war as a result, they kept it to themselves. 

A less commonly heard argument, generally limited to more radical circles, is the idea that a conscript (Noam Chomsky slips the euphemism “citizen” in here) army will be less willing than a volunteer (often dysphemized as “mercenary,” as if in unconscious tribute to the modern Left's reactionary Prussian roots) army to fight in imperialistic wars or commit atrocities.

This is historically dubious, to put it mildly. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had “citizen” armies. The Japanese Empire conquered and brutalized much of Asia with a “citizen” army that- just to recap, since some people seem to forget that Asians are not indeterminate clouds of quantum fuzz that only have definite characteristics and histories when white people are fucking with them- slaughtered millions, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by dousing Chinese cities in cholera and bubonic plague, and torturously killed thousands more researching medical mysteries like "What happens if you saw a still-conscious infant's torso open and start yanking stuff out?"  Every major belligerent in World War I had a “citizen” army. Napoleon conquered much of Europe with a “citizen” army. The first modern “citizen” army in Europe carried out the first modern ideological genocide in Europe on tens of thousand of civilians in the Vendée before it was even half a decade old.

For a bit of irony, that link up above leads to a transcript of a talk Noam Chomsky gave on the occasion of Yasser Arafat's death, condemning the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory... by the State of Israel, which is so enthusiastic about the idea of “citizen armies” that it has mandatory military service for all men 18-21 and is one of the only countries on Earth that conscripts women as well.

For bonus irony, in light of the fact it's radical leftists making this argument, consider the implications of simultaneously agreeing- as Chomsky does- with the statements that:

1.Volunteer armies are full of the sort of brutal, amoral “mercenaries” well-suited to murderous campaigns of aggression and imperialism, while a conscript army would be full of much more humane, thoughtful “citizens” who wouldn't be able to stomach such depravity.
2. Volunteer armies are dark-skinned and poor, while a conscript army would have a greatly increased proportion of whites and the rich.

I don't want to wander too far afield of my main subject, so I leave the question of what a naturally concomitant 3 might be to others.

There's another problem when we look at the American historical record. Proponents of these pro-draft arguments often cite the size of the antiwar movement and the eventual shift in public opinion against the war during America's involvement in Vietnam as an example of the draft having the effect they claim, and the relative lack of a noisy antiwar movement during America's even longer military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demonstration of how the lack of a draft makes the public tolerant of unjustified military adventurism.

How well does this claim hold up? We'll examine that next time.

(Spoiler alert: Poorly.)

The worst people in the world, then and now

Because I'm nothing if not eager to brood resentfully about the past, I've been thinking back, recently, on the aftermath of the Jared Lee Loughner mass shooting in Arizona. (See my previous remarks here.) It's impressive how quickly that seems to have gone down the memory hole once the accumulation of actual information about Loughner and his motives meant that the  “anti-government nut driven to mass murder by those horrid people saying mean things about Democrats” fantasy so many media figures and rank-and-file progressives were luxuriating in was no longer tenable. So frustrating, when reality interrupts a good wet dream that way.

After I published this post last November, I had started to wonder if I'd been overly harsh when I'd referred to the mainstream Left's "fascistic true colors" and described its predominant attitude towards dissent as “berserk, hysterical rage and hatred.” That was then. Now I'm just wondering why I beat around the bush with that milquetoast "-ic" suffix. Many rank-and-file progressives no doubt mean well and would recoil from things they currently accept or support if they fully understood them- but, to paraphrase what I said in that post, a successful statist ideology needs to be good at making sure it isn't understood too well.

The response to the Jared Loughner shooting didn't show me anything that I didn't, at least in broad outlines,already know.  The frenzied, triumphant eruption of demonisation and hatred directed by so many liberal commentators, politicians, and everyday folks at anyone with an unkind word to say about Obama, Democrats, or the sacred federal government after the Loughner shooting, before anyone had gone through the formality of actually finding out what the shooter's motives were was the natural evolution of liberal/centrist discourse, and the message is what it always was: Shut up. It has been readily apparent for some time that mainline left-liberal opinion-makers and political figures consider any meaningful dissent to be utterly beyond the pale. If you're on board with the existing state and its continued expansion and want to suggest some tweaks while you're submitting, that's fine, and that's as far as legitimate, responsible “differences” can go. That's been the consistent pattern since Obama took office; at a (usually) less hysterical/gleeful level it's been an ongoing theme in American politics for at least half a century.

(All three of those links are to articles by Jesse Walker that I recommend very highly.)

When attempts to use the Jared Loughner shooting to demonize dissenters into silence were at fever pitch, some people rebutted that all this liberal caterwauling about “civility” and right-wing “hate” was grossly hypocritical in light of the sort of things many liberals were saying during the Bush years. That's true enough, but it wrongly implies the existence of some radical discontinuity between the Bush era and the years preceding it.

I came of political age in the Clinton years, and- unlike the significant percentage of the population that was apparently sent into some sort of amnesiac fugue state by the shock of 9/11- I remember them.  As much as the state of pro-war conservative rhetoric during the George W. Bush years repelled me, liberal complaints about being called “anti-American” or the like were always ridiculous to me. I certainly agree that the accusation was rarely if ever true, and that a large proportion of right-wing political speech after 9/11 consisted of shrill, hysterical insults based on nothing but the fact that you had the temerity to disagree about the war in Iraq or the PATRIOT Act or whatever. I was subjected to it myself on more than one occasion.

(There was the time I was accused of wanting "Islamo-Fascists" to conquer America, have women stoned to death, outlaw liquor, and send everyone to gas chambers, for instance.)

But to have taken liberal outrage over the likes of David Horowitz calling people “traitors” or “America-hating” seriously,  I'd have to have believed that relentlessly  accusing people of being cruel, heartless, greedy, selfish, hate-filled, fascist, racist, misogynistic, violent, or dangerous for daring to disagree with you is just fine, but that calling someone unpatriotic is somehow beyond the pale. I would have to forget the militia scare, when people with much louder megaphones than the likes of Ann Coulter were talking about the ominous, dangerous “extremism” of folks like me, who didn't like the vast power wielded by the national government or thought that things like the government-instigated bloodbath at Waco or the cold-blooded murder of Vicki Weaver were worth being mad about. I'd have to imagine that the shocked, hysterical whining of a spoiled bully outraged to discover that someone was actually willing and able to hit him back somehow deserved my respect.

I also think the extent to which the political Left got nastier during the Bush years is somewhat exaggerated- they were quite fierce, certainly, but the previous baseline was already quite high. There was a genuine increase in liberal acrimony, but the chief difference is that the most hated opponents of liberals during the Clinton years were a more diffuse target, and after a while liberal demonisation of them became the political equivalent of white noise from an air conditioner- loud, but so uniform that after a while you stop consciously noticing it unless you specifically decide to think about it. The Bush administration provided conspicuous specific personalities like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who drew much more concentrated and thus more attention-grabbing hostility. It's like replacing four 50-watt light bulbs lighting a room with two 50-watt light bulbs lighting a room and a 100-watt laser burning someone's face off- getting attention isn't just a matter of raw output.

More importantly, however,the Bush era is much less revealing than the state of liberal and centrist rhetoric after Bush, during the same period when critics of the Obama administration were supposedly being whipped into a murderous rage by antigovernment rhetoric and the ensorcerelled bullseyes on Sarah Palin's evil hypno-map. What has characterized the speech of the Left and the "vital center"? For fairness' sake, let's limit it to mainstream figures and publications.

Mindless, reflexive, sweeping condemnations of dissent as "racism." A litany of accusations that people who oppose a government takeover of healthcare are insurance industry shills and/or causing the deaths of hordes of fellow Americans out of sheer greed or callousness, . Blaming opponents of the new administration for inciting the "murder" of a government employee that, awkwardly, turned out to have never taken place. Comparisons of people at peaceful rallies to Stalin.  Description of the Tea Party movement as "small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht." An apparent Jack Chick-like inability to even conceive of someone who's heard their program and yet rejects it for reasons other than bigotry, greed, or sheer wickedness.

Declaring criticism of or opposition to liberal politicians, their polices, or the power of the federal government to be sedition- that is to say, criminal.

And, of course, a seemingly endless series of claims that widespread, significant opposition to Obama's policies represent some sort of rising tide of "fascism" or sinister "extremism" that threatens an imminent explosion of violence. Calling actual, significant expansions of government power instigated and controlled by people who actually hold power "fascism" is absurd, paranoid, extremist, and irresponsible, whereas calling peaceful political speech by private citizens opposed to such expansion of state power "fascism" or "terrorism"is perfectly reasonable.  This is probably where liberal hypocrisy about "civility" is most glaring- if anti-Obama groups ever managed to pull off something half as disruptive and noisy as the liberal response to Scott Walker's attempts to weaken government employee unions in Wisconsin,  they'd probably be screaming for the President to declare martial law.The overwrought hysteria and terror so many liberals in the media and government display at the prospect of non-liberals daring to actually organize and protest would be hilarious if it weren't so  ominous.

In fact, in my experience liberal commentators have been far more vitriolic and eager to demonize opposition since Bush left office than while he was in it. Even if you don't share my assessment that it's actually gotten worse, it's still rather curious considering what it's in response to.

During the Bush administration, Bush and other Republicans (and many Democrats, like Obama's current Secretary of State) launched a pointless, costly, devastating and highly controversial war due to what was at best terrible judgment and at worst consciously perpetrated fraud, severely attacked civil liberties, and assumed office through an extremely controversial election victory that many liberals considered fraudulent or corrupt. Whatever  else I may say about liberal discourse during the Bush years, which rarely dared to question liberal statism and put too much emphasis on a few figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney while giving short shrift to the decades of accumulated precedents leading up to them, the sheer fury directed towards men like Bush made sense given the situation.

(If not always the reasons for it- in terms of the animosity it generated, Bush's failure to speak with a proper General American Walter Cronkite accent was probably worth at least a few tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.)

The targets of liberal ire during the Obama administration, on the other hand, have been rather less accomplished. Criticism of federal spending has become fiercer and more common than it was during the Bush years.  Republican congressmen- some of whom are apparently under the impression that winning the Presidential election only gives the winner the powers of a President and not a Roman dictator- wouldn't vote for Obamacare, causing it to be passed slightly later then would have otherwise been the case. There's a cable network with programming that often portrays President Obama and other Democrats in a hostile light, and many talk radio shows do likewise. Non-liberals have had the temerity to hold peaceful public rallies, lawfully exercise their right to bear arms in public, and even mouth off to their betters during what were supposed to be carefully managed propaganda events.

Even if you don't approve of these things, they still seem rather unimpressive compared to the reasons for liberals to be angry during the Bush years, and yet they produce at least as much rage and loathing as the outrages of the Bush administration. The sheer scale of it has certainly grown since the Bush years, from something directed predominantly at relatively prominent, influential figures such as politicians and media personalities to a more democratized sort of  demonisation of far larger groups of people.

The mere existence of significant, outspoken dissent against liberal domestic politics- dissent which was ultimately unsuccessful, since it didn't stop the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress at that time from passing the health care bill, or the bailout of the automobile industry and its associated unions, or hundreds of billions of dollars in “stimulus” spending- provokes at least as much rage and loathing as a pointless war that has killed hundreds of thousands of foreigners and thousands of Americans, the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars and much of America's international reputation, all sorts of outrageous attacks against civil liberties and due process, and a possibly stolen election.  During the Bush years- and still today,  occasionally- some liberals, usually those of a more radical sort, advocated prosecuting Bush as a war criminal for starting a war of aggression that killed thousands. Now we've got mainstream liberal figures and publications like The Nation talking about prosecuting people for criticizing politicians.

I used to find this counterintuitive. I no longer do.  For all the condemnation he received, George W. Bush was never a threat to liberalism/progressivism's core principles.

The near-total evaporation of the anti-war movement has been remarked upon many times, so I won't belabor it here. In addition to that, I would remind everybody that  President Bill Clinton's enforcement of UN sanctions against Iraq during his 8 years in office killed  hundreds of thousands of people.  Aside from libertarians, some paleoconservatives, and the sort of leftists who probably find Democratic Party fund-raising letters in their mail and think “I should see if my parakeet's cage needs to be cleaned,” most people didn't care much. Stacks of dead foreigners simply aren't that big an issue.

Bush's attacks on civil liberties and due process at home drew plenty of heat while he was in office. There are still outspoken people on the Left, such as Glenn Greenwald, who haven't let up on the issue.  As we've seen since Obama took office, however, most liberals treat those issues as at best a minor sideshow when a Democrat is in the White House. They don't necessarily like or advocate them- I'm sure many devoted liberals would, all else equal, prefer it if the government wasn't claiming the right to assassinate American citizens at will or groping children's pubic regions at airports- but things that Bush was excoriated for, or would have been if he had actually dared to do them, barely register now.

And of course, there's no shortage of  liberals who will actually defend these things. (Or, more cleverly, claim nominal disapproval and them and go on the attack against people who demonstrate actual disapproval, a la Mark Ames and Yasha Levine.) If there is an assault on people's freedom, privacy, or dignity so grotesque that large numbers of liberals won't rally to defend it, it has yet to be discovered.

The most conspicuously objectionable things Bush did simply aren't things most mainstream liberals actually oppose all that strongly, if at all.The lie that Bush was some sort of radical free-marketeer has become firmly established now,  but when he was in office Bush barely even pretended to have interests in that direction. He was a “compassionate conservative,” not one of those scary anti-government types; he had disputes with liberals about the precise implementation of the welfare and regulatory state, and about the specific areas and rate of its future expansion, but he didn't even pretend to take the anti-statist rhetoric of the Clinton era seriously.

And here we run into a striking difference between Bush and the sort of people that some of the folks at America's oldest and most venerable journal of left-of-center political opinion wants imprisoned for sedition. The tea party movement defines itself by its hostility to domestic statism, or at least economic statism. Many politicians who've associated themselves with it are no doubt just opportunists, and many rank-and-file supporters are no doubt not terribly consistent. Still, I think there clearly is a lot of genuine hostility to domestic statism in the movement, though I remain cautiously pessimistic about the prospects of any long-term effects.

(My default stance is to assume that any seemingly positive development is either a mistake, a trick, or unstoppably careening towards a catastrophic plunge over the side of an unseen cliff, so “cautiously pessimistic” is actually fairly high praise.)

In any case, their harshest detractors usually seem to consider them a genuine menace to the modern welfare/regulatory/cronyist state. Unlike George W. Bush, the Tea Party movement is avowedly hostile to liberal principles that, unlike privacy or not immolating foreigners for no good reason, are not negotiable:welfare statism, interventionism, ever-greater management of the economy and society by government technocrats. Tea Party rhetoric is anti-government, whereas he great bulk of what the loudest right-wingers during the Bush administration had to say was merely anti-Left- and the venom of liberalism's harshest critics during the Bush years was primarily targeted at things that have now been shown to be disposable appendages of American liberalism rather than vital principles. Here there is a strong parallel with establishment conservatism, which forgives virtually any amount of contempt for its supposed principles of free markets and “limited government” if you're sufficiently supportive of the warfare state and is indifferent to any amount of support for them if you're not.

Sincerely or not, consistently or not, the ideas being expressed by people like the Tea Partiers strike at the very heart of mainline American leftist/liberal and centrist values in a way George W. Bush never did. And so it's perfectly natural that peaceful people ineffectually protesting bailouts or health care mandates cause as much rage and horror as government-sanctioned torture, the destruction of habeas corpus, and hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths. Gotta keep your priorities in order.

Opiate of the Red States

A few weeks back, the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom denounced Congressman Ron Paul and expelled him from their National Advisory Board, on which he had served for twenty years. This, despite the fact that Paul was the recipient of the group's greatest honor, the Guardian of Freedom award, and despite the fact that Paul is by far the most thoroughgoing opponent of big government and supporter of free enterprise in Congress country and has done an enormous amount to popularize those ideas- ideas that are ostensibly among the YAF's core principles. (Young American's for Freedom should not be confused with the Young Americans for Liberty, another student-based group. You can tell them apart by the fact that YAL's leaders don't don't snicker when they say the last word of their group's name.)

This, in microcosm, is an excellent reenactment of the story of the American conservative movement since the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

The reason for his expulsion action was simple- Paul is anti-war. He thinks that “limited government” is incompatible with spending hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year to perpetually garrison the entire planet and billions more for armed social engineering projects on the other side of the world. He's argued that foreigners become upset when their friends, relatives, countrymen, or coreligionists are maimed or killed, and that this displeasure has more to do with why some of them are willing to hurl themselves to certain death for a chance to kill Americans than hatred of push-up bras or BLTs or the works of Montesquieu does.  His preferred response to terrorism does not involve unending “nation-building” military occupations or the unprovoked flattening of whatever foreign country he happens to be annoyed with at the time.

Let's take a look at YAF's core statement of principles, the Sharon Statement. The Sharon Statement endorses strict constitutionalism and federalism limiting the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, the free  market, the view that the proper role of government is to preserve individual freedom through law enforcement and national defense, that national sovereignty must not be ceded to foreign or international bodies, and that the standard by which a foreign policy should be judged is “the just interests of the United States.”

Not bad. If anyone within spitting distance of importance in mainstream American right-of-center politics had actually demonstrated principles like these within my lifetime, I'd hold modern conservatism in much higher esteem. Remove the now-outdated references to international communism (the statement was written in 1960) and it sounds like something Ron Paul could easily have written himself- and, unlike most Republican who hold public office or enjoy any media prominence, actually believe. Even if you accept the claim that Paul's non-interventionism does not “serve the just interests of the United States,”  Ron Paul is still by far the national political figure who best exemplifies the ideals of what is supposed to be YAF's creed.

And yet Paul is still utterly beyond the pale in the eyes of YAF's leadership ; not merely unfit for participation in their organization, but a moral monster. The YAF's leadership didn't merely say that they thought Paul was too far out of step with the YAF's ideals for them to continue working with him. In the statement issued about Paul's expulsion, YAF Senior National Director Jordan Marks said that Paul's actions “border on treason.” (Emphasis added.)

YAF is just one group, and there's clearly a strong element of opportunism here. The official statement against Paul- who has long been quite vocal about his foreign policy views- says they're only taking action against him now because he's started leading "left-wing subversives" into the movement. If we give Mr. Marks the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would not publicly state that someone is on the border of being guilty of something that is punishable by death under the laws of the United States and has traditionally been considered to be among the most despicable of all crimes unless he actually meant it, it would follow that YAF has been willingly associating itself with a known borderline-traitor for years. Apparently, YAF's leadership cannot abide an influx of young anti-interventionists inspired by Paul's example, but is "big tent" enough to accept years of behavior that borders on “levying war” against the United States and/or “adhering to their Enemies.” That seems sort of odd for a group that expresses so much concern about defending America, though perhaps the various left-wing anti-Americans I was exposed to in my formative years have clouded my judgment.

Nevertheless, its example is depressingly illustrative; either Marks et al. sincerely believe what the say about Paul, or they're playing to an audience that they expect to be well-disposed towards what they said. In either case, once YAF's leaders decided to abandon their convenient hypocrisy (or emerged from cryogenic hibernation, or whatever was stopping them from driving History's Greatest Monster from their ranks before now), their condemnation and excommunication of Paul had a well-established template to follow.

Support for militarism and foreign adventurism is not merely the dominant or most strongly held position in post 9/11 mainstream conservatism, but its defining principle as a political movement. This level of condemnation comes in different degrees but the fundamental principle is pretty consistent: being conspicuously antiwar is qualitatively worse than deviating from other principles conservatives claim to hold dear. Almost unlimited disdain for supposed conservative principles like free markets, limited government, constitutionalism, and federalism is excusable as long as you're pro-war enough, and no amount of support for them matters if you aren't.

(Mainstream liberalism follows a similar principle in regards to abridging civil liberties, giving giant piles of government money to the rich and privileged, compelling members of the middle and working classes to give piles of their own money and/or their homes to same, blasting hapless foreigners to pulp in ill-conceived military ventures, powerful white guys doing horrendous things to vulnerable females, and the like.)

It's possible to be pro-war and yet so unacceptably deviant in others ways that you're consigned to the outer darkness with folks like Paul, but it's damned hard. Being a vehemently anti-religious Marxist isn't enough. Instituting a state-level prototype of Obamacare while serving as a governor isn't enough. Being a Democratic Party candidate for the vice-presidency with F ratings from the National Taxpayers Union and the National Rifle Association isn't enough. This phenomenon isn't new, of course, since mainstream Cold War conservatism spurned vocal antimilitarists like Murray Rothbard and John T. Flynn but was glad to embrace New Dealers and social democrats who were sufficiently interventionist, but it's more rigid and far more hysterical.

Now, this is not universal, though the intense hostility many conservatives display towards conservative dissenters (such as paleoconservatives) on this issue only serves to emphasize the general rule. The popularity of Ron Paul in the last few years further shows that there are people who identify as conservative who don't share these priorities, and my hope is that things like the Tea Party movement will spur some conservatives to take a more serious interest in the idea of limiting government power that won't fade into oblivion once the Democrats are out of the White House. The resurgence of antistatist-sounding rhetoric among so many politicians and other prominent figures on the Right is to a great extent a pose, to be sure, but part of the reason the pose is so useful is because it brings in people who actually do take ideas like that seriously, at least some of the time, but have enough blind spots or gaps in their understanding and awareness to be taken in by Republican lip service to them.

(The other principal reason the pose is useful is that there is a significant- probably more significant- strain within modern conservatism that places great value and emphasis on the word "freedom", but has little or no regard for the freedom of individuals in even a limited or confused sense. It's not that they're lying- except to themselves, I suppose- it's just that they have a conception of freedom devoid of actual content. “Freedom” in this context simply means what America is and does, regardless of what America is and does; You could swap in “goodness” or “American” or “fahrvergnugen“ with little or no loss of meaning. They're the exemplars of the “shut up and enjoy your freedom of speech” philosophy.)

A political movement mimicking the rhetoric of ideals its biggest players and many of the rank-and-file don't actually respect very much- either as a deliberate deception or due to self-delusion-  is playing a dangerous game. The people who aren't in on the joke may eventually notice the disparity between your words and deeds, or realize that what you claim to believe has implications- perhaps radical implications- you haven't acknowledged. That's why the all-consuming primacy of the “War on Terror,”or some other foreign menace, is so helpful: it eternally excuses conservatism's failure to be what it claims to be.

It allows you to assert hostility  to “big government” as a general principle while supporting so many deviations from it- because the war on terrorism is so important, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, etc.- that the exceptions devour the supposed rule. It means that someone like Ron Paul should be rejected in favor of people who make professed Republican hostility to domestic big government, collectivism, welfare statism, and meddling Washington bureaucrats and political elites seem like an obscene joke, because the War on Terror is so important that all other principles are secondary. But hang in there, and someday we'll have the luxury of making an effort to act on the ideals we're always talking about. Just not today, or the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

American conservatism is remarkably similar to communism in this respect, now that I think about it.

Nothing new under the sun

Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama's most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting.

How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he been able to inspire in so many people. How this manifests among his opponents was especially driven home recently by the now somewhat notorious Dinesh D'Souza article in Forbes, in which D'Souza argued that Obama's politics are the result of the anti-colonialist ideology of Obama's Kenyan father. As D'Souza summarizes:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder...

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s...

Equipped with this window into the president's soul, D'Souza purports to explain a variety of Obama's political positions, from economics to his interest in using NASA for outreach to the Muslim world.

There are two problems with this thesis. (Three if one counts D'Souza's questionable attempts at psychoanalysis, which takes a somewhat troubled young man's youthful romanticizing of his absent biological father and turns it into The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.)

The first relates to Obama's military and foreign policy. In the real world, where the sitting president of the United States of America is the actual Barack Obama and not a cunningly disguised George McGovern wearing a Barack Obama mask, Obama has maintained tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, significantly escalated military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan with considerable cost in human lives, and is loudly rattling his saber at Iran. If he's grieved by the fact that the United States has military bases spanning the globe, well over one million men under arms, and an annual military budget that accounts for two-fifths of the planet's military spending, he 's been remarkably restrained in his complaints about it.

If Obama really views America's military as "an instrument of neocolonial occupation," as D'Souza claims, that's actually a rather decisive refutation of the idea that he's driven by anticolonialism.

In his discussion of domestic matters, D'Souza is at least reasonably accurate about describing Obama's actual policies. (Though it should be noted that, contrary to both D'Souza and some of Obama's own apologists, the rich aren't Obama's only tax targets: Obama signed a bill that more than doubled federal cigarette taxes. Like most lifestyle choices that progressives cluck their tongues at, cigarette smoking is disproportionately common among people at lower income levels.) However, he is no more effective in making his case for Obama the anticolonialist.

D'Souza's claims about Obama's desire to use NASA as a way to forge closer ties with Muslim countries is nicely representative of how he goes wrong:

No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach.

Please. This is generic off-the-shelf liberalism- government programs will bring people together in a United Colors of Benetton-esque fraternity of cooperation and mutual understanding. Give me half an hour at any university in this country and I could round up dozens of lily-white progressives who would think that using NASA as a way to reach out to the Muslim world is a splendid idea.

The problem is that D'Souza asks the wrong questions: Why would Obama blow hundreds of billions of dollars on a dubious "stimulus" program during an economic crisis? Why would he try to make banks that had declined bailout money due to the strings attached take it anyway? Why would he try to tighten the government's grip on health care? Why would he want to raise taxes on higher income brackets?

Why on earth wouldn't he? He's blowing hundreds of billions on the stimulus so that he and his political allies can fund pet projects, justify the exercise of greater influence and power over society and pass out government swag to friends, allies, and supporters. He's doing the standard, normal thing for someone with political power to do - he's just able to do more because of the circumstances he finds himself in.

He wants to raise taxes on higher income brackets? So does every other center-left politician cultivating his "friend of the people" persona. He wants to increase federal involvement in this or that sector of the economy? He'd be a bizarre anomaly if he was a major American politician who didn't.

The same can be said of questions raised by faltering or disenchanted Obama supporters: Why hasn't he shown interest in liberalizing drug laws? Why isn't he renouncing the Bush era's offenses against civil liberties and separation of powers? Why is he handing out wagonloads of boodle to big corporations?

Why would it be otherwise?

The problem D'Souza has- and that many conservative critics of Obama have, and that many liberal admirers of Obama have- is this: He thinks there must be some interesting, unusual, or complex explanation for what is actually entirely mundane, typical behavior with a mundane, typical explanation.

The conservative reaction to Obama's programs are remarkably similar to the liberal reaction to George W. Bush, which also tended to ridiculously exaggerate the novelty of what Bush was doing by acting as if incremental changes building on established precedent were new and shocking.

Torture? President Bill Clinton signed an executive order authorizing "extraordinary rendition" in 1995- Bush's innovation was the idea of having it done in-house instead of subcontracting it out to the Third World. Bush killed hundreds of thousands of people by invading Iraq... not at all like his immediate predecessor, who had the good taste and discretion to kill hundreds of thousands of people through low-key methods like starvation and water-borne disease. Bush's encroachments on civil liberties weren't just built on the foundation of past encroachments by past administrations of both parties- they were, in many cases, the same law enforcement powers that Clinton had tried and failed to enact after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing.

That's easy to forget, amidst all the hysterical squealing about Bush's supposed radical right-wingerness. In domestic policy, much of said squealing is the result of outright falsehoods- specifically, the ludicrous but impressively durable myth that Bush was a proponent of laissez-faire or presided over a reduction in the government's domestic size or regulatory power. This belief is actually very much like D'Souza's belief that Obama is anti-military- it's not only false, it's very obviously false, but the truth is incompatible with each side's mental image of the other side and so cannot penetrate their skulls.

Liberal treatment of Bush's foreign policy is generally much like D'Souza's interpretation of Obama's domestic policy- based on a reasonably accurate account of what Bush actually did but distorted into nonsense by the assumption that the Bush administration's polices and ideas, a Wilsonian crusade to spread the blessings of democracy through military force that would probably have met with the approval of many of the original Progressives, represented some sort of radical and novel right-wing extremism. (You don't get a vote in favor of your war from the number two contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and President Obama's current Secretary of State without bipartisan appeal.)

Bush was able to push the limits further than Clinton because Bush had a bigger, scarier terrorist attack. Likewise, Obama has a bigger, scarier economic problem than his predecessors, and that provides opportunity. Each man chose to avail himself of the opportunity not because there is anything unusual or special about either of these politicians, but precisely because there isn't. No need for any unique wickedness from either of them. No need for any sort of exotic political agenda, be it Marxism, anticolonialism, neoconservatism as it exists in the liberal imagination*, secret adherence to Islam, or the machinations of the vengeful shade of Saul Alinsky.

*(Not to be confused with neoconservatism as it exists in the real world, where it's a movement founded by New Deal-style liberals, Trotskyites, anti-Soviet social democrats, and technocratic center-leftists who started identifying with the conservative movement because they were were appalled by the New Left's antimilitarism, cultural radicalism, and hostility to Cold War consensus liberalism.)

Acknowledging the incremental rather than revolutionary nature of what you condemn is potentially awkward for people in the political mainstream, because doing so will entail condemning your own side in the process. Everything that both the mainstream Right and mainstream Left profess to oppose, they both helped to create and preserve. If you don't want to face that, or don't want other people to, or are so deeply immersed in mainstream political assumptions that ideas like "Republicans aren't consistent or principled supporters of the free market or opponents of big government and government regulation" or "Democrats aren't consistent or principled supporters of peace and civil liberties or opponents of the rich, powerful, and privileged" makes your brain start giving Bad command or file name error messages, you'll need to replace the most plausible, obvious, and parsimonious explanation with something more baroque.

Apparently, starvation blockades are bad for the economy. Who knew?

David Brooks has a column in The New York Times entitled "Nation Building Works," in which he attempts to vindicate the US government's past seven years in Iraq. From the article (via Cheryl Cline at der Blaustrumpf):

“Iraq has made substantial progress since 2003,” the International Monetary Fund reports. Inflation is reasonably stable. A budget surplus is expected by 2012. Unemployment, though still 15 percent, is down from stratospheric levels...

Living standards are also improving. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the authoritative compendium of data on this subject, 833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, more than 1.7 million do.

In the most recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of Iraqis rated their personal finances positively, up from 36 percent in March 2007. Baghdad residents say the markets are vibrant again, with new electronics, clothing and even liquor stores...

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Brooks attributes this to American nation-building efforts in Iraq, and says that President Obama should follow the advice of "serious Iraq hands" and keep American forces in the country.

I'm not surprised to hear that the Iraqi economy has improved since the invasion. I question how much of that has to do with American nation-building, however. I have a simpler explanation: It's easier to breathe when you're not being strangled.

From 1990 until Saddam Hussein's overthrow in 2003, the economy of Iraq was effectively cut off from the rest of the world due to U.N. sanctions that prevented the importation of anything except medicine and food "in humanitarian circumstances." This was supposed to serve the dual purpose of preventing Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction and tormenting the Iraqi people until they obligingly got rid of Hussein for us.

Iraq's economy had been built around the export of oil and so was more dependent than most countries on international trade, and it's civilian infrastructure was devastated in the Gulf War. The result of this was economic and societal collapse, the neglect and breakdown of facilities and equipment using modern technology, a fall in per-capita income to a small fraction of its former level, declining literacy rates, and hundreds of thousands of deaths from malnutrition, disease, and lack of clean water.

The Iraq the United States and its allies invaded in 2003 was already a shattered wreck before the first shot was fired. This isn't mentioned as much as it ought to be, I suspect because there's so much blame to go around. Democrats can't point out that the two Bushes enforced a policy that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people unless they're willing to call Bill Clinton a mass murderer right alongside them, and Republicans are in a similar bind. Likewise, partisans of the United Nations can't condemn the United States for the effects of the embargo without simultaneously damning the U.N., and vice versa.

Giving credit for economic progress in Iraq to foreign aid seems plausible if you imagine that the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the arrival of foreign troops and aid is the only important factor that has changed between 2003 and 2010. Things get a little more complicated once you recall that, prior to the invasion, the same governments to which Brooks gives credit for Iraq's recovery were enforcing a policy that amounted to the systematic destruction of Iraq's economy and technological infrastructure. Of course, considering the implications of that requires contemplating the idea that whatever prosperity Iraqis enjoy now exists in spite of the interventions of the technocratic government elite that Brooks' career is dedicated to defending, rather than because of them.

So, yes, it's heartening to know that Iraq is not as wretchedly poor as it used to be now that the world's greatest military power is no longer actively working to drive it into the Stone Age. I'm sure David Brooks and all the other "serious" political thinkers who cheered on the murderous slow-motion strangulation of the Iraqi people must be very proud of their benevolence.

News that would have been considered interesting two years ago

Last month I had a post mentioning that June 2010 had been the bloodiest month for NATO forces in Afghanistan since the war began nine years ago. Well, time marches on. I don't have the numbers for NATO as a whole in front of me, but July 2010 is now the bloodiest month of the war for American forces since the conflict began. Like last month, the rise is being attributed to the expansion of NATO's offensive operations, so it again seems probable that Afghan fatalities have been very high as well, given that expanding an offensive entails expanding the potential scope for things like this.

And at the time I'm writing this it's about 11:30 PM, Kabul time, so July still has a day left to go.

Thank God we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House now

June 2010 was the bloodiest month for NATO troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war nine years ago. There were either 101 or 81 fatalities, depending on whether you use the figures from iCasualties or official military statements, but each figure is the highest reported by its respective source since operations began in 2001. I don't have any figures in front of me for Afghan casualties, military or civilian, but given that the jump in NATO deaths is being attributed to the intensification of offensive operations in Taliban-controlled areas I'd imagine they're up as well.

I've found depressingly little comment on this news online. My memories of antiwar sentiment during the Bush era are starting to seem almost like a dream from which I've just awakened: I can vividly remember it, so vividly I could swear it was real, but there's nothing concrete I can grasp to prove it ever actually happened.

Is actually learning some basic facts about a politician before you start worshipping him too much to ask?

So, President Obama has announced the deployment of more troops to Afghanistan. To their credit, more liberals have attacked this decision than I expected. In many such cases, however, my respect is somewhat tempered by the fact that many of them are getting indignant about the fact that their beloved has betrayed them by doing exactly what he had always explicitly said he intended to do. Obama advocated the idea of escalating in Afghanistan well before he was elected, after all. He became the "peace candidate" because he was Not Bush, and Bush was a warmonger, and so Not Bush must be a great lover of peace. QED.

The result is actually remarkably similar to the subject of a recent post, the myth of Leon Trotsky the good Communist. Both men have an admiring mythology built around them that is not only at odds with the facts, it is explicitly contradicted by the glorified hero's own words!

This is a predictable outcome of both the way Barack Obama ran his presidential campaign and the way most of the media covered it. The elections always heavily emphasize general concepts tied to strong emotions- Freedom, Hope, Compassion, Children, Patriotism, Danger, Those Other People We Can't Stand- but Obama went further in emphasizing cheery platitudes and good vibes over actual policy and political philosophy than any other major politician I can recall in my lifetime. He was a unifier, he was pragmatic, he was nonideological, he was understanding he was hopeful, he was an historic milestone in America's racial history, he was Not Bush. Most of the mainstream media, thoroughly biased in Obama's favor and not especially politically incisive even at the best of times, indulged this.

John McCain often wasn't all that much better, his persona heavily dependent on his military service and on the reputation as a "maverick" that he had received during his stint as the media's favorite Republican earlier in the decade. I'll say this much for McCain, though: I doubt anyone supported him because they had fallen under the impression that he was a peacenik or a supporter of gay marriage or an opponent of big business.

It's not that Obama didn't have concrete beliefs- his campaign site had an extensive platform outlining his proposed policies. And yet, such was the fervor around him that he was able to rally a passionate following with the most vacuous campaign since "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". He isn't anti-war, but he's a man of powerful charisma who seemed like he ought to be, and who people wanted to be anti-war, and that was enough.

Reality outstupids parody once again

I was up very late last night, as is my habit (one of the nice things about a job done mostly from home is that if I want to sit at my computer playing Victoria: Revolutions at 3:30 AM, that's my prerogative), and I saw the news that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize minutes after it started hitting news sites. I honestly thought it was some sort of joke until I punched "Barack Obama Nobel" into Google and got some confirmations.

I suppose I shouldn't get my dander up about the sanctity of an award that has been given to Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger (though at least both of them received their award for significant involvement in actual peace-ish activities), but this is absurd. It's as if an article from The Onion ridiculing the Obama cult of personality somehow rose from the page and took over the real world.

There was a widespread perception that Paul Krugman's Economics Prize was politically motivated as an anti-Bush gesture, but there was a time- before he became the Platonic Form of the Partisan Hack walking the earth in human guise- when Krugman actually was a contributor to the science. Obama's award has been justfied on the grounds of his alleged intentions: he thinks it would be sort of nice if there were no nuclear weapons and people in the Middle East didn't murder each other so much. (It should also be noted that some of Obama's anti-nuclear statement were in the context of trying to intimidate North Korea and Iran, the latter of which he has openly threatened with military force for failing to comply with inspections.)

Meanwhile, he continues to wage Bush's war in Iraq and intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He has escalated the bombing of targets in Pakistan, killing hundreds of noncombatants, and has threatened preemptive attacks on Iran. These are the actions of a man awarded the world's most prestigious award for makers of peace. Given that we now have such thorough confirmation that The One is indeed an infallible, transcendent being, could we just stop beating around the bush, have the Senate declare Obama a god, and be done with it? We could throw in the Hugo for Best Fanzine, the Stanley Cup, and the Outstanding Asian-Americans in Business Award while we're at it; his qualifications for those are at least as strong.

Caring about the war is so 2008

The end of August marked the close of what is now the bloodiest month for the United States forces in Afghanistan since its presence began there in 2001, with 45 confirmed deaths. I haven’t seen any numbers for Afghan deaths, but given the escalation in violence it seems likely that they were high as well. As you may recall, Afghanistan is where President Obama wants to increase American troop numbers.

I wouldn’t blame the average person all that much if they didn’t recall it, though. It’s not given much attention, compared to the former President Bush’s military decisions. Nor is it criticized very much, since the bulk of the antiwar movement apparently slipped into a coma during Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony and is now descending into a permanent vegetative state.

The rapid drop-off in interest really is remarkable. Principled exceptions exist, but often only throw the rest into sharper relief. For instance, Cindy Sheehan has continued her antiwar campaign into the new administration, calling on Obama to end the war just as she did George W. Bush and protesting at Martha’s Vineyard during Obama’s presence there.

And yet, the woman that so much of the press couldn’t get enough of now barely warrants a mention from either the press or many her former comrades and supporters, something she herself has commented on. I suppose some of the media indifference can be attributed to the fact that the novelty element is gone now that she’s been known for a few years, but the very fact that she is continuing her crusade against the war even with Bush gone seems like something I would expect to draw interest- one of the things that originally made her famous was her utter relentlessness, and so her willingness to go after Democrats as fiercely she did Republicans is a dramatic illustration of the very trait that made her noteworthy to begin with. Apparently, though, the heartbroken mothers of dead soldiers just aren’t very interesting without a Republican in the White House.

I expected most of the American Left to lose interest in the war issue once Obama was in office, and especially once Obama started to escalate American military efforts in Afghanistan. Similarly, I expected them to start finding torture, attacks on civil liberties, and unrestrained executive power much less bothersome once they were wielding those weapons themselves. Perhaps above all else, I expected their whole “dissent is patriotic” shtick to fade away as well. However, I really didn’t expect the change to be quite so abrupt. It's a demonstration of an important lesson libertarians need to keep in mind- neither liberals nor conservatives are actually very good on the issues they're supposedly on the right side of.

This phenomenon- and especially the hysterical liberal reaction to the supposed menace of right-wing extremists with the temerity to use their outdoor voices at protests- reminds me of a scene in the novel 1984. At the height of a Hate Week rally, an Ingsoc Party official is whipping the crowd into a frenzy against Oceania’s hated enemy, Eurasia. Mid-speech, he is quietly handed a document by one of the other officials and instantly starts railing against Oceania’s hated enemy Eastasia, with whom Oceania has always been locked in a deadly struggle alongside Oceania’s steadfast ally Eurasia. The crowd, noticing that all the Hate Week posters still say that Eurasia is the enemy and has always been the enemy, conclude that traitors are trying to sabotage Hate Week by spreading confusion and lies, and in their righteous outrage begin tearing down and destroying posters bearing slogans they had been shouting themselves only moments before. (I don't have the book in front of me, so I may have mixed up Eurasia and Eastasia. Which would be quite fitting, of course.)

I think a lot of it is sincere, in the sense that many of the people acting this way are not motivated by cynical partisan point-scoring and really do feel that things that were outrages crying to Heaven for justice when done by the Bush administration suddenly stop mattering when Obama is in charge. People can have tremendous power to believe things they weant to believe, and too many people have too much emotional energy invested in loving Obama and hating Bush as the definitive evil in American history to start wondering how different they actually are. Much the same can be said of many conservatives.

I wish that weren’t the case- in some ways I find the idea of people behaving that way, and the power of the human mind to warp itself to escape reality, more disturbing than the idea that they are simply amoral hypocrites. Tribalism is a powerful thing, and the drive to believe- not just say, but truly, genuinely believe- what you want to believe is probably even stronger.

Claiming ownership

Donald Boudreaux has a great post on draft registration. In the post, he explains how he described the concept of draft registration to his young son:

It's part of the government's effort to make you think that your life ultimately belongs to it and not to you. The government wants you to believe that you're obliged even to die for it if it commands you to do so.

Boudreaux goes on to describe registration as a “degrading ritual,” which strikes me as right on the money. I remember when I registered, and I felt… I guess “cheapened” is the best word, as if I was admitting that I wasn’t worth enough to claim my life as my own.

This is a key part of why I find all the ideas for compulsory “national service” for young people, military or otherwise, so repulsive. It would be another way for the government to loudly proclaim, to each young person entering adulthood, that your life belongs to the state, not to you. Some supporters of these schemes all but admit that this is the point, with their talk of instilling a sense of “community obligation” or the like. Indeed, requiring recent high school graduates to spend their time working on government “service” projects for months or years on end would drive that message home much more dramatically than a one-time act like registering for the draft.

The state isn’t just after your money, your labor, or your obedience. It’s after your soul. Never forget that.

Barbarism

Today is the 63^rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where the United States government immolated tens of thousands of innocent people and sentenced tens of thousands more to slower but no less awful deaths by radiation sickness and cancer. Some recommended reading on the subject: Historian Ralph Raico on the circumstances of the bombing, some additional historical context from Gregory P. Pavlik, a more visceral post on the subject by Rad Geek, and some thoughts from Anthony Gregory. I can’t improve on them.

A while back, I remember some conservatives wailing/gloating about the results of some survey that showed the percentage of American Muslims who thought bombing attacks on civilians were at least sometimes acceptable; this, we were told, showed how dangerous they were. I wonder how many Americans polled today would say that the devastation of Hiroshima (or Nagasaki, or Dresden, or Tokyo) was justified. I’d be extremely surprised if it wasn’t a majority; liberals and conservatives alike are deeply invested in the idea of the Good War. It would be more even more interesting to know how many of the people shrieking about the menace of barbarous Muslims would say that burning tens of thousands of innocents alive at Hiroshima was the right thing to do- but, sadly, I suspect I have a good idea of the answer to that.