According to the NY Times, “[The Baker Commission Report] warned that if the situation continues to deteriorate, there is a risk of a ”slide toward chaos (that) could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe.”

”Neighboring countries could intervene. …. The global standing of the United States could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized,” commissioners said.”

Gee – Ya think?  Am I the only one who thinks this assessment accurately reflects the situation as it was about two years ago?  It takes no genius to forecast the past.

And we have a good historical example of how well the main recommendation works – we called it “Vietnamization of the conflict”.  Hold that helicopter, please!!! 

( – promoted by odum)

I sat at lunch yesterday with a former Egyptian ambassador to the UN and asked him his opinions on Bolton.  Interesting response – not very diplomatic, but he is retired.  He felt that Bolton’s problems were along two dimensions – one was a very abrasive and arrogant personality, not a good quality in a diplomat.  The other was a policy platform dictated from Washington.  The result was three major strategic failures that discredited him and the US.
1.  There was an attempt by Bolton to hijack the UN budget management process.  The USA pays about 20% of the UN budget, but wanted to have 100% control over the management of the spending.  This was soundly rejected by the General Assembly.  Now  one could certainly make a case for UN reform and greater efficiency, and maybe if the US were viewed as more benign by the world there could have been granted disproportionate influence, but everyone is so pissed off at us that this was a battle that was lost before it began, and a person with half a brain would have know that.
2.  Choosing a South American seat for the Security Council.  Venezuela never had a chance, but the American choice, Guatemala, was soundly rejected and Panama was chosen as a compromise for the 2 year term.  This loss was widely viewed as a major blow against the US.
3.  The USA was voted off the UN Human Rights Commission in a stunning rebuke that was supported not only by the developing countries that we routinely criticize, but also by western countries that are tired of “do as we say, not as we do” chest thumping by the US.  This occurred before Bolton’s tenure, but he has done nothing to repair the regard for the US, especially in the face of charges of US torture, renditions, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc.

Noting that a number of court cases have gone aganst Bush’s claims of omnipotence, wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those conservative judges that the Repubs fought so hard to get appointed turn out to actually believe in the Constitution and effectively overthrow John Woo and Cheney?

I predict that Dick Cheney will resign soon and Bush will appoint a Rove type as VP, effectively appointing his successor by making that person the automatic front runner for the Repub presidential nomination, and head off McCain.  My bet at this time is Frist.  Earlier, I would have said DeLay, but not anymore.

( – promoted by odum)

This was said at the Values Voters Summit in Washington DC over last weekend, according to a report in the Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cm…

Bill Bennett, a conservative radio host, said that when US soldiers were killed and dragged through the streets in Falluja, Iraq, “you take out Falluja. You level Falluja. You have to teach them that American life is not cheap”.  First, as far as I recall, they were not US soldiers, they were “contractors” i.e. mercenaries, though Bennett’s implication is that they were being paid by the CIA or something.  Second, I don’t recall Jesus condoning one act of savagery in response to another – or do I misunderstand what  Values Voters think they stand for?  I guess it’s OK to kill Iraqi men, women and children for revenge, but it’s not OK to stop an 8 cell lump of protoplasm from continuing to divide.

I am in a dialog with a friend who sent me an article from the LA Times, September 18, 2006 entitled “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.” By Sam Harris.  She is the same person that sent the list of Jewish and Muslim Nobel Prize winners. (See my post of Sep 17th).  The article makes some serious claims, you can get the gist of it from my specific responses at the bottom.  Here is my reply:

The article covers a lot of ground, and I won’t try to address it all specifically.  The author says he has written books on the various subjects and it is clear that almost every sentence is the conclusion at the end of a chapter.  I don’t want to write a book and you don’t want to read one. 

But the short answer is that I do not agree that liberals (as represented by me) are “soft on terrorism.”  Instead I believe that generally, terrorism can be defeated only by addressing three factors:  (1) the sense of overwhelming outrage and injustice against the west, especially the US.  This has a lot of sources, only one of which is uncritical support for Israel.  (This is a long discussion)  (2) The sense of powerlessness and repression that make asymmetric warfare the only feasible tool, and (3) the hopelessness and despair that make suicide bombers willing to strap it on.  (By the way, it is interesting to contrast suicide bombers with the motivations of  Japanese kamikaze pilots, who were generally educated young men with a lot to live for.  The similarities are a lot greater between them and the London and 9/11 bombers than the ones in Israel and Iraq.)  My characterization of the opposing (conservative) view is that we can defeat them by killing them, often along with whoever is standing nearby.  I don’t think so.  That just feeds the cycle.

But the article is about a lot more than that – it is about the role of religion.  That is a complicated issue, and instead of dealing with the article directly, I will try to describe something else – I’m not sure what to call it, but it is a result from the combination of my studies, experiences and personal and family history that forms the way I look at the world.

1. What we are pleased to call “western civilization” is one which emerged in Europe as a result of the Norse invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries, and is based on the notion of the individual as the fundamental unit.  Oriental societies before and since are based on the tribe as the fundamental unit.  This view emerged from the quasi-religious based system of paternalistic families evolving into tribes, where the divine or divinely-sanctioned ruler is the father and the family members-subjects exist to preserve the family-tribe.  The individual is unimportant.  You can see the difference in the way “I” is formed in various languages.  In European languages it is an explicit and separate word, but as one goes east, it runs into an ending on a verb and becomes indistinct, finally disappearing.  The Norse and other barbarian languages which have a word for “I”, gradually replaced Latin after the overthrow of the Roman Empire. (Read Borkenau on this subject.)
2. The fundamental psychological problem of humans – the price of the self-awareness that animals mostly seem to lack – is the knowledge of eventual death.  The fear of death generates a psychological insistence on the existence of an afterlife, despite the total lack of any evidence for it – it is founded not on reason but on faith.  And it is religion that provides the framework for that faith.
3. Reasoned judgment requires hard work – it requires thought, investigation and information.  It requires constant questioning, because we are always acquiring new information as a result of experience, both personal and historic.  And that means that one has to be open to changing ones mind and admitting being wrong. It’s like a system of cogs and wheels that works to turn a system in one direction –if you add one more cog, the direction reverses.  A statistician calls it the “missing variables” problem.  It is much easier to check one’s brain at the door of the church, allowing the priests to make the rules.  Surrendering reason to faith is the easy path, because it does not require judgment.
4.  In the West, individualism after the end of the Viking wars over time generated a huge number of sects and churches in the various Protestant traditions.  But in the Orient, that fragmentation is much less pronounced, with just a few large separations into Shia and Sunni.  And that was based not on individual interpretation of dogma but on historical arguments about legitimacy of succession.  It is Orientalism that guided the historical development of Islam, not the other way around.  And that means at the extreme, that there is a willingness to sacrifice others and oneself for the benefit of the tribe and its ruler, and a view that it is the duty of the faithful to do so.  A good example is the Assassin cult that arose during the Crusades.  It is not Islam as a religion but Orientalism that has been cloaked in Islam that generates this.
5. Religion provides a story of divinity and a variety of myths that enable faith, but because faith is the easy way, it can overcome reason.  And religion, by emphasizing the mysterious and unknowable and by introducing rituals and rites and secret knowledge, creates a gap between “us” and “them.” This creates the opening used by politicians throughout history to use religion as a means of manipulation to achieve worldly ends that are cloaked with justification by religion. This is what Marx meant when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses.  Much of the human – generated evil that has existed in the world has been justified in these ways.
6. It is interesting that the Romans never undertook religious wars.  They were polytheists, and that necessarily generated tolerance of multiple gods.  It was not until Akhenaten’s, Abraham’s, Moses’, and later Mohammed’s widespread monotheism that large scale religious persecution and wars justified by divine revelation began.  The Albigensian Crusade in France, the Crusades to the “Holy Land”, the various religious persecutions and religious wars throughout European history, all had “god on our side” and were positioned as a battle between good and the other – the  evil – religion.  My father and grandfather lived through the Armenian (Christian) massacres by Turkey (Muslim), and told me vivid stories of that time.  My mother’s family lived through the rise of the Nazis (state religion)  in Germany and told me vivid stories of that time.  Bush Senior fought in that war and lived through that history, and understood this, but his son, who is poorly educated and seems ignorant of almost everything except faith, has no clue.
7. The Enlightenment was at its core a separation of religion from the affairs of state.  The Constitution is a product of the Enlightenment.  The First Amendment was not put there just to protect religion from the state but also to protect the state from religion.  For the divine right of kings, it substituted elections and a human-based system of checks and balances.  It looks like religious “conservatives” want to return to the pre-Enlightenment structure.  I don’t. 
8. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, in physics and in human society (where Hegel calls it dialectics).  We tend to become our enemy. That is what is so infuriating to me about Bush.  He is turning the US into a version of the enemy that he opposes, breaking down the separation of government from religion, with international aggression, police state tactics, and a belief that it’s OK if we do it but not if others do.  He seems prepared to thoughtlessly destroy the Constitution, which is what makes the United States exceptional, and that gives us a moral stature in the world that has almost totally evaporated.  And we have nothing to show for it, even in Bush’s own terms of reference. 

So to come back to the article:
– I agree that religion should be kept out of public life.
– I share the view that there are many legitimate unanswered questions about 9/11, although my general rule is not to explain by malice what can be attributed to sheer incompetence.
– Neither the US nor the Israelis are innocent of killing civilians, and the view in the region is that neither we nor they try very hard to not do so.  It is not so much that opponents are inhumanely using human shields, but that they are part of the fabric of their societies. Mao Tse Tung said that a guerilla must swim in the population like a fish swims in the ocean and Hamas and Hezbollah do.  Anyway, Muslims live their religion at a level that a fundamentalist Christian would understand perfectly.  But in the Middle East, everybody is that way, not just a minority as in the West.
– Israel does not hold the moral high ground against Hamas and Hezbollah as far as people in the region are concerned.  The article is totally wrong on that.  Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has put it into the same moral category as South Africa under apartheid.  And if the US generally accepts and supports his view, which it does, then this puts the US also on the wrong moral side.
–  Liberal tolerance is not the problem; it is part of the solution.  The rest of the solution involves education, economic development, decent jobs, and an opportunity for the hope that the future will be better than the past. The problem is not whether there is life after death, but whether life after birth can be made tolerable, rewarding and hopeful.  That’s how you defeat terrorism.

I recently received again and from a different source an e-mail that lists out separately the winners of Noble prizes that are jewish compared to a listing of those that are “muslim” – actually those that are arabs.  Apparently this list, which shows about an 18 to 1 ratio of Jewish winners to muslim winners, is making its way around the Internet.  I had ignored it the first time, but seeing it the second time, though I am neither jew nor muslim, I had to respond.

First I tried to be ironic: 
  I don’t get the point the list is trying to make.  Is it “Muslims are stupid and Jews are smart?”Or is it “Jews publish in European languages that are widely read, but Muslims publish in languages and alphabets that the Nobel Commission doesn’t understand?”  Or is it “Jews contribute and Muslims don’t?” Or is it “Jews excel in categories that the Nobel Commission values, while Muslims and other ethnic groups excel in categories that are valued by other types of organizations?” Or is it just flat out bigoted Muslim bashing? 

But irony was lost on my reader, so here it is in plain speech:

It does not surprise me that this is getting circulated at a time when the Israelis are being accused of war crimes in Lebanon for their indiscriminate attacks on civilians there.  According to Reuters, “Killed in the conflict were 1,187 Lebanese civilians and 44 Israeli civilians.. Almost one third of the Lebanese civilian casualties were children under 13 years of age.” (That actually puts the multiplier at
27 to 1).  I realize that Hizbollah’s hands are not clean either.

To me the message that such a list sends is that a Jew (read “Israeli”) is somehow worth about 18 times more than a Muslim (read “Arab.” Of course,  most Muslims are not Arabs). In other words, the real subtext message here is that Jews are  more “valuable” than Muslims, and this superiority means that a dead Muslim is worth about one-fifth of a dead Jew – sort of a Dred Scott calculation. The bad things that follow from accepting that kind of thinking  range from genocide through ethnic cleansing to apartheid, to Nuremberg Laws, second-class citizen status and other forms of discrimination.  Ask Nelson Mandela.

So what’s up with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and Bush’s orchestgrated new reference point linking their war to 1939 and WW2 against the Nazis. (Interesting that this rhetoric seems to be a replacement for analogies to the Cold War against godless communism.) There are a lot of semiotics in that language:
1. The Nazis were evil people, therefore, our opponents are evil people.
2. The Nazis were the aggressors that started WW2, therefore our opponents are the aggressors in this war.
3. The Nazis were anti-Semitic racists who persecuted the Jews, therefore opposition to Israel’s policies in Labanon and the occupied territories is anti-Semitic and racist.
4. The world was united (except for Italy, Japan and for a while the Soviet Union) against the bad guys and won, therefore, if the world – especially US voters – would unite in support of the Bushies against the bad guys, we will “win.”
5. Appeasement in 1939 encouraged the Nazis to invade Poland and begin WW2, therefore  “appeasement” (i.e. US withdrawal from Iraq) will encourage more attacks on us.
6. The legal climate of a Congressionally formally declared war against sovereign nations allowed FDR to do things that would never have been allowed otherwise – e.g. interning Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps, holding military tribunals, instituting a draft…, therefore Bush should have the same authorities in the war against terrorism.

None of these associations are made explicit in the speeches, and they are so wrong at so many levels, they fall apart under even the most superficial historical scrutiny, but the unspoken associations have power that shapes attitudes.  And these guys know how to shape the debate using this kind of rhetoric.

( – promoted by odum)

There is a huge battle going on about (Inter)Net Neutrality.  For those of you who don’t follow this, the fixed line telco phone companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc) are arguing that they should be able to give priority routing for Internet traffic over their networks to content owners that pay a premium for the better service.  It has been characterized as providing an “express lane” for information. 

Most of the opposition has been driven by content providers like Google, who argue that the historic neutrality of the information transportation network to what is sent over it should be maintained and the FCC should maintain “net neutrality.” 

But there is another element to this argument that is at least as serious if not more; this has to do with Plain Old Telephone Services.  This was the old telco monopoly, but now it is threatened by a technology known as VOIP (never mind) that uses the Internet.  This bypasses the interconnection charges that the telcos impose on their competitors when a call terminates onto the telco network.  The telcos are desperate to retain this revenue, but as more and more phone calls get carried by folks like Skype and Vonage, the telcos feel increasingly threatened.  Hence, the proposal for a “two-tiered” pricing system.

The impact of the telco tactic becomes clear in this report from the OECD:

“Typically all Internet traffic receives equal priority on a first-come-first-served basis with no guarantee of delivery. As a result, aplications need to use error checking and request any packets that may not have arrived. The architecture was designed, and works best
for less time-sensitive applications such as e-mail and file transfer protocol. This is because packets are not sent over a dedicated channel and may arrive out of sequence or with a slight delay. A delay of a few seconds makes little difference to e-mail users but can completely disrupt a phone conversation using VoIP
or a data stream of a live event.”

So the telco two-track approach would let them either degrade the service quality  of their competitors to where it is not usable, or load charges onto the telephone calls of their competitors, which would raise their costs, make them less competitive, probably require higher prices, maintain telco profits, and hurt the consumer; all  to protect a 19th century technology from 21st century competition.

At least the oil companies rip you off to your face!