Friday Review: The Impeachment Question

Over the past year or so, the call to impeach Bush has grown increasingly mainstream and self-confident. According to this Salon article, which gives a useful recap of the movement to impeach Bush, twenty-six House Democrats, including minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, support the creation of a select committee to investigate the possibility of impeachable offenses. Bush stands accused of all kinds of high crimes and misdemeanors, such as taking the US to war on false premises, violating the constitution, and authorizing torture.

The House Judiciary Committee could probably make a pretty good case for drawing up articles of impeachment. Lying to go to war might not technically be a high crime, but unjustifiably suspending various aspects of the constitution certainly is. In certain ways, Bush has sprung his own trap. By claiming extreme times demand extraordinary powers, he indicates that he can be judged only by extraordinary measures, not normal checks and balances. Surely this is what impeachment was established for: a congressional check on executive power to be used only under the most extreme circumstances.

However, impeachment is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Some liberals, like Harold Meyerson, have argued that impeachment is imprudent right now because it’s not going to be the kind of unifying national campaign slogan that will win the Democrats the mid-term elections. It would drain too many political resources away from the campaigns themselves. Yet by this logic, it is hard to see how impeachment would be a good idea even after the mid-term elections. Just from the standpoint of the Democrats themselves, surely political capital would be better spent trying to repeal the Patriot Act, demanding the closure of Guantanamo or insisting on the withdrawal of troops, than trying to take down the President.

If we take a step back from electoral politics, we can see even more serious problems with impeachment. The fundamental problem facing American democracy, which we have discussed before, is a structural crisis, in which Congress defers and the Supreme Court acquiesces to the accumulation of powers by the Presidency. Both parties have participated in this process, and there is little reason to believe either of them will sincerely address the issue. This basic problem has been shunted to the margins of public debate, while matters of personality, specific policies, inter-party differences, or moral integrity have taken center stage. It is not that certain threats to democracy, like unconstitutional wiretapping, aren’t discussed, but that they are at most identified with a specific person (Bush) or party (Republicans). The incessant debates about these issues and the demand to ‘do something’ about them ends up reproducing the climate of crisis and immediate action that forecloses more considered political debate. Politics becomes about issue-hopping and damage-control, rather than a serious interrogation of our democracy.

In this context, impeachment easily becomes a misleading proxy for real democratic change. Putting the waste of time that was Clinton’s impeachment to one side, think of Nixon. For two years the nation was consumed in a public debate about Nixon’s shenanigans – illegal wiretapping, slush funds, blackmailing, cover-up, break-in. At the end of it, Nixon stepped down, and the Congress passed a few pieces of legislation, like the War Powers Act, which erected paper barriers against presidential powers. The final outcome was public exhaustion and cynicism with politics, and a massive expenditure of energy with no real long-term improvement in American democracy. One might say we ended up worse off, as the public was left with a vision of political institutions as irredeemably corrupt, and intractable to real democratic change.

The reason impeachment is not a powerful device of democratic change is that it is a special legal proceeding. It works according to the principle of individual responsibility. As a tactic of political change, therefore, it has the tendency to transform broad social problems into matters of individual behavior and responsibility. Legal proceedings by nature cannot directly address social forces or historical trends, and at worst can occlude them. It can give the impression of symbolic victory without substantive change, or confuse deposing an individual with political transformation.

This confusion of the person and the wider problem is already in evidence. According to the Salon article, in a town hall meeting in New York about impeachment, one of the panelists said:

““We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said, "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back.””

The move from ‘republic to tyranny’, or at least erosion of democratic liberties, has been going on for quite some time. It was not all wine and roses before Bush, and deposing Bush would put…Cheney in the helm. Or if both went, House Speaker Dennis Hastert – not exactly a champion of democracy.

The point is not merely that impeachment won’t really change things. It might even serve to redeem the very political system that we should be criticizing. Impeachment would here serve as a piece of political theater, making Congress look like it is serving its designed checking function instead of exposing both parties’ complicity.

As the Salon article quite reasonably asks:
“But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.”

In other words, what nobody has really explained is how getting rid of Bush will address the evisceration of American democracy. Impeachment does not appear to be part of any grand strategy. A strategy presumes relative clarity about first principles and fundamental problems. But if anything, at the moment, it seems to substitute action for thinking. Impeachment would signal a rehabilitation of the totally uninspiring ‘Anybody But Bush’ slogan that dominated the 2004 electoral debate on the left. Democrats hide behind the anti-Bush slogan, hoping nobody will notice that they don’t really know what they stand for.

One might argue that impeachment could acquire a dynamic of its own by bringing to the fore issues like accountability, democracy and the separation of powers. While the Democrats focused on Bush, public debate might start taking these issues more seriously, and start holding both parties to these standards. This might give impeachment some instrumental value as a strategy for improving democracy. However, we know what the public debate will be like – Did Bush lie? Did he know he lied? Does it matter if he knew he lied? Did he violate the constitution? Did he know he violated the constitution? Who told him what? Did Congress give him the power? Was it a high crime? What is a high crime and misdemeanor?

In other words, it will be as it was with Clinton and Nixon – an emphasis on technical legal issues, and personal behavior. Any attempt to leverage the impeachment debate into a broader discussion of institutional crisis and first principles faces an uphill battle. After all, it would mean trying to focus debate on precisely the kinds of social and political trends that impeachment is ill-suited to addressing. If such discussions had any impact, they would actually point away from focusing energy on mere impeachment, and therefore seem to run at cross-purposes with what’s going on at the moment. The essential problem facing our society is its unwillingness to face the long-term evisceration of democratic liberties. It is not the presence of Bush but the absence of a democratic movement that is most problematic today. By focusing on personalities, specific policies, and particular actions, impeachment is unlikely to raise, and just as likely to lower, the level of debate. Impeachment promises to be a piece of political theater, which serves no critical function.

Friday Review: The Antiwar Position Revisited

The raison d’etre of the war on terror is that it makes us safer. Security, however, is never an end in itself, it is only worthwhile as a means to other ends. We can only measure different security arguments against these ends. For instance, we know that in domestic politics, security is supposed to be a means to liberty, or living a free life. Since demands for security can have authoritarian consequences, we do not accept all of them, and we are, or at least should be, critical of them. We expect there to be some criteria by which we distinguish between real and unreal threats, and between policies that sacrifice too much liberty to security.

The problem with the war on terror, is that it makes security an end in itself. It doesn’t even admit of external principles against which we can distinguish rational and irrational demands. Any act that makes us feel safer is presumed to be justified. Logically speaking, an enemy does not even have to exist. All that has to exist is a perception of threat for a security demand to be seen as valid. This eliminates any rational grounds for criticism because the only standard left is not the materiality of the threat, or the value of security in relation to other principles, but simply our, or really our politicians’, feelings. So in the domestic sphere, we are asked to trade whatever liberty is necessary to make us safe, rather than recognize that some demands for security are unjustified or unnecessary because they have no rational purpose – they do not actually make us safer.

Within our own society, we at least recognize an alternative principle – liberty – against which to measure and criticize different demands for security. But when it comes to international relations it is unclear what the analogous principles are. It is that the antiwar position has failed to come up with an adequately powerful set of arguments. As we have written here before, it is insufficient and potentially problematic to be merely against the war in Iraq, but not against the war on terror. One reason is that the focus on the war on Iraq has lead to an overemphasis on problems that appear specific to that war, and therefore failed to develop properly principled positions. Much of the opposition has focused on the dishonesty, venality, and criminality of the war. Even as criticisms of the Iraq War, these arguments are insufficient:

Lies: It is true that Bush lied, but had he not lied the war still would have been wrong. Even if Saddam had possessed large stocks of biological and chemical weapons, and even if he
had been seeking nuclear weapons, he would not have posed anything like an immediate threat to the United States. This was the leader of an incredibly weak country, ravaged by ten years of sanctions, and unable even to mobilize his soldiers for symbolic military exercises, let alone some kind of attack on the United States.

Corruption: It is also true that there is all kinds of venal, war-profiteering amongst Bush's corporate friends. But this, too, would not be an argument against the war if the war had been necessary.

Illegality: Likewise, it is true that the war was illegal. But calling into question the legality of the war, on its own, does not challenge the important political questions: was Saddam a threat, was this war necessary, and when is it appropriate to violate the sovereignty of another nation?

The fundamental problem with this war was that it was the unjustified violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Nor is this a matter of Iraq alone. The deeper problem with just critiquing the Iraq War is that the overarching war on terror is left unaddressed. The war on terror is presupposed as a background to the debate, rather than brought to the fore as the central issue for us to discuss. Yet it is relevant even for the Iraq War. Why were people so willing to believe that Saddam was a threat given that he clearly was not? It is not so much that the public was manipulated, but that the Iraq debate was and is deeply interwoven with the war on terror itself. This means that all debate takes place in a climate of fear, in which to challenge any particular claim - like Saddam is a threat - is also to challenge the underlying premise that even the most remote and undefined threats must be assailed 'pre-emptively'.

Here is where a critique of the war on terror is simply unavoidable, and where the need for a set of political principles for assessing global affairs is necessary. Having mainly substituted cynicism for criticism, the antiwar position has left us sorely lacking. When considering just the international dimensions of the war on terror, the alternative principles, against which we can measure security demands, are self-determination and sovereignty. The defense of self-determination abroad derives from the same commitment to freedom and democracy at home. Every nation is capable of becoming a democratic society, but only if it is allowed to determine for itself the shape of its own institutions. Only in this way do their institutions become expressions of their own, collective will. Democratic liberties are only won when they are seized by the people themselves. But for this process of self-determination to take place, then the sovereignty, or territorial integrity and political independence, of these nations must be respected. Sovereignty is instrumental to self-determination. Non-intervention must be the norm. (Of course, the erosion of sovereignty did not begin with Bush).

If sovereignty is the norm, then that means powerful nations, like the United States, cannot invade or otherwise intervene in the affairs of others states whenever it feels worried, or has a hunch about some potential security threat. The threat must be imminent, real and over-powering. Security as a reason for war is only potentially justified when it is in self-defense because survival is a precondition for self-determination: a society cannot determine its fate if it is about to be invaded and destroyed, as the Iraqis and Afghanis now well know. That there is some possibility, some 'unknown unknowns' in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, is not a good reason for war. Iraqi sovereignty should not have been violated. Wars whose justification is simply that some other state *might* someday be threatening, or *might* have some weapons, is simply an invitation for powerful states to act on whatever hunch it might have, with no rational limitations on its actions. It is a prescription for permanent war. If we accept sovereignty as a norm, and self-determination as the principle we are aiming at, then we at least possess a rational standard for assessing, and criticizing, various justifications for war. Having a 'bad feeling about things' is not enough.

Finally, as we have mentioned before, a defense of self-determination and sovereignty is not merely important for what happens internationally and in other countries. By rejecting the idea that the state can go to war to address even the most unfounded and speculative of fears, we also impose restraints on our own government. That is to say, we defend our own process of self-determination, by rejecting our government's attempt to impose a permanent state of war and suspend domestic politics. In this way, by defending sovereignty we allow other nations to retain some of their own political autonomy, and we recover some of our own democratic agency. We must develop the principles that allow us to break free from the politics of fear, suspicion, and irrational conjecture.

Friday Review: Confronting the Backlash

On the fourth anniversary of 9/11 the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article by journalist and professor Mark Danner, taking stock of the war on terror. In it he made the familiar argument that, not only had the war on terror failed to achieve its original objectives, it had in fact increased the danger of terrorism by encouraging an Islamist backlash against US policy. As Danner put it, "Al Qaeda has now become Al Qaedaism...[U]nder the American allied assault, what had been a relatively small, conspiratorial organization has mutated into a worldwide political movement, with thousands of followers eager to adopt its methods and advance its aims."

Variations of this argument are made across the political spectrum. Conservative former CIA spook, Michael Scheuer, advances it in his book, 'Imperial Hubris', while the leftist collective 'Retort' echo Danner in their book 'Afflicted Powers', claiming Al-Qaeda "appears to have transformed itself from a vanguard organization into something like a mass movement with a nearly unlimited pool of potential operatives." But such accounts are highly problematic. First, they fail to recognize the apolitical, introverted character of the radical jihadis. Second, they tend to conflate a series of different movements, which need to be differentiated in order appropriately to assess them.

In fact the jihadis of Afghanistan were never strongly connected to the Muslim societies they claim to represent. This both predates and stems from their experience of Afghanistan. Initially, a number of the key figures had been active in domestic Islamist politics around the Middle East. The failure of these movements, crushed by the states in which they took place over the 1980s and early 1990s left the leadership disenchanted with their own societies. Afghanistan allowed them to re-pose their struggle on a more cosmic level, in the grand Manichean terms of a war against the great atheist power (the Soviet Union). They no longer had to relate to the needs of the impoverished urban masses who had been their target audiences in Cairo, Algiers or Damascus. Us funding of the mujahadeen's war meant that they did not even have to build strong links with the local Afghan resistance. There was frequent tension between the concrete goals of the latter group and the more ephemeral aims of the Arab and South Asian jihadis who arrived in their country.

In this new cosmic jihad the individual salvation, through martyrdom, of the jihadi assumed central importance. There are many tales from the Afghan war of foreign fighters holding positions long after it became clear they were doomed and in fact begging not to be withdrawn or relived. In his excellent study 'Landscapes of the Jihad', Faisal Devji, a professor of history at the New School for Social Research, claims that the jihad is now "more ethical than political in nature". That is to say, the actions of jihadis are not performed according to a traditional political calculation of means and ends. The symbolic character of the act has become its central purpose, rather than any specific aim it furthers or achieves. Rather than acting as political representatives of a movement or people, jihadis act as atomized consciences disclosing their inner soul.

This explains how the attacks of 9/11 could come straight out of the blue. Unlike the assault on Pearl Harbor, to which 9/11 is so often compared, there was no logic or rational calculus behind the latter. As Devji puts it "While the attacks of 9/11...were meticulously planned, they were at the same time completely speculative as far as their effects were concerned, since these could neither be predicted with any degree of certainty, nor controlled in any fashion." This stands in clear contrast to the calculations of the Japanese who, while they knew they were taking an enormous risk in attacking the US, only did so at the end of an exhaustive process of strategic consideration. Likewise the failure of Al Qaeda to claim many of their attacks, in the manner adopted by all major terrorist groups over the years, suggests an ambiguity as to their goals.

But while this might make Al Qaeda unpredictable and shocking, this is not a sign of their strength. As Devji makes clear "As the kind of acts that have moved beyond the rationality of intentions, such excesses now characterise the totality of the jihad's action, which has lost intentionality because it has lost control over its own global environment" (emphasis added). This is also a stark limitation on the likely spread of jihadi Islamism throughout the world, and has been a critical factor in its marginalized character. For the vast majority of people in the Muslim world, the jihad, with its inability to control outcomes or to guarantee any kind of results from its actions, will always be a terrifying prospect. In the form practiced by the radical Islamists, jihad can only mean chaos for those populations. These populations remain vividly aware of their lack of connection to and representation in jihadist circles.

This fact works against the popular idea that a 'backlash' against US policies is benefiting Al Qaeda's cause and leading to mass 'Al Qaedaism'. While there is no doubt widespread animus toward the US for its pursuit of two bloody wars in the Muslim world, there is little reason why this should translate into active support for the jihadis. The people of the region would no doubt rather accept the domination of the Ba'ath in Syria, National Democratic Party in Egypt, or Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, to the instability and violence of the jihad. Events in Iraq can only underscore that cynicism toward Bin Ladin and his ilk.

Indeed, even in that most extreme situation - Iraq under US occupation - it is not clear the radical jihadis have been able to make deep inroads into the local society. It has become apparent that Iraqi insurgents have begun to distance themselves from bloody and indiscriminate tactics practice by the likes of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. The latest report from the International Crisis Group notes that the insurgents have become increasingly concerned about their public image. While there is nothing in the ICG report to suggest that the Iraq insurgents are about to hand Zarqawi over to the US, we might read this shift as evidence that the Iraqi Sunnis are imposing a more rigid political framework on the foreign fighters operating in their country. When the jihad is forced to contend with local actors and conditions, the ends/means calculus soon reasserts itself, as do the requirements of tailoring political action to suit the interests of those one claims to represent.

That also describes the situation facing the various reformist Islamist parties. While the controversy about the election of Hamas rages on, what is often missed is the long term drift of the party toward the mainstream, here detailed in an article by Graham Usher, veteran Occupied Territories correspondent. This is a party for whom the political landscape is fundamentally shaped by the need to meet the expectations of their constituency - for whom success will be defined in the mundane terms of utility provision and economic growth. Meanwhile far from voting on the basis of a backlash against US policy, the critical issues for the Palestinian electorate seem to have been largely internal. The same constraints act upon Hizbollah in Lebanon, or the Anavatan Partisi who form Turkey's government.

In the light of this reality, we can see just how crude the 'backlash' idea is. The picture from the region is far more complex than such a simple model could ever suggest. As we have seen, there are fundamental constraints on the growth of radical jihadism. And to conflate Al Qaeda with Hamas, or other popular Islamist parties, will undermine our ability to understand and to asses either. But not only does the backlash idea misrepresent reality, it may actually legitimize the war on terror. For if US policy were actually engendering an armed, organized opposition, many of the current security measures would be more justified. Both sides of the debate need to stop opportunistically distorting the facts to suit their own political proclivities. In overstating the threat, CIA spooks, the New York Times, and radical lefties are fanning the flames of fear and misunderstanding over here, and doing a disservice to politics over there.

FRIDAY REVIEW: Human Rights and the Narrowing of Politics

For many human rights advocates, perhaps the most incomprehensible moment of the war on terror was when Bush told New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta, "No president has ever done more for human rights than I have." Given a track record of secret detentions, extrajudicial kidnappings, and torture, the remark smacked of cynicism, egomania, or both. Yet, despite the disbelief of critics, Bush himself was completely serious and would no doubt say the same again. For him, the war on terror is nothing less than an attempt to make the world safe from the threat of violence, and to create a permanent condition of global peace. At his most grandiose, Bush hopes to ensure domestic security by eliminating disorder everywhere and by ending terrorism as a political tool.

In his commitment to keeping individuals safe from violence, Bush's goals mirror those of human rights activists. Both seek an international order in which no individuals are subject to unwarranted coercion, and strong safeguards are placed on the use of force. For Bush, the war on terror is simply the most aggressive tool available for human rights promotion. By contrast, groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch argue that the very means employed by the Administration necessarily corrupt the project. The Administration fails to appreciate how its own actions and support for foreign dictators perpetuates state violence and a climate of global insecurity. As James Bovard writes, "The United States should recognize that its bankrolling and support of governments that terrorize their own people make a mockery of Bush's promise to rid the world of evil." Bovard and others argue that one can't eliminate terror by employing terroristic instruments. The best tools for pursuing peace and security are global civil society and the courts. By naming and shaming those political leaders that commit acts of violence, the international community can slowly but surely eliminate local coercion. Moreover, by creating strong judicial norms, activists can enforce legal rights in international and domestic courts -- and expand the tools available for individuals to achieve security.

As suggested in a previous post, the human rights critique of the war on terror devolves into a critique about the means appropriate to ending violence. In essence, the Administration argues for a revolutionary break, in which military force and "the long war" can once and for all achieve permanent peace. The human rights critics respond with a pragmatic defense of piecemeal action through non-coercive means. For Amnesty and company, revolutionary breaks and the terroristic violence they produce will never succeed in protecting individuals from oppression. But, the fact that this tactical disagreement constitutes the primary debate over the war on terror suggests how much has been evacuated from our political conversation.

To begin with, each side imagines rights solely in terms of safeguarding personal security -- protecting the isolated individual. For HRW and for the Administration, to be free is simply to avoid being subject to acts of violence. In a sense, both remove meaningful collective goals and ideological commitments from their place at the center of political life. If our disagreements were once motivated by the great "isms" (liberalism, nationalism, communism, fascism), today they merely concern how best to keep our bodies safe.

This is not a trivial point. It means that the prevailing human rights paradigm is gravely limited as a tool of political critique. It has no way to respond to the obvious fact that sometimes ends do justify the means. Violence may be terrible, but aren't there political objectives worthy of going to war over? HRW, of course, concedes this fact through its own support for humanitarian interventions that seek to halt ongoing or imminent mass killing. For various reasons the invasion in Iraq failed to rise to their standard of humanitarian intervention: principally due to the lack of immediate acts of violence by Saddam and the willingness to resort to force before all other options were exhausted. Despite such views, HRW still refused to take a stand explicitly opposing the initial invasion. The official explanation was that wars are matters of state policy whose support or opposition are beyond the mandate of the group. Taking the point at face value, one should be skeptical of how critical a group can be if it won't participate in life and death debates over war.

Yet, the silence also tells us that human rights groups have been struggling to figure out what exactly sets their interventions of the 1990s apart from those of the war on terror. Ken Roth wrote at the beginning of the 2004 HRW World Report of his concern that, "the Iraq War and the effort to justify it even in part in humanitarian terms risk giving humanitarian intervention a bad name." Once war had been accepted in principle as a legitimate tool to protect individuals from violence, very little intellectual space separates the human rights stance from that of the Administration. At root, the basic criticism expressed by HRW and others already takes the parameters of political debate as given. Since wars are not within the "mandate of HRW" states can fight terrorism, promote free markets, etc., so long as the means aren't self-defeating or morally unacceptable. But, if the groups themselves have justified and championed wars to end coercion and insecurity what remains of the critique? Is it now only the very pragmatic claim that criminal prosecution should have been tried first or that the U.S. should have waited for a large enough act of violence? The fact that many human rights groups equivocate on the basic substance of their opposition to the Administration -- the illegitimacy of war and coercion as useful tools -- makes it impossible for them to articulate a clear opposition. It means that the rhetoric of protecting "faraway victims" not only can be appropriated by the war on terror, but actually becomes its moral cover.

Ultimately, the rise of human rights language, employed by both Bush and his critics, underscores how liberty is now increasingly indistinguishable from security. When the Administration and NGOs debate balancing "liberty" and "security", security really exists on both sides of the equation. This has not always been the case with rights talk, and human rights talk specifically. Activists like to imagine that human rights have been with us since the beginning of time, or at least since the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Yet, reading that declaration tells us just how far we've drifted from earlier conceptions. For them, rights belonged to men as citizens: members of a political community. Such rights were forged through collective action and articulated a guideline for how state power could embody the interests of all. This may be a bit abstract, but it does emphasize what the relationship between rights and liberty once was. Rights weren't just limits on what states and terrorists could do to an individual. Instead, they provided a roadmap for how citizens acting together could liberate social and political life from hierarchy and inequality.

The human rights paradigm we see today really draws inspiration from the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its focus on securing the individual from violence. But even after its creation, there remained an alterative approach linking rights and liberty -- one often articulated by colonial independence leaders and those at the margins of Western society. Malcolm X famously said that, "The common goal of 22 million African Americans is respect as human beings, the god-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans." For him, human rights meant achieving the equal inclusion of all individuals, regardless of race, into the political community. Such rights were inherently political, and embodied the hope that through their own efforts African Americans could democratize society and alter the basic distribution of power. As Malcolm X said 'nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you are a man you take it.'

The fact that human rights today have been reduced to security-speak, easily coopted for endless war, is disconcerting to say the least. It suggests that the kind of liberty articulated by the French in 1789 and by Malcolm X in 1964 is no longer even part of our political imagination. Today we're left to debate which strategies are more likely to eliminate threat, rather than to think about the goals that might justify taking risks. To put it grandly, the transformation of human rights from a language of collective self-determination to one of risk management perfectly captures the narrowing of American politics and social possibility. If critique has any value, it has to begin by resisting this move and reclaiming the progressive potential inherent in politics.

Friday Review: Terrifying Minorities

Last week Minority Rights Group International used the release of its new report, "State of the World's Minorities 2006", to critique the war on terror. The report is the first attempt of any organization to present annual data and analysis on the situation faced by minorities globally. MRG's effort is part of a widespread development in liberal and left activism: the focus on minority harm and anti-discrimination.

Michael Lattimer, MRG’s executive director, explains that governments have transformed "what should be a struggle against terrorism into a war on minorities." Lattimer expresses a problem common to minority rights advocacy and opposition to the war on terror in general. He begins by accepting the assumptions of the war on terror and then "critiques" it for being improperly implemented. As a consequence, MRG is sanctioning the broader erosion of civil liberties in the process of opposing minority rights abuses. This is generally true of the minority rights position, and it is problematic for two reasons.

First, the minority rights position places minorities in an adversarial relationship with broader society. The focus on minorities makes the implicit point that these communities are somehow "under threat" and "vulnerable", that they need to be vigilant in protecting themselves from the rest of society. This assumption of a threat posed by society and of the vulnerability of the minority reinforces the worst assumptions of the war on terror: massively overestimated threat and massively underestimated individuals. Equally, it reinforces the war on terror’s assumption that the great threat to individuals comes from their peers and neighbors.

Minority rights groups thus find themselves mirroring the Bush administration by trading in fear. Since minority rights are constituted around the prevention of harm and protection of the vulnerable, minority rights advocates places themselves in the peculiar position of searching out such harm and even talking up threats to their communities. In anti-discrimination and minority rights logic, it makes perfect sense that advocates end up collecting discrimination "incidents" as evidence of the need for minority rights. Proving minority vulnerability justifies their agenda.

Examples abound. The war on terror has pushed Arab and Muslim advocacy groups to absurd degrees of threat deterrence. In anticipation of the US invasion of Iraq, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put together a "Muslim Community Safety Kit." In a similarly paranoid move, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) issued an advisory statement to Arab-American and Muslim-American communities, "in light of the bombings that took place in the public transportation system in London." With fear-mongering equal to any engaged in by the federal government, the ADC counseled:

IF YOUR PLACE OF WORK, PLACE OF WORSHIP, OR SCHOOL IS IDENTIFIED WITH ARABS AND/OR MUSLIMS:
* Make sure the location has an open line of communication with law enforcement.
* Make sure you know all the exits to your building.
* Make sure the location has a current emergency plan that is defined and can be implemented should the need arise.

IF YOUR CHILD CAN BE IDENTIFIED AS ARAB OR MUSLIM, OR MAY BE CONFUSED FOR BEING OF MIDDLE-EASTERN ORIGIN:
* Make sure you discuss the events with your children and that they feel comfortable speaking with an adult if they face harassment by others
* Make sure your children know what steps to take to avoid confrontation with other students.
* Work with your children's school to implement an anti- discriminatory policy.

As a "precautionary measure" the ADC proceeded to advise Arab and Muslim Americans that they should feel threatened if they, or people they are associated with, "can be identified with Arabs and/or Muslims." It cannot be in the interest of any Americans to live in this state of fear from their society, especially when the threat is almost non-existent (for the proof see CAIR’s own annual reports which attempt to document every "incident" of discrimination nationwide; violent crimes are exceptionally few). Yet CAIR and ADC believe the documentation of all discrimination minutia are an integral part of their advocacy work. Both groups have features on their websites for Arabs and Muslims to report incidents of "discrimination" or "hate." CAIR advises that all incidents be reported, "even if you believe it is a 'small' incident."

CAIR's "Muslim Community Safety Kit" is a study in war-on-terror ideology. In the advice on "Reacting to Acts of Discrimination," Muslims are instructed to "Remain calm." CAIR’s "mosque security guidelines" identify shrubs around a mosque as an "area of vulnerability", and suggests Muslims "trim shrubs" in order to reduce areas "in which criminals may hide." The safety kit concludes with an extensive "bomb threat checklist" which Muslims are to "keep near phone in case of threatening calls." Although some may have thought it impossible, CAIR seems to have stolen the prize on public service scare-mongering from even the color-coded terror threat system. And in an indication of just how far the assertion of liberty has been subsumed by the avoidance of risk, CAIR’s safety kit, incident report form, and annual reports compiling all incidents are placed under the Civil Rights section of their website.

While it is not surprising that minority groups have been sucked into the fear management politics of the rest of the country, they have nothing to gain from the development. A strong position in society cannot be achieved by insisting that one is vulnerable, and collective action cannot possibly be fostered by heightening Americans’ distrust of one another.

The second problem with the minority rights position is that, as illustrated by MRG's report, it entirely accepts the logic of the war on terror. Take the example of searches and surveillance. The minority rights challenge to many of the government’s programs is based on the fact that individuals are being singled out on the basis of their race, ethnicity or national origin. Logically, if the searches were randomized or done equally, then there would be no minority rights problem. In other words, nobody's liberties would really be violated if everyone were surveilled. Hardly a victory for liberty.

This is exactly the framework through which all present domestic war on terror discussions are taking place. Randomized, generalized searches have become the aim of law enforcement, because they ensure that the government will be able to survive any legal attack. This is what happened with the randomized New York subway search policy, recently upheld in federal court. Police commissioners testified that they designed the program specifically to be able to overcome constitutional hurdles.

This is not just a problem for resisting specific programs, it is also speaks to our priorities. No longer able to define what individual liberty is or what purposes it serves, those hoping to defend civil liberties can only identify a violation of rights when it is dressed in the garb of discrimination. Non-discrimination becomes the principle rather than liberty. This shift from a defense of liberty to anti-discrimination threatens to bring about a society in which all limitations on freedom are acceptable as long as the limitations are universally applied.

FRIDAY REVIEW: Three Problems With The Antiwar Position

The general point of this Friday Review is that the antiwar movement has failed to develop a truly critical position on the international dimensions of the war on terror. There are three places in which this failure is visible, and where we would like to propose what a truly critical, oppositional stance looks like. This Friday Review is written as something of a position paper because it doubles as one set of arguments that we will make about the international dimensions of the war on terror at our teach-in.

The first problem with the antiwar position is the almost exclusive focus on Iraq. This near total obsession with Iraq is a political mistake. It reflects an inability to relate the invasion of Iraq to the broader context of the war on terror. The problem is that the various arguments against the Iraq War – dishonest, illegal, war for oil, unilateral, risky – give the appearance that a critical position can be developed on the basis of the peculiarities of that war. While one can strike opportunistic blows in this way, it leaves the most problematic political trends unchallenged. The occupation of Iraq should be put in the broader context of post-Cold War interventionism, and the degradation of sovereignty and self-determination. This process of degradation began with humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo, whereby the sovereign equality of states, and the principle of self-determination, were cast as impediments to moral progress, rather than carrying democratic justification. These interventions have inevitably bled into state-building operations, becoming in some situations far more invasive than during the Cold War, when at least formal respect for sovereign equality existed.

The second problem relates to the first. While the antiwar position is marked by a tremendous diversity of arguments, perhaps the most pervasive is that it was based on ‘lies’. This is not a principled criticism of the administration so much as an expression of political cynicism. In fact, politics often involves lies and deception. There is nothing new, but also nothing specially important, about the fact that Bush lied to go to war. To elevate ‘dishonesty’ to the level of criticism is to adopt the same moralistic tone as the administration, and also fail to find the political point of entry. Honesty is a matter of personal integrity, but not political ethics. Liberty is a political principle. The problem with the invasion of Iraq is the problem with the administration’s diplomacy generally: the degradation of sovereignty and self-determination is not the way to foster collective liberty. Sovereignty is not a timeless principle, nor is it a guarantee that, should the autonomy of states be respected, they will immediately become democratic. In these times, however, it is the most principled way of emphasizing that truly democratic institutions only arise through the collective efforts of those governed by them, not by imposition.

Moreover, interventionism not only undermines the development of democratic processes abroad that suffer, but also at home. In pursuing his ethical and security aims abroad, Bush has loosened himself from domestic, democratic controls on foreign policy, and sought to escape the fact that he is incapable of addressing any domestic issues. In doing so, Bush follows a script written by his predecessor. Clinton used humanitarianism to transcend domestic politics, and focus attention on the suffering of others, rather than political paralysis at home. The best argument against the new interventionism is not that it is based on lies – as Kosovo and Iraq, especially, were – but on the fact that they undermine democratic liberties at home and abroad.

The final problem with the antiwar position is that the failure to develop a truly critical political principle goes hand in hand with the failure to identify the real agents of change. The antiwar movement has generally looked outside itself for effective political resistance, be it to international law, Europe, or Third World insurgents. This signals a real abdication of domestic responsibility. ‘Not in Our Name’ is not the slogan of an effective opposition so much as the manifesto of a group that has abandoned the hope of making an impact, and simply wishes go about its daily activity with a clear conscience. By trying to extricate ‘our name’ from the war, ‘we’ seem to be more concerned to keep ‘our’ hands clean than to develop a truly oppositional political agency. In this sense, the antiwar opposition seems to start from the position that it is unable to be the source of change. That is why it looks to the divine intervention of external agents to slow down the Bush administration. In doing so, the antiwar position reinforces perhaps the most conservative feature of contemporary politics: a degraded sense of political agency. Just as the best hope for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is self-determination, so too the only really effective opposition in the US will come from those who seriously believe they can be political agents. This means climbing down off the defeatist moral pedestal of ‘Not in Our Name’, and worrying more about how we can change society than the state of our conscience.

A real alternative will only emerge on the back of careful, self-conscious thinking about arguments, principles and aims. Many of the criticisms floating around right now are opportunistic, and lack a truly critical edge. Here, we are offering a starting point for developing a serious alternative. Defending the sovereignty and independence of other states goes hand in hand with taking seriously the idea of our own political agency.

FRIDAY REVIEW: Sharon

Had Ariel Sharon died two years ago, he would have been remembered as the butcher of Beirut and Jenin, a brutal general who was publicly condemned by the 1983 Kahan Commission. But this summer’s withdrawal from Gaza, followed by his split from the more ideological Likud party has reinvented him in the eyes of the world. Thus as ‘The Bulldozer’ lies critically ill in a Jerusalem hospital, the New York Times regrets the loss of a leader who might have been able to bring about a unilateral settlement to the conflict with the Palestinians “on the back of his own charisma and appeal”. Meanwhile Britain’s left-leaning Guardian lauds his ability to take “take really tough and unpopular decisions”.

But how tough have these decisions really been? Far from being a characteristic of Sharon as an individual, the extreme swings of his career simply reveals the fluidity and superficiality of contemporary Israeli politics. When examined in context, Israel’s own war on terror seems less about the assertive actions of ideologically parties, and more like a drifting ship, reacting to events without referral to any prior logic or program. In this way it provides an interesting parallel to that of the US, one which this blog aims to expose.

Today, Israeli politics appear to be irredeemably unstable, with one cobbled-together coalition following another at an alarming rate. It is worth remembering that this was not always the case; from 1948, the year the state was founded, until 1977, the country was governed by a single party, Labour. While much of the West found stability under social-democratic politics during this period, Israel remained an exceptional case, as no other party mounted a serious challenge until the early 1970s. This was largely due to the country's unique international situation, set among hostile neighbors.

War played an integral part in maintaining the political cohesion of Israel. Domestic conflicts of the kind that erupted in other states were subsumed under the higher cause of survival in the Israeli case. Labour relations, for instance, were managed through a large state union, the Histradrut. This state of constant alert was legitimized to the population in different ways during Israel's history - at first through a language of radical social democracy that played upon the experiences of many of the early Zionists and immigrants in the labor politics of Europe. Later the experience of the Holocaust was mobilized, making the case that Israel's survival was necessary for the survival of Jews everywhere.

As long as the state faced credible enemies on the outside, consensus could reign within. And Israel was able to exploit the threat further by becoming, during the 1960s, a staunch US ally against the radical Arab nationalist regimes. This was both a material and ideological prop: Israel became a massive recipient of US aid, while enjoying the prestige of a partnership with the world's foremost power. The Zionist project was sustained through these various mechanisms despite the fact that its initial impetus, European anti-Semitism, was by now an irrelevance to the vast majority of Jews.

Yet such a situation could not last. As the project of third world nationalism ground to a halt, the leading states of the movement, such as Egypt, were forced to come to terms with the West and its allies. After the wars of 1973, Egypt's pragmatic president, Anwar Sadat, went to the table and emerged from the 1979 Camp David process with the Sinai Peninsula and the second largest US annual aid package (Israel remained in first place). While the upheaval that the peace treaty caused in Egypt was perhaps more dramatic - Sadat was assassinated within two years - its impact on Israel was equally revolutionary. The dissipation of the outside threat (the menace of the remaining radical Arab regimes was largely illusory without the might and ideological pull of Egypt) left the Israeli political project without a guiding principle. The institution of the Labour party was an early casualty.

It seems as though this remains the case today. The past 25 years have been marked by a series of crisis periods, as Israeli elites have failed to find a contemporary mission for Zionism. The 1980s began with the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon, which only sharpened the cynical mood in Israeli politics. Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War - the collapse of the Soviet Union and the seismic shifts in the global balance of forces - exacerbated tensions with the US. American leaders now tend to view Israel as much as a liability as a useful ally, a tension which became apparent when Israel threatened to join the coalition against Iraq during the first Gulf War. The peace process represents one attempt to come to terms with these shifts, while Sharon et al’s tough line on the West Bank wall represents another. The two political strategies are simply symptoms of the underlying problem. Indeed, Sharon has pursued both at the same time; even as he breaks away from Likud to form his new peace-orientated party, security forces have continued to perform extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militants.

Nor is the peace/conflict axis the only direction in which Israeli politics can sway. The new leader of the Labour party, Amir Peretz, is a former trade unionist who wants to direct discussion back to the question of social justice among Israelis. The latest reports suggest, however, that this new initiative is likely to succumb to the generalized cynicism about the political leadership. Just like Sharon, the Labour party is desperately seeking a way to reconstruct the social cohesion that once marked the Jewish state. In the meantime, we can expect more stunts and pragmatism from whoever follows ‘The Bulldozer’.

Critics of the current US war on terror would do well to examine the parallel that Israel represents. Rather than focus on the outrages that these governments inarguably practice, we must get to grips with the underlying dynamics of this conflict. The war on terror throws up many contingent events. If we simply react to these, our politics will become equally contingent.