One Man's Democracy...

In a trenchant and eloquent editorial from today's Guardian, Hamas spokesman Khalid Mish'al takes the West to task. "The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections," he writes, "the world's leading democracies failed the test of democracy." We can only concur. As we have argued here before, the West's interest in democratization has little to do with self-determination.

Mish'al's fiery style stands in sharp contrast to the banal pronouncements of our own politicians, and reminds us of a more assertive period in the struggle for Third World independence. But now Hamas must find the substance to maintain political leadership in the long term. They have won the election largely by default, playing on the general dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority. The question is whether they have a positive program that can engage and mobilize the Palestinian people.

Pre-Game Show

Beneath the layers of self-advertisement and applause, tonight's State of the Union address puts us in a strange position as listeners: to imagine what's being left unsaid. More to the point, what should Bush say?

Apparently having mistaken the president's address for a college football game, Arianna Huffington is planning a drinking game for each time we hear 'rejectionist,' while the GOP 'party kit' includes big-gulp 'W' cups for ardent fans. (For some of last year's juvenile SOTU games see here.) The irony is that while each side gears up for an evening of taunting and cheering, neither side really has a critique of the other. Take the view from space: on the terrestrial surface both devout liberals and their W-loving enemies will drink each time the President says 'Freedom'. But from space one can't tell that the Dems are being ironic. The jeering and cheerleading just seems like sport. The louder they yell the less they have to make their real arguments known.

The stakes for the President, however, are high. Alito's confirmation proves that the president isn't completely powerless to achieve a few symbolic victories. But the one thing he promised, or at least took over from his father - that 'vision thing' - is what stands in question. Preemption, for example, is part of Bush's vision of American power in foreign affairs and thus a view of how the general political will can be shaped into a real force. It's a general principle orienting American power, and something Bush wants to stake his legacy on. Yet already in last year's SOTU Bush soft-pedalled pre-emption, and made hay out of ridding the world of tyrants. Something he hasn't really done much of. At this point, whether or not you accept the premises of Bush 43, you have to start asking yourself whether his administration is even true to itself. This year he has an opportunity to try and clear things up, yet one senses already that he does not know where to go.

Last year he 'dazzled' us with the smoke and mirrors of steroid abuse and nominal education reforms, but it was all too evident that the president could not put together a coherent speech. This year has given him no favors. The war on terror is limping. Iraq is a disaster and Afghanistan's new government is breaking bread with the Taliban it was supposed to eliminate. The Katrina debacle and failed Miers nomination lurks in the background. On top of which, his domestic agenda, such as it ever was, is stalled (Social Security reform) or a huge and unpopular mess (Health Care reform).

The country is not on the brink of collapse, but it lacks a serious political debate about its future. While critics and supporters top-up their big-gulps, all we expect to hear, from Bush and the echo chamber he's speaking in, is white noise filling the space where serious arguments should be. We suspect that the problem will be not what Bush says, but that he won't say very much at all.

Mind the Gap!

Condi Rice made the embarassing admission on Sunday, that the State Department had underestimated the strength of Hamas. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming...It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse" she said. Indeed, the White House seems to have been blindsided by this issue at every turn. First they try to encourage Middle East democracy, then panic about the consequences. And now, having failed to win the election for Abbas, they are trying to enforce a series of stringent conditions on Hamas.

Proving themselves unable to fix an election amongst one of the most marginalized and oppressed populations in the world, must give the White House pause for thought. Yet perhaps there is no way the White House can produce the outcomes it wants, because it does not have a clear idea of what those outcomes would be. Instead they hope that the trumpets of the war on terror, or the banalities of democratization, will fill the space where their foreign policy should be. As we have noted before this drift can have destructive consequences.

Ayman who?

We are used to flights of fancy from Al-Qaeda and their ilk. But when Ayman al-Zawahri emerged today and stated "Bush, do you know where I am? I am among the Muslim masses," we must respond. The Muslim masses of today are in Cairo, Jakarta, Karachi, Tehran, Istanbul or Damascus. Mr. Zawahri, as far as anyone knows, lives somewhere in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, a rural area with little infrastructure and relatively few people. This fact speaks to his distance, both ideologically and geographically from the Muslim masses. Indeed, as we have written here before, were it not for his fellow fantasists in the White House, we would have long since consigned Mr. Zawahri to the dustbin of history.

Students and Protestors, and Quakers. Oh My!

The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday on a parallel Pentagon spying agency that appears to be considerably larger than the NSA's program: 'CIFA, an agency created just under four years ago...now includes nine directorates and more than 1,000 employees'. The proliferation of these activities is indeed troubling, especially since they appear to be unable to distinguish peace activists and student protestors from terrorists.

But this is no surprise. The expansion of these programs is not, or is not merely, the product of Bush using new powers to go after political enemies. Rather, they expand as much as they do because the government doesn't really know who to use these powers against. It's not mere incompetence, but the scope of the problem: al-Qaeda is not the communist party, a civil rights organization, or any other large-scale social movement. The security apparatus grows in an inverse relationship to the scale of the problem.

Judicial Review: Savior or Bogeyman ? (part I)

John Kerry's ridiculous theatrics aside, the impending confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court has liberals worried. And they're right: even as Bush is increasingly isolated and powerless, he's moving to firmly ensconce his crumbling ideology in the judiciary for life. As an already rightwing court lurches sharply righward, there are intriguing signs that the American left is rethinking its half-century of faith in the judiciary. While by no means a majority position among liberals, critiques of judicial reivew (for instance, here and here) are beginning to have (and may increasingly have) a greater hearing in the shadow of the Roberts court.

This debate has everything to do with the war on terror. As some of us have argued in the past, judicial review of emergency powers has left an ambivalent record at best. While courts have occasionally acknowledged the passing of periodic bouts of repressive hysteria by the other branches, they are never at the vanguard. More frequently, judicial review of emergency powers has constributed to a normalization of emergencies by accepting elements of crisis government and integrating them within ordinary constitutional limits, leading to a more repressive and authoritarian sense of normality. This is certainly what happened in the disastrous Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, which is now exhibit A in the AG's defense of domestic wiretapping.

Signs such as this, of a growing skepticism towards judicial reivew among liberals is a welcome trend. Indeed, it would be healthy for the left to return to the attitudes of the 1910's and '20's, when mainstream Progressives such as Charles Beard called for the elimination of judicial review, and the working class rightly regarded the court as an anti-democratic force effectively denying representation to workers (if you have the time, read this for a wonderful history of judicial review during that period). But the left should avoid replacing the naive faith in the Supreme Court as a behicle for progressive social change with an equally naive demonization of the Court as the root of all that's wrong with America. Whenever the Supreme Court has behaved particularly nefariously, it has always done so as a part of society at large, not as a wholly islotated institution (more on this in part II). The critique of judicial review as an institution should not overshadow the failures, and ongoing failings, of the left to directly engage with and pursuade fellow citizens, rather than lobby an unelected judiciary. The Supreme Court has been no friend to the left, especially in recent years. But the real problem has been replacing the need for debate with litigation strategies, and the high court cannot be blamed for that one.

The Cost of War

We often hear that the cost of the Iraq war is too high. The projected financial cost of the war was a major point of discussion at the outset of the war, and today the anti-war movement continue to lament the economic burden. This month Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes presented a paper that expands on traditional budgetary estimates by folding in to the calculation indirect costs such as long-term health care for the injured and oil price increases estimated to be related to the war.

Many in the anti-war camp hail such efforts to calculate the "real costs" of the war. But, for once, the National Review gets it right. Even the highest estimates for Iraq War expenditure cannot win the political argument over whether this is a war worth fighting. Historically, war has been a very costly financial undertaking, with WWII, for example, demanding a shocking 130% of one year's GDP before it was over. Americans have yet to experience anything even resembling the economic outlay required for WWII. The question of whether the cost of a war is too high can only be answered, of course, by examining the denominator: the aims and principles of the war. To know whether the war is worth it, we have to first understand what it is. Efforts such as that by Stigliz and Bilmes, to assign numerical value to political factors not traditionally deemed costs of war, suffer from the same weakness as most of today's anti-war arguments: they hope to provide a pragmatic basis for opposing the war, without winning the political argument as to why this war isn't worth fighting.

Such efforts are bound to fail. As Bowyer put it for National Review Online, "any attempt to discredit this war based on its effect on the U.S. economy is an unnecessary distraction." He couldn't be more right. The cost of the war is neither here nor there--no matter what the number, the right war might be worth fighting. Let's elevate the war discussion from a pragmatic question of resource-allocation to the real one: what are we fighting for?

Reconstructing Incompetence

First, something you probably already know: it is now official, the president is incompetent. After two and a half years of trying to figure out how to organize an unplanned reconstruction effort, his own Inspector General reported yesterday that the process is still marked 'by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy.' The anti-imperialists out there would do well to consider how an imperial power could make so little effort to plan out the various scenarious and guarantee its interests, especially since the so-called neoconservatives had allegedly been preparing for this war ever since the US pulled up short of the Iraqi border in 1991. Contrast that with FDR, who began planning every aspect of German reconstruction in 1941, and you have to admit, we're dealing with something different, which old slogans don't quite fit.

Some further evidence, that may have escaped your attention: reconstruction blues are not just a foreign affair. The recent Medicare shenanigans suggest Bush is even more incapable of implementing his will at home. Since Bush's signature domestic reform took effect on January 1, there has been such substantial confusion and mishap that 'at least 25 states and the District have had to defray the costs to seniors that [Medicare reform] was supposed to cover'. Specific examples of chaos include 20 percent of California's Medicaid recipients losing coverage, and Maine's state assistance line logging 18,000 calls by January 3. Again, a historical example illustrates the scope of the failure to plan. When LBJ created Medicare--that's right, created it from scratch--he planned for all kinds of contingencies amongst a complex environment that included requiring hospitals to conform with civil rights legislation, and limited hospital capacity. As Jonathan Cohn reports in this illuminating New Republic piece, LBJ had helicopters in place to ferry patients from overloaded hospitals to ones with spare capacity and he had the program start in the summer, when hospital demand is the lowest. In the end, newspaper headlines read 'MEDICARE TAKES OVER EASILY'.

The relevance for our immediate political concerns is this: incompetence is an accurate description of what we're dealing with, but the deeper point is that we are facing an arbitrary power. It is arbitray not in the sense that it is unregulated, but in the sense that it has little sense of its long-term interests. This is not specific to Bush. Clinton's presidency, too, was famously about crisis-managment. He may have been somewhat better at it than Bush, but as a strategic actor, he was still unpredictable, cooking up foreign and domestic policy as he went along. In a peculiar way, this makes the task of opposition more difficult. There was a certain solidity and straightforwardness to the anti-imperialist line of the past, which makes it seductive but also probably wrong. Critiquing bunglers is in certain ways more difficult than more calculating enemies.

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.

Reconstruction With Extreme Prejudice

A little Friday morning humor for your enjoyment.

The Securitization of Everyday Life

A thoughtful reader writes in response to our blog statement "we shouldn't concede that 'security' means only 'stopping foreigners with weapons.' Greater health security, for instance, would save lives. Greater economic security would mitigate the ravages of globalization. And so on… I'm just pointing out that we should be careful not to accept the Republican frame on this."

But Republican or otherwise, all this talk about human security, economic security, environmental security etc. has a tendency to make all the things we care about only conceivable in terms of a risk assessment. The politically important thing about health care is not just that it keeps us from dying, but that it provides the conditions for us to pursue our goals and control our lives. In other words, security-speak promotes an environment in which we are unwilling to take chances, politically and otherwise, because of a plethora of fears, most of which aren't particularly rational.

The administration plays on the cultural climate of fear by constantly invoking our various insecurities (terrorism chief among them) to maintain its own authority. The Democrats simply respond by saying ‘we'll better protect you’. But they would just be playing on different kinds of fears. Of course, security is a concern, but we should describe our political goals in terms that emphasize our ability to overcome security worries and risk and make positive changes to the world. This may all sound like psycho-babble, but it's a real problem. We rarely have politicians today that inspire us with what we can do, rather than playing to our insecurities.

Be Careful What You Wish For...

The victory of Hamas in yesterday’s Palestinian election has elicited anxious statements from the White House and the EU. But that’s democracy after all, and although they tried, the West can’t decide who wins.

And despite all the hype, it is very unclear what victory for Hamas means. In this excellent article, veteran Occupied Territories correspondent Graham Usher argues that, “Hamas has gone mainstream, moving from a movement of parallel or alternative political authority to the existing PA/PLO political system to one of participation and integration within it”. In fact, with their anti-corruption message, pragmatic views on the economy, and willingness to enter the democratic process, Hamas look very much like the reform movements the West has welcomed so wholeheartedly in other parts of the region. This is the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution dressed in green.

Is the Solution Expanding the War?

On Wednesday, at a press conference for its new report on Libya, Human Rights Watch commented that, "Washington in particular, but also European governments, should be more critical of Libya's human rights record and not be silent because they are a partner in this international campaign (on terror)."

In essence, the group accused the U.S. of, on the one hand, turning a blind eye to human rights violations committed by allies in the War on Terror while, on the other hand, using the rights violations of its enemies (Hussein's Iraq or the Taliban) as part of its justification for intervention. If the goal of the war is to eliminate all the illegitimate forms of global violence that undermine peace and security, shouldn't Libya be held to account alongside Iraq? But HRW's worry about double standards is deeply troubling. Treating allies the same as enemies amounts to an invitation to expand the war indefinitely. Wherever violence and coercion exist, American police power and intervention should thereby follow. Clearly, this isn't what HRW is after. But by calling on the U.S. to stick to the principle, it's justifying aggressive human rights promotion. HRW may argue that such promotion should not be pursued by the military, but isn’t that ultimately a debate over tactics? The fact remains that decrying American double standards can easily be coopted into justifying new fronts in the War on Terror. And, if consistency devolves into global war in the name of human rights, how is the cry of hypocrisy really a critique at all?

Against the War on Terror Hits the Airwaves!

It’s true! We’ve been unleashed from web and are heading into the ether. Today Aziz and Alex will appear on WBAI’s ‘Behind the Headlines’ with host Doug Henwood. Be sure to tune in and hear them, between 5-6pm. 99.5 on the FM dial for New Yorkers, or on the web here.

Law and Politics

We’ve received a number of intelligent and interesting criticisms that merit a response, so we like to use a post from time to time to respond to our critics. One of the more consistent criticisms we’ve been receiving is about our attitude toward the rule of law (for example). Aren’t we rejecting legal and judicial means of reigning in the abuse of executive power? Why are we so hostile to law?

In fact, law has never been our target here. To be clear, the rule of law is an important thing. Societies that are not governed by the rule of law tend to be very unpleasant places to live. However, legality, in and of itself, is no basis for political criticism. What we are against is making the law the exclusive perspective from which to criticize politics. This seems like a bad idea to us for at least two reasons.

First of all, constitutionality is an ineffective foundation for a critical political stance, because many things we oppose may be perfectly constitutional. The NSA wiretapping issue is a perfect example of this. It may have been illegal for Bush to carry out those secret wiretaps. But Congress certainly has constitutional authority to impose them if it wants to. The left has based its entire argument on the fact that Bush doesn’t have the legal authority to act alone. But what would happen if Congress simply decided to authorize some version of what Bush is doing? (And they might) Then, this legal argument would have no ground to stand on. The constitution would permit any number of atrocious and objectionable policies. Why should we adopt it as the basis for what is acceptable and what isn’t?

Secondly, the exclusive concern with the law detracts from the need to make substantive arguments about the things we really care about. It may be easier to argue against a certain policy because it’s illegal. But that should not replace attempting to persuade others on the basis of ideology and political principles. Adherence to legal procedures is important too, but the left’s overwhelming reliance on them signals a reluctance to engage with their fellow citizens on matters of political analysis and ideological principles. Indeed, the only way to decide between good and bad laws is to debate the political principles that underlie them.

On this blog, we’ve suggested at least two major points for debate: as an empirical matter, the terrorist threat is preposterously inflated, and as a political principle, we reject the elevation of security over liberty (more on these to come). Together, these are substantive reasons for criticizing the war on terror as a whole, both the illegal and legal aspects of it. We agree with liberals that the state cannot violate the law. But this concern with legality is not the same as a principled political stance, and juridical strategies cannot replace the need for debate and persuasion in the public sphere.

Bush Loses Iraq War

One of the peculiar things about the Iraq War is the difficulty in evaluating what success for Bush would have meant. Some say that, by failing to win France and Germany’s cooperation, Bush lost the war before it started: the Iraq War failed to re-establish American
hegemony, or consent by other great powers to American supremacy. There’s something to be said for this argument, but it refers only to the international aims of the war.

More persuasive is the idea that Bush was more interested in the effect of the war here at home. Even with public support dropping, Bush has if anything made more out of the war, wanting to talk about little else. Now his entire presidency rests on his success in using the Iraq War to create a new standard for the use of American power and to recreate a sense of national purpose. In which case, as the LATimes reports, Bush has lost the Iraq War.
According to the LATimes, the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review seems to consider the Iraq War a ‘one-off’ venture, by which it really means a failure, or at least not a model to follow:

"The U.S. military has long been accused of always planning to fight its last war. But as the Pentagon assesses threats to national security over the next four years, a major blueprint being completed in the shadow of the Iraq war will do largely the opposite…

…the U.S. military has no appetite for another lengthy war of
"regime change."

And while some new lessons will be incorporated into the Pentagon review, the spending blueprint for the next four years will largely stick to the script Pentagon officials wrote before the Iraq war, according to those familiar with the nearly final document that will be presented to Congress in early February."

This president has not only failed to convince the country of his vision, he’s also failed to convince even his own Defense Department. If anything, he’s convinced the Pentagon to lower its expectations about what the American military can achieve. Not much of a legacy for Bush.

The War Weary

As we have pointed out before the neocons are not the omnipresent force in the White House they are continually made out to be. This fascinating article from Slate shows how weak their ideological influence over foreign policy has become.

Meanwhile, Save the USA points out that the February 4th anti-war marches are scheduled for a time when Bush and Congress won’t even be in DC. Both sides of the debate seem uncertain of their own position.

Stop the Program!

In an interview this evening with Jim Lehrer on the Lehrer News Hour, we heard Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez say 'If you listen very carefully to the critics, none of them, or very few of them, are saying stop the program.' He was referring to the NSA spying, and thought public opinion was actually with the administration on the grounds that this is narrow and focused spying. When he puts it like that, Gonzalez sounds ridiculous—lots of people are against the program as it stands now. For example, a group of Democratic Senators are sponsoring a resolution to reject the administration's arguments. But no doubt Gonzalez is right that most objections are to the fact that the administration didn't go through the FISA courts or other legal channels, not to the spying itself.

The real problem with the surveillance is not merely that it's illegal, nor that it is focused or not—although those are concerns. What's really at stake is the subtler effect these programs have on our political culture: each time we accept the administration's arguments, no matter how small the new power it acquires, we also renew our willingness to accept the idea that we are at war and under a security emergency. The program should be rejected on the ground that we are not and should not be at war; quit trying to convince us that we cannot enjoy our liberties because our survival is at stake. On the off-chance that Gonzalez is listening, we are happy to be one of the vocal few: Stop the Program!

Shadowboxing with Congress

Reactions to NSA’s secret spying on American citizens continue to reverberate through Washington and the mainstream media, making this case an interesting prism for some of the broader issues of the war on terror. We’ve already expressed skepticism about the sincerity of Congress’s rejection of the administration’s spying, a trend that has continued with John McCain’s recently expressed doubts about the legality of the warrantless spying.

The liberal position on the issue is probably best represented by a letter to Congress in this week’s New York Review of Books signed by several prominent legal academics. The letter argues that the NSA spying was not authorized by Congress, and that without such authorization, the spying raises “serious questions under the Fourth Amendment.” These arguments exactly echo John McCain’s comments yesterday on Fox News. Here’s what McCain said:

You know, I don't think [the NSA wiretaps were legally authorized], but why not come to Congress? We can sort this all out. I don't think -- I know of no member of Congress, frankly, who, if the administration came and said here's why we need this capability, that they wouldn't get it. And so let's have the hearings…Let's have the administration come to Congress. I think they will get that authority, whatever is reasonable and needed, and increased abilities to monitor communications are clearly in order.

McCain makes clear that the legalist objection does not involve any substantive opposition to domestic spying. It has nothing to do with protecting liberty. There’s nothing here that’s remotely critical of the ridiculous assertion that the United States is under immanent threat. Congress simply wanted to be in on the action. And the letter in the NYRB replicates, on a more sophisticated level, exactly this position. Remarkably, the lengthy letter didn’t make a single substantive argument objecting to the spying itself. The liberal authors would apparently be as pleased as John McCain would be if the exact same secret program were in existence with Congressional backing.

On this blog, we’ve had a lot to say about the failures of the antiwar movement. The lack of ideas there is mirrored in the striking inability of liberal critics of the Bush administration to make substantive arguments about why Bush’s emergency powers are wrong. Domestic spying is not wrong because Congress should have been involved. It’s wrong because it’s a violation of liberty, under outrageously false pretences. The secret monitoring of communication, with or without Congressional authorization, is not befitting a free society. That should be the basis for opposition to such policies. But that requires taking a principled rejection of the whole idea of the “terrorist threat,” something that Bush’s liberal critics seem unwilling to do.

USAID Wins Palestinian Election

The perverse logic of Middle East democratization, one of the cornerstones of the war on terror, continues to play itself out in this week’s Palestinian elections. As discussed previously on this blog, democratization does not entail unfettered self-determination. The Washington Post reports that the US will outspend all Palestinian political parties in the run-up to Wednesday’s election, in a clandestine initiative to shore up the ailing Palestinian Authority. USAID’s main goal is to limit the influence of Hamas in the elections. Seemingly unaware of the contradictions in his position, James A. Bever, USAID’s mission director for the West Bank and Gaza, stated: “We are not favoring any particular party. But we do not support parties that are on the terrorism list. We are here to support the democratic process.” Apparently, for USAID, the democratic process includes secretly bankrolling roughly 40 projects and events, including donating food and water to Palestinians at border crossings and a national youth soccer tournament, all presented in the name of the Palestinian Authority.

This seems to us a good example of how external interventions, even those conducted under the auspices of international aid, distort local politics. Attempts to direct Palestinians to choose the politicians we would like them to choose will create a government more responsive to USAID interests than to those of its own people. This is a step back from democratic politics, not a step forward.

War and Peace

Bin Laden resurfaced this week, with a new audiotape containing the suggestion of a truce: “We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.” The White House was quick to respond by stating, “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” while the Vice President, with canny insight, declared: “It sounds to me like it’s some kind of ploy.” The only actual news out of all of this seems to be just how seriously Bin-Laden is taken by all. Does Cheney really feel the need to explain to the public that al-Qaeda is “not an organization that’s ever going to sit down and sign a truce”? If so, the administration only has itself to blame. For the past four years they have treated Bin-Laden as a legitimate adversary. They have insisted that they are at “war” with Bin-Laden and his rag-tag band of outlaws. They rhetorically transformed their invasion and occupation of Iraq into an extension of the war against al-Qaeda.

Now Bin-Laden extends their logic, suggesting that the two sides might be able to enter into a truce, as if they were two organized entities with opposing armies at war. Unsurprisingly, the administration itself can’t seem to grasp the absurdity of the truce suggestion. Bin-Laden is a man who lives in a cave somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. What on earth could a truce between him and the most powerful country in the world look like? The suggestion is, of course, ridiculous. But the administration should take note—signing a truce with a man in a cave is only as ridiculous as trying to fighting a war against one.

Ignatieff as Idolater and as Politician

In a recent interview, Michael Ignatieff, the ‘human rights guru’ now running in Monday’s election for MP of the Canadian constituency Etobicoke-Lakeshore said

‘What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian…I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the US. Even as a spectator I didn’t really get what people there cared about.’

This is a very revealing statement regardless of your interest in Canadian politics. Ignatieff has been at the forefront of the human rights debate, championing the humanitarianism of the 1990s (in books like Warrior’s Honor, Blood and Belonging and the more qualified though no less committed Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry and Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond). In January 2003, amidst the heated debates over whether to invade Iraq, Ignatieff wrote a long editorial in the New York Times Magazine called ‘The Burden’ arguing the moral necessity of liberating the Iraqis. Ignatieff’s guiding light, which is representative of a broad school of thought transcending partisan divisions, is that the United States has a moral responsibility to save others and act in their interests – to empathize with them on the basis of universal commitments and human understanding.

It is strange, then, to read that a man who wrote so consistently against nationalism, and for universal empathy, is suddenly saying about countries he has spent many years in ‘I didn’t really get what people there cared about’. What happened to universal empathy, boundary-less humanitarian consciousness, and Ignatieff’s connection with the suffering of others? More to the point, how exactly did Ignatieff spend decades ‘understanding’ the needs of victims he’d never met and yet never figure out what the people around him cared about? No doubt some of this is Ignatieff posturing, trying to defend himself against the criticism that he is not really Canadian and just parachuting in to Canadian politics. But even more, it seems Ignatieff is finally acknowledging that matters are rather more complicated once you get involved, rather than gaze from afar and on high.

The point is not that politics is always unethical and therefore ‘below morality’, but rather that political commitment is different from moral commitment. Politics is about taking sides, where your side may not always do the most ethical thing, and occasionally must do what is necessary, but you support it anyhow. (Ignatieff himself does not appear above doing what is necessary to ensure his own nomination against intraparty opponents – see the end of this article). Political commitment also entails getting directly involved in engaging others in debate and convincing them of your position – taking them seriously as thinking and acting beings. Ignatieff’s inability to understand what those around him cared about was not simply a personality quirk on his part, but reflected that way his ethical commitment was in fact the pose of a snobby elite, standing above the fray and looking down from on high.* He became the ethical individual, proselytizing the good word of intervention abroad, only by detaching himself from the domestic politics of countries he’s lived in for decades. As Ignatieff beats his retreat back to earth, it is worth recalling that he and his ilk did a great deal to re-enchant American military power in the post-Cold War world.

*As Corey Robin (a speaker at our February teach-in) noted in his book Fear: History of a Political Idea and 'The Fear of the Liberals', Ignatieff's predicament is shared by a whole class of opinion-setting liberals.

Friday Review: Whither the Imperial Presidency?

We’ve been hearing a lot of talk recently about the revival of the imperial presidency. Most recently, last Sunday’s New York Times published a highly critical editorial called “The imperial presidency at work,” lambasting Bush for what it saw as an attempt to manipulate the fear of terrorism to claim illegitimate executive power. “Mr. Bush,” the editorial admonished, “sees no limit to his imperial presidency,” (for some less recent examples of this kind of invocation of the imperial presidency, see here, here, here). Since this blog has (critically) used the term occasionally, in this Friday review we’d like to probe more deeply into the meaning of this phrase, and clarify our position on it. What is meant when Bush is described as an imperial president and how much critical insight does the term offer?

Although already in use in the late 1960’s, the term gained great prominence with the 1973 publication of The Imperial Presidency by the eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Written in the midst of the Watergate scandal and the last year of the Vietnam War, Schlesinger saw the growth of presidential power as, in his words, "the shift in the constitutional balance – with, that is, the appropriation by the Presidency, and particularly by the contemporary Presidency, of powers reserved by the Constitution and by long historical practice to Congress." The metaphor imperial means that presidential power grows by colonizing or absorbing powers that were reserved to the other branches. It’s a metaphor
about the abrogation of the separation of powers.

But it’s not just any metaphor. Imperial also retains the sense of the term’s most immediate meaning: direct political rule over extensive colonies or territories. Of course, this is not to say
that the Times actually meant that Bush ruled over an empire. The editors made clear that they were objecting to Bush’s disrespect of the other branches. But the term draws it rhetorical force from the illegitimacy associated with imperial rule, and it’s no accident
that we have seen a revival of the term following the Iraq war. Calling Bush an imperial president confers a sense of the arrogance and pompousness of empire, without having to concretely analyze the nature of the Iraq occupation and its relation to historical
examples of political rule. Substituting metaphorical evocation for straightforward argument, the imperial presidency invokes an aura of illegitimacy that ultimately has little analytical or polemical force.

The ultimately vacuous nature of the concept is evident in the kind of solutions that are frequently proposed as a cure for the imperial presidency. Schlesinger, for his part, somewhat lamely calls for “a new attitude on the part of the American people toward their Presidents…specifically, a decline in reverence.” After considering and rejecting such institutional proposals as plural executives, Schlesinger’s own conclusion is that the nation required both a strong Presidency for leadership and the separation of powers for liberty… a constitutional Presidency, as great Presidents have shown, could be a very strong Presidency
indeed. But what kept a strong President constitutional, in addition to checks and balances incorporated within his own breast, was the vigilance of the nation.

What’s interesting about this is that Schlesinger himself had already shown precisely the opposite: that “great” presidents are those that have significantly enlarged the presidency, expanded its prerogatives, undermined congressional powers, and pushed their
authority to the brink of constitutional limits. For instance, Schlesinger, an establishment Democrat and former member of the Kennedy administration, clearly admires Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy. But all three of these men dramatically expanded presidential power, as Schlesinger somewhat uncomfortably admits. In each case, however, Schlesinger points to the virtues their personality, and individual restraint, which presumably qualify them as “great” in spite of their contributions to the very accretion of power Schlesinger is denouncing. Whether one accepts Schlesinger’s evaluation of presidential personality, the idea of relying on “checks and balances incorporated in his own breast” is completely
spurious. Schlesinger’s overvaluation of presidential personality obscures a deeper contradiction: he frames his argument about the growth of presidential power as such, but he is really only objecting to the abuse of presidential power for what he regards as
illegitimate ends.

Peter Irons, in his recently published War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, suffers from the same lack of political imagination. After a blistering indictment of the Bush’s imperial presidency, Irons rather meekly suggests that “the iron grip of the president on every aspect of foreign policy will loosen only when Congress reasserts its constitutional powers” of war-making. But given the eagerness of Congress to delegate its
authority and pass blank-check authorizations, it is hard to imagine a return of congressional war power as a solution. Furthermore, this solution rests on Irons’ questionable idea that
the president is the sole vehicle for economic corporations bent on gaining imperial markets. But why should Congress be any better? Irons spends three chapters denouncing the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and domestic emergency powers. But
these cases do not support Irons’ argument: Bush was given explicit authorization for both wars by Congress. Congress passed the PATRIOT ACT in overwhelming numbers, denied court hearings to anyone declared to be an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and will most likely
re-pass the PATRIOT ACT without major changes. Even in the recent hubbub over secret domestic wiretapping, the Bush administration is claiming that congress authorized that too, in an extremely broad 2001 statute authorizing the president to use military force against anyone he determines to be related to terrorist attacks.

The weakness of both Schlesinger’s and Irons’ proposed solutions point to a second problem with the concept of the imperial presidency itself, even taken as a polemical device: its political implications tend to be excessively formalistic. For example, Peter Irons argues strongly that what is needed is for Congress to take back the war making power. But since it was Congress itself that helped create such a strong presidency in the first place by delegating its powers, it is unclear how this presents much of an alternative in terms of policy. Likewise, Schlesinger lapses into vagueness when he tries to explain why the strong presidency is fine for Roosevelt and Kennedy, but unacceptable for Nixon. The concept of the imperial presidency, grounded on formalism and with a rhetorical bite that relies on metaphor, simply doesn’t offer enough insight to clearly articulate what’s wrong with the growth of presidential war powers, and what should be done about it.

Although they value it differently, Schlesinger, and Irons both describe a very strong presidency acting alone in wartime or national emergencies. But both these authors ignore the internal political dynamics that drive the presidential invocation of emergencies and war. For instance, historically powerful presidents such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt used extra-legal emergency powers to radically transform the structure of the American state,
and its relations with society. They are much better understood as future oriented, reconstructive figures representing genuine forces in society, rather than conservative “constitutional dictators” trying to overcome an emergency to restore the status quo.

But how to understand the current Bush presidency from this perspective? The Bush administration has certainly been remarkably bold and audacious in its claims of presidential authority and its use of emergency powers. But Bush is neither a reconstructive president, bursting through constitutional bounds with great electoral majorities, nor a Schlesingerian imperial president kept aloft by Cold War international engagements. Schlesinger’s imperial
presidency, which stretched from Roosevelt until Nixon, represented a real growth in presidential power. But this Cold War presidency was already in total disarray in the Clinton administration, and reached its lowest ebb in the disastrous 2000 election amidst the
Florida scandal and the loss of the popular vote. Especially following the Jeffords defection in the Senate, Bush faced the prospect of legislative gridlock, and the further weakening of the
presidency cycle.

Of course, September 11th changed that by injecting Bush’s presidency with a sense of crisis and plebiscitary energy. During this period, Bush was able to superficially invoke the crisis
administrations of Franklin Roosevelt or even Lincoln. But the resemblance was completely surface level. Without a substantive reconstructive program for the transformation of the state, Bush’s plebiscitary appeal was based solely on fear of a perceived terrorist threat, and the administration’s ability to overcome the perceived crisis. There was no transformative or even substantial political project underneath it. The pathological flipside of this situation, however, is that the actual overcoming of the crisis reduces the president’s authority. Once the emergency is over, the basis of Bush’s plebiscitary appeal is extinguished as well. Hence
the curious nature of many of the emergency related acts of the Bush administration, which might be described as ‘fear management’ in the intentional sense of the term: color coded warnings with no imaginable benefit to public safety, holding individuals as enemy combatants only to release them without changes or transfer them to ordinary courts, vast immigration dragnets that wield few or no convictions, a network of secret prisons, many of which lie empty, and the perplexing indifference to the distribution of emergency preparedness funds. What all these have in common is that they are less about overcoming some imminent threat to the state than creating the appearance of vigorous and urgently required action.

But it is precisely this dynamic which is eluded by the concept of the imperial presidency. Our liberty today is not threatened by a genuine menace to the state, nor by a plebiscitary president claiming to represent the popular will. The problem is when politically weak presidents require fear and emergency powers in order to govern. We need concepts to understand and criticize this trend, but the imperial presidency takes us in the wrong direction.

Jacques Rattles His Saber

France has not been struck by a terrorist attack. Nor do we know of any threats that it will be struck. Moreover, the terrorism that has so far occurred - World Trade Center/Pentagon, and London bombings - was not state-sponsored. Far from it: these few terrorists are violent and nihilistic because of their lack of attachment to either a state or a mass following. So why is French President Jacques Chirac suddenly saying he will use nuclear bombs against a state that launches a terrorist against him? Who, after all, will he actually launch such a nuke against? Does Chirac really mean to say that the US should have nuked Afghanistan, and vaporized thousands of Afghani peasants to no end?

The war on terror has created a remarkably permissive environment with regard to what presidents can say. No doubt Chirac thought he saw an opportunity here to look as tough as Bush, perhaps to one-up Bush in the international game of posturing and parading that counts as diplomacy these days. Dark as this bluster is – (don’t such leaders start to sound like their enemies when they are willing to dispense with countless civilian lives for what amounts to a violent, symbolic act?) – it also points up its own emptiness. Chirac probably knows there is nobody to launch such a bomb at, at least in a way that serves any identifiable strategic purpose. This is precisely why he can bluster, and use this bluster as a tactic to improve his political image.

Fighting the war wrong or the wrong war?

Juan Cole positively endorses Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster’s essay in Military Review, which criticizes early stages on the US operation in Iraq. The report makes interesting reading, and some of his criticism rings true, particularly the stress on how isolated the US military is from the Iraqis. US officers, unsurprisingly, have responded that this is not fair and they have a point. Blaming the soldiers, or even their generals, for insensitivity to local custom forgets the fact that they are not supposed to be diplomats. Doubtless they are often brutal, cruel and ignorant about local conditions but they are after all an army. They cannot be expected to win the battle for hearts and minds for the White House. That, as we have said before, would require some ideas.

This search for the moment at which the occupation went bad, the tipping point that turned it from Operation Iraqi Freedom into the seemingly intractable mess it is today, is pointless. Democratization by intervention, state-building or nation-building are a series of contradictions in terms. Nobody can impose such institutions from the outside, and the invasion of another country, the suppression of an existing government and anyone who chooses to support it, will always require an oppressive force.

Meanwhile Aylwin-Foster maintains a chauvinistic British outlook, dating back to the start of the war, which contrasts US inexperience in counterinsurgency operations, with the skills of the British. Where did the British learn these skills? Northern Ireland (where the conflict lasted from 1968-c.1993), Malaysia (1948-60), Kenya (1952-60), Oman (1965-75) to name but a few. So don’t plan to be home any time soon boys.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Law

Gore’s fiery speech on Monday in which he said that Bush has repeatedly broken the law produced this response by the National Review Online. Byron York points out that along with accusing Bush of undermining the Constitution, Gore also said that, “The threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility.”

In a sense, York’s response raises the inadequacies of the current Democratic constitutional offensive, in which party advocates are up in arms about the imperial president. Whether or not they choose to admit it, Gore and others are not making a legal point at all, but quietly suggesting that maybe America isn’t under dire threat and that survival shouldn’t drive politics. Yet, they are ultimately too afraid to make this larger political argument, since it goes against the apparent consensus that we face permanent emergency. Noah Feldman, who a week ago published a long, scholarly piece in the New York Times on the rise of executive prerogative and its dangers, ended in disappointing fashion with these words, “The basic fact of presidential power is now irreversible. No one denies that a strong executive is needed to respond to the threat of terrorism.”

Today, law has become a useful sleight of hand to question the political judgments of the Administration (e.g. perhaps the threat of terrorism doesn’t justify warrantless wiretapping), without being held publicly accountable for those views. But, this attempt to pursue political objectives through the law is deeply flawed. It blinds us to the basic nature of crises. Devising the right legal rules will never solve the abuses inherent in emergencies, because by definition these are times when extraordinary action is required. Telling Bush he’s breaking the law is question begging, since the whole point of emergency is that the ordinary laws cannot apply. If anything, once people accept crisis conditions, the fiction of elaborate legal rules tends to distort legality itself rather than to limit power. This is because it creates a mask of constitutional appropriateness that can constantly be manipulated to fit political ends.

Talking about law when we really mean politics but are too scared to say so has a second equally corrosive effect. It refuses to confront the actual political claims made by the Administration and its supporters. Despite all the helpful history, in one sentence, by assuming the overwhelming threat of terrorism and the irreversibility of presidential power, Feldman concedes the larger debate to the Administration. His legal criticisms, as well as Gore's, accept political defeat as their starting point. As a result, both perpetuate an environment in which all we can do by way of opposition is fumble at the constitutional margins. You can’t solve a political problem by resorting to law, and it’s time for critics to bite the bullet and say what they mean.

The Sovereignty Question

Many people have commented on our ideas about sovereignty and intervention (e.g. particularly thoughtful examples are here, as well as the comments on these two posts