More Friends of FISA

Last week we predicted that Congress would react to the unwarranted wiretapping scandal by retroactively legalizing the administration’s action in some way. Well, Senator Arlen Specter has drafted legislation that would do just that, and more. As Marty Lederman points out in his extremely informative post (the whole thing is worth reading, here), the legislation appears as if Congress is stepping in and tightening the reigns on the administration, but in fact, the bill would do nothing to restrain the President, and would go a very long way in legitimating and providing legal cover for Bush’s activities.

In fact, this supposed restoration of checks and balances (at least that is the impression given by the Washington Post) is not only markedly worse than the original FISA statute, it is arguably a significant step back from the pre-1978 scenario, because the secret FISA court both holds responsibility for ensuring that the program as a whole is "consistent" with the Constitution, and at the same time, would be prevented from determining specific Fourth Amendment violations. In other words, the "review" offered by the FISA court is review in name only; all it would do is certify the program on a whole, but it cannot hear individual cases. As Lederman points out: "See the new section 704: The standard for the FISA Court's review of the application is whether "there is probable cause to believe that the electronic surveillance program will intercept communications of the foreign power or agent of a foreign power specified in the application, or a person who has had communication with the foreign power or agent of a foreign power specified in the application."

It doesn't get any broader or vaguer than that. This bill would improve markedly on an already rubber stamp court by making it virtually impossible to exercise meaningful review. Not that there is much room for improvement; as we've noted, the old FISA court was not exactly a palladium of liberty.

So, here's our question: where are you, liberal media? So great and widespread were the howls of outrage over the initial NSA program that Bush - who jumps at any chance he gets to play War President - was sent scurrying back to Congress for legal cover. Congress is in the process of responding with a program that embraces the worst aspects of the spying program and graces it with a patina of legality and an utterly toothless review process - a program that is undoubtedly worse than the original illegal spying. So let's hear it... where is the outrage? Do the mainstream media really think it is so much better to be spied on legally rather than illegally? Is it that much better for secret wiretapping to be backed with congressional acquiescence than without? Do you feel any freer with the knowledge that the secret spying program will once again be approved by a secret court, unable to hear appeals or even review individual cases?

What's Not Wrong With the War in Iraq

In a recent Reason Magazine article, Julian Sanchez seconds Francis Fukuyama's condemnation of the neoconservatives for being too optimistic, at least about foreign affairs. Sanchez makes reference to Thomas Sowell, a conservative thinker, who came up with a rather arbitrary distinction between 'unconstrained' and 'tragic' visions. The former, mainly associated with the left, is amenable to experimenting with social transformation, the latter, mostly conservative, sees life as too complex to be changed. Unsurprisingly, Sanchez then seeks to paint the neoconservatives with the optimistic-lefty brush:

"The problems Fukuyama diagnoses with the planning of the Iraq War and its aftermath are typical of the unconstrained vision as Sowell describes it."

Sanchez has, like many others, drawn an overly conservative lesson from the chaotic Iraqi occupation. Invading Iraq was hardly a grand scheme of social transformation, so much as a romantic gesture dressed up as utopianism. Sanchez's problem is that he doesn't like the riskiness of the venture per se.

As Corey Robin pointed out in our teach-in this past Saturday, there is more than one approach to risk; we might call one the conservative and the other the progressive attitude. Right-wing romanticism has historically celebrated risk-taking for its own sake, as a heroic act of individual rejection of the conformist, risk-averse mentality of capitalist society. The 'fascistic' moment here is the celebration of the will for its own sake. Progressives, however, do not celebrate risk-taking for its own sake. Rather, they take risks for the sake of achieving some ends they think are desirable, like a more equal society, or the emancipation of a particular element of society. The problem with the neoconservative gambit, such as it was, was not that it took a risk with social engineering so much as that it was never really serious about this transformation, and the theoretical basis for their intervention was flawed (imposing democracy).

As we have argued before, this social vision is deeply anti-utopian and undemocratic anyhow. But the point is that, what really mattered to the neoconservatives seemed to be the riskiness of the effort itself. The invasion was a romantic rejection of the bureaucratic mentality of Pentagon and CIA civil servants, of the perceived passivity of most American citizens, and of the creaking political machinery of Washington. What's not wrong with the war on Iraq is that it was too utopian, so much as that it was an irrational act of will with no higher purpose than its own expression.

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.

Watching Over Ourselves

Why is this administration so intent on inducing citizens to spy on one another? First came operation TIPS (the Terrorist Information and Prevention System) in 2002, which was supposed to recruit transportation workers, mailmen, utility crews and the like to spy on their neighbors. The program was eventually killed in Congress, due to public outcry. Next was the Total Information Awareness program, which constituted one of the truly bizarre heights of the war on terror. TIA, which was led by the convicted felon John Poindexter, was supposed to develop mass surveillance and other technologies to gather as much personal information about as many people as possible. (see the truly crazy original seal of the program). Unsurprisingly, that program too was defunded by Congress in 2003.

Now the administration is at it again, with this program enlisting school bus drivers to spy on their passengers, supposedly on the lookout for terrorists. According to the New York Times,

“School bus drivers around the country are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, in a program financed by the Homeland Security Department. Designers of the program, called School Bus Watch, want to turn 600,000 drivers into an army of observers.

‘The terrorist is not going to be able to do some of their casing and rehearsal activity without being detected by one of you,’ Mr. Beatty, a former antiterrorism officer, told the drivers in his class. The more people watching, he said, the safer the community would be.”

Its sheer outlandishness and ostentatious invitation for abuse may very well destine “School Bus Watch” to a similar fate as TIPS and TIA. Congress has not really been eager to pass such openly fascistic programs, at least not those uniformly affecting the citizenry as a whole. However, we should not celebrate so quickly if Congress refuses to back Bush’s bus driver surveillance. As Alexander Cockburn pointed out in 2002, to a large extent, even TIA represented bureaucracy catching up with reality: before the passage of TIA, and after its abolition, “Police reports, criminal records, mortgage records, credit history, medical history, former employment, DMV data--either lawfully or with artifice, any competent private investigator can get the skinny on you. Wiretaps? My local lineman tells me that years ago the cops stopped even asking the phone company for an OK to monitor calls.”

While such highly visible programs as TIA have been (and still should be!) stopped, the less visible penetration of surveillance and “security” into our everyday lives continues unabated. Spying bus drivers would be merely ludicrous rather than insidious if not for the elevation of safety into a supreme political principle. We should reject both the “school bus watch” nonsense and the apolitical obsession with security and safety that make such programs possible.

Who Exactly Are We Fighting Now?

The Stranger and Alternet each have particularly chilling articles about one underreported front in the War on Terror: local prosecutions of acts that are in no way consistent with the traditional definition of terrorism. On January 20th, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the arrest of 11 so-called "eco-terrorists." The individuals were members of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). They were indicted on 17 crimes all relating to the destruction of property and none including the loss of life or acts that resulted in personal injury. The most recent offense took place over four years ago, on October 15, 2001, and acts cited in the indictments date back to 1996. Nonetheless, prosecutors are seeking life sentences for many of the defendents, with Mueller declaring that the penalties will have a "dramatic impact on persons who contemplate these crimes."

These indictments were planned to coincide with public relations efforts to renew the Patriot Act, and sought to emphasize the Administration's commitment to combating terrorism at home and abroad. They underscore two particularly corrosive features of the current war. First, they show how incredibly malleable fighting "terror" has become. The simple fact is that the U.S. is not facing a coherent ideological enemy in Al Qaeda with foot soldiers on every corner. Keeping up the fight against an opponent that doesn't really exist easily reduces to attacking any form of violence considered illegitimate. If one can't find actual terrorists, perhaps property destruction will do. Such malleability means that business interests can pressure the government to relabel their more extreme environmental opponents as terrorists, because the term itself has no meaningful substance. Since the government is ultimately fighting insecurity rather than a movement with clear principles, the war is infinitely adaptable.

The indictments also illustrate a central crisis facing government. The contemporary state, armed with great powers of surveillance and intrusion, is remarkable for the sense that it actually doesn't do very much (or that it does a lot but not very well). Unlike during the New Deal or even the Great Society, we now experience the state as a massive bureaucracy that seems both disconnected from everyday life and incapable of materially improving conditions. The general criticism of government incompetence expresses precisely this sentiment. One thing we can all count on is that government will bungle something of national importance. Mueller, in proudly reading off "eco-terrorist" indictments and calling for life sentences, is struggling to validate the state as an entity capable of actually fulfilling objectives. Even if these aren't real terrorists and their acts aren't discernible as terrorism, at least government is seen as energetic. One gets the creeping sense that the War on Terror is increasingly an effort to justify the apparatus itself -- to validate government action to an indifferent and demobilized public. But without ideas or any links to a popular grounding, we're left with bureaucratic officials twisting the state into a blunt and violent instrument. Such energy is at best empty, and for those like Daniel McGowan and Chelsea Gerlach far worse.

Ethical Militarism

Earlier this week, British Defense Secretary John Reid gave a speech to students of the War Studies Department at King's College London. No questions were permitted after the speech, but the minister did deign to mingle with a pre-screened audience of Masters students afterwards. Putting to one side the hyperbole comparing Al Qaeda to the Nazis, the speech proved an interesting snapshot of contemporary British strategic thinking.

The speech comes in the aftermath of the publication of a videotape, recorded by a British soldier serving in Basra a few years ago, showing British troops beating unarmed Iraqi teenagers. Attempting to stem the outrage in the British media, Reid used his speech to call upon the public to show more understanding and less instantaneous condemnation of the 'deeply ethical professional body' that is the British Army. 'Ethical foreign policy', one of the ideological pillars of Tony Blair's first administration (similarly with President Clinton), now seems to have been consolidated in the ethical waging of war under Reid's stewardship of Britain's armed forces. This shift, from legitimizing military power in terms of national interests, to justifying military power by reference to its ethical ends such as human rights, is striking - far more striking than all the technological changes on the battlefield that Reid invokes in his speech.

While the language of 'ethics' jars with the brutality and illegitimacy of the US and British presence in Iraq, there is something more deeply troubling here than mere hypocrisy. For justifying the exercise of power through ethics is asking us to judge power not on the outcome of policy, but on the purity of the motives behind it. Reid's call for media self-restraint makes sense from the viewpoint of ethics: for who can doubt that Tony Blair has anything but the best of intentions? Nor is this unique to the UK. Bush has similarly rejected criticism on such issues as Abu Ghraib, absence of weapons of mass destruction, and the chaos in Iraq, on the grounds that his intentions were pure. Political critique is here rendered redundant or transformed into a question of personal character, in which opponents are forced to guess at the inner motives of politicians.

This ethical politics is extremely narcissistic. From the viewpoint of the ethical diplomat, be it Tony Blair, John Reid, or George W. Bush, human suffering exists only in so far as it can be exploited, not in the instrumental service of a higher good, but to demonstrate the 'beautiful soul' of the statesman himself. This means, perversely, that this ethically-motivated politics is ultimately indifferent to human suffering. The use of ethics as the justification for militarism exposes the political meaninglessness of the Iraq War: British and American leaders are fighting in Iraq in search of ethical redemption for themselves, rather than out of any real concern for the Iraqi people.

Shame!

As if we needed further proof that the Democrats offer no alternative to the war on terror, the venerable Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton have moved to protect us from foreign ownership of our ports. No wait--the port in question was already in foreign hands, owned by Britain's P&O. So why the fuss? Because P&O has just been bought by Dubai Ports, a company owned by the government of that country. Yet the only possible danger anybody can point to is that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from the UAE (not even from Dubai itself incidentally). By that logic the origins of Timothy McVeigh would end US ownership of US firms.

This is a truly ugly piece of posturing, a Democratic attempt to 'out tough' the Republicans. The Senators, and the various Republicans who have jumped on their bandwagon, should be ashamed of themselves for this racist innuendo. If Sen. Clinton is indeed the great Democratic hope for '08 then the electorate can expect, once again, little choice at the polls.

FISA's Friends

An interesting (although, ahem, predicted) story is shaping up in Congress's reaction to the Bush administration domestic spying program. Bush, in spite of his increasingly farcical bluster, has conceded that Congress will have to be involved in some way in the program. Although it is somewhat difficult to sort through all the political theatre and maneuvering, there appears to be four distinct positions vis a vis the spying program. The first possibility, as Bill Frist argued for today, is for Congress to do nothing, allow the program to continue, and leave FISA in place, apparently as a kind of optional program that Presidents can opt out of if they see fit. This option is fairly unlikely, however. Even Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and staunch ally of the Bush administration, appears to have figured out the current program is generating too much heat and provides too easy a target for Democrats.

The second option, endorsed by some Democrats, is to insist that the administration complies with the '78 legislation, and seeks a warrant from the special secret court established by FISA. This option appears equally unlikely, however. Even the majority of Democrats seem to be admitting that FISA can be further stretched in order to achieve some form of "oversight." Moreover, that would be a major loss of face to the White House, and would be resisted by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

Far more likely are the third and fourth options, or some combination of the two: Congress could either adopt the plan proposed by Senator Mike DeWine, which would have Congress pass a law retrospectively authorizing the spying program while leaving FISA in place, or follow the plan endorsed by Roberts and many others and rework the FISA statute itself, either weakening the review process, or establishing some form of Congressional review, or some other form of institutionalization of the domestic spying program. Both of these options involve some form of legalization, leaving large parts of the spying program in place, while avoiding the awkward lack of legal authority that is currently causing such an uproar.

That is the spectrum of possible responses, in increasing order of likelihood. Two conclusions suggest themselves from this survey: First, Congress will, in some form or another, legalize Bush's spying program. The liberal-left, which has spent this whole time arguing that the spying was illegal, literally will have the ground swept out from under its feet. All the arguments we have heard – coming from the Nation, to the New York Review of Books, to the New York Times (just to name a few) - that the problem with the spying was its illegality will be irrelevant if either DeWine, Roberts, or any of the other myriad legalization schemes are successful. Could there be a more dramatic illustration of why exclusively legal arguments make for a bad and naive political strategy?

Secondly, note that the most liberal position - enforcing FISA and holding hearings - accepts wholesale the legitimacy of a secret court, where only Justice department lawyers present evidence, which essentially has acted as a rubber stamp for domestic surveillance since its inception (in its 28 year history, 18,761 warrants were granted, and 4 or 5, depending on which source one follows, were rejected. Would anyone like to do the math?). As we've been arguing for months, FISA itself represents a considerable blow to civil liberties. The fact that it now represents a principled, liberal stance speaks volumes about the insidiously slippery slope of the politics of fear. But even if the Bush administration loses its battle to save its spying program, it appears to have won the war of narrowing the spectrum of "legitimate" debate, deflating our expectations, and numbing our sense of what qualifies as normalcy.

Defining Democracy Down Part 2

Since Woodrow Wilson, American statesmen have made democracy promotion a part of their official ideology and aims. As we discussed in a prior post, this embrace has gone hand in hand with a tendency to 'define democracy down'. One of the peculiarities of this tendency is that politicians cast their project as 'idealist', as if they were defending high-minded ideals against realist pessimists. Yet their actual vision of democracy is deeply limited.

This anti-utopian mood was in evidence in Francis Fukuyama's recent article in the New York Times Magazine. In it, he claimed to be defending foreign policy idealism from the bad name neoconservatives had given it. But the best defense of democratic institutions he could give was that they help in 'alleviating poverty...dealing with pandemics [and] controlling violent conflicts.' This is a view of democratization that fits well with the security-obsessed mentality of the war on terror. Fukuyama's vision of democracy is a beefed up version of FEMA.

The Consensus on Difference

The ever-insightful observer of political Islam, Olivier Roy, has an interesting article in Newsweek on the cartoon controversy. He demonstrates that the force behind the worldwide cartoon protests were in fact a few Arab and Muslim states. Roy points out that various states elevated the cartoons to center stage to serve a number of pragmatic interests: to assert themselves as pro-religion, as they simultaneously suppress Islamist political opponents at home, and to attempt to use Muslim populations in Europe as leverage to strengthen their weak position vis a vis Western states.

But along with these excellent insights, Roy makes the point that the "protests represent a call for equality and integration, not separation or special treatment." In some ways, Roy is absolutely correct that Europe's Muslims wish to integrate. What's wrong with Roy's statement, however, is that the Europe Muslims want to integrate into is one that has jettisoned the notion of actual equality and has embraced an equality of difference: multiculturalism. Thus to integrate, European Muslims are lining up along with all other Europeans to assert their differential identity, and to claim the special protections that this identity supposedly requires. Rather than any clash of civilizations, the cartoon incidents instead stem from different European groups negotiating with one another about multiculturalism. As Wrongside of Capitalism puts it, "Muslim outrage appears to be largely articulated in good multiculturalist terms, as an objection to being offended." But this is a dangerous game for Muslims, because, as we've said before, by asserting the protections that come with difference, their multiculturalist efforts at integration only reinforce their status as minorities.

Multiculturalism generates a subtle racism of its own. As Poetix explains, referencing Slavoj Zizek, one way it does so is by projecting an extreme racial or religious sensitivity onto another group. ""[W]e" are not intolerant, are overweeningly tolerant even, but must police our own and others’ language and behaviour in essentially intolerant ways for the sake of this supposed hyper-sensitive community of others (who are politically infantilised in the process)."

Such ideas influence both sides in the war on terror. Both Bush and Cirac were finally able to agree by both urging that we hold back on exercising our freedoms in order to be mindful of Muslim religious sensitivity. As Bush said, "We believe in a free press. We also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities." And Chirac criticized, "all manifest provocations that are liable to dangerously arouse passions." Yes, better not rile up those crazy ragheads. The same logic informs the argument that Bush's war on terror is only making things worse by provoking a Muslim backlash, as we discussed in last week's Friday Review. From left and from right, the assumption is that Muslims can't be trusted to act as we do. Resistance to the war on terror must start by assuming our commonalities not our differences.

Sorting out Sudan

Yesterday, Bush gave a speech in which he inveighed against those who claim we are not at war. He said a "tendency of folks is to say this really isn't a war. People kind of want to slip to the comfortable." It was surprising, then, to hear Bush make a commitment in that same speech to increasing US and others' involvement in the Sudan. Bush said Sudan needed "more troops, probably under the United Nations," and did not discount the possibility of sending US military personnel. If the nation is really at war, and needs to absorb itself in preserving its security, where does it get the time, resources and energy to devote itself to humanitarian missions such as Sudan?

In fact, even in relation to Sudan, Bush has been unable to decide whether the relevant issue is humanitarianism or security. Although in his most recent speech, Bush believed the story in Darfur, the Western region in Sudan where the fighting is concentrated, to be about genocide, requiring foreign intervention and strong-arming the government and its paramilitaries, in prior diplomatic overtures, Bush has claimed the main issue in Sudan is terrorism. This has meant strengthening the hand of the central government, including negotiations and financial backing, as well as military cooperation. This Janus-faced policy reflects a deep confusion in Bush's foreign policy. In the absence of clearly defined enemies, Bush has had intense difficulty relating to any specific issue. Even with Iraq, Bush has altered his reasons for intervening, from security to democracy to genocide and back, never settling on a clearly defined argument nor consistently formulated policy. The main determining factor of Bush's foreign policy strategy seems to be how any particular diplomatic effort plays at home in the moment. Which, given some of the problems in Iraq, may be why he is testing the waters on Sudan.

The absence of a strategy does not make Bush's foreign policy any less destructive. Not only has he smashed two states in the Middle East and Central Asia, but the unpredictability of his diplomacy over time makes it difficult for actors in other countries to orient their own actions. This is clear in Sudan, where Bush has given both the central government and the rebels reasons to count on Bush and not to count on Bush. This creates a very fluid and ambiguous situation, in which the strategy's of local actors must take into account American diplomacy, by sheer dint of its strength, but find themselves unable to do so, given its fickleness. This, among others, is one of the central reasons why interventions in general, but particularly under this administration, are so problematic. Their terms and tactics are dictated by politicians' responses to home populations, not as representatives of those who are subject to intervention.

Gitmo and Democracy

Yesterday, in the wake of a 54 page report by a U.N. panel calling for detainees in Gitmo to be released or brought before an independent court, Kofi Annan declared that the prison itself should be closed. Besides questioning the accuracy of the report and of public comments by U.N. officials, the Administration also implied that the U.N. and its NGO supporters have no popular basis for interfering in local decisions. A consistent criticism by both the White House and its think tank allies has been to say that neither international human rights groups nor UN institutions and bureaucrats enjoy democratic support -- they don't have a political constituency and thus no public standing to call on "democratic" states to shift policy. While we may agree with the thrust of Kofi Annan's argument against Gitmo, the Administration's basic point is a powerful one. A commitment to ensuring that local communities make decisions about their own internal politics surely extends to the U.S. as well as developing countries.

But if U.N. bureaucrats have little claim to democratic legitimacy, exactly what right do White House officials have to claim the mantle of popular support? Have U.S. citizens had any meaningful opportunity to make decisions about whether we should be in the business of running an international prison system? How much basic information have we been provided about the nature and extent of detention practices? And, what actual avenues exist for asserting popular opposition and reclaiming political control?

If anything, the Administration's anti-U.N. rhetoric underscores its own public isolation. The word democracy has itself become a ritualistic cant for the Bushies. Internationally, it seems to mean little more than reproducing elections, regardless of whether those elections embody any real links between publics and so-called representatives. Domestically, it serves as a cloak for concealing state activity -- again under the guise that an occasional election justifies virtually any act of power. In each case, the Administration's own claim to democratic authority reinforces the hollowness both of its idea of democracy and its own public support. Just who are the mobilized "people" clamouring for the war on terror? Whose real interests are expressed in detention practices or war policies? No one's. What we have instead is a disconnected elite, whose attempt to combat foreign criticism exposes its own lack of a meaningful democratic mandate.

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 mujahideen'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 relieved. 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 souls.

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, "[a]s 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 Hizbullah 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.

The Loyal Opposition

Both Digby and Glenn Greenwald have very interesting posts - here and here - expressing frustration that the Democrats appear to be backing away from the NSA wiretapping scandal. The Democrats seem to think they will look weak on security if they challenge the administration. Greenwald puzzles over why this is so, given that a plurality of the public believes Bush broke the law and was wrong for doing so: "I am genuinely amazed that the percentage of people who believe that Bush broke the law is so high, because Democrats have barely even made this case to the public."

Interestingly enough, the same could be said not just about wiretapping, or even the war in Iraq, but the war on terror generally. Immediately after 9/11, 87% of Americans expressed worry about terrorism, and 49% worried a 'great deal'. Two years later, in September, 2003, the Pew Research Center found 41% of Americans were not too worried or not worried at all, while only 13% were 'very worried'. Six months later, a Harris poll found only 9% worried 'often' while 45% didn't worry. Consider also the progression in the Polling Report's findings from October 2001 to January 2006: it is not since July 2004 that more than 20% of Americans have thought another attack is very likely, and that number now hovers around 10%. And about half of Americans believe a terrorist attack is not at all likely. All of this is without any major, or at least mainstream, public figure consistently arguing that the threat of terrorism is significantly overblown.

Digby, commenting on the NSA program, wonders why the Democrats get things so wrong: "The problem for Democrats isn't that they are seen as soft on national security. It's that they are seen as not believing in anything and therefore are not strong on national security." This seems right to us, but perhaps too hesitantly put because it still puts the emphasis on perceptions of their strength on national security. The Democrats generally lack a strong set of principles, and have so for a long time. The only disagreement we really have with Digby and Greenwald is their tacit belief that the Democrats can somehow spontaneously generate a spine and a sense of purpose. We don't have all the answers, but it seems pretty clear to us that the Democrats are part of the problem, not part of the solution. We should be asking ourselves, not the Democrats, how to present a principled opposition.

Use and Abuse of Terror

Published today in the UK, The Use and Abuse of Terror, is a welcome addition to the literature criticizing the war on terror. Author Peter Osborne carefully dissects several UK terror scares, detailing the way that police, media and politicians, each with their own agenda, fed the panic. This is an excellent piece of journalism, digging around the story and questioning the official explanations until the truth becomes clear.

But Osborne's conclusions, available in summary here, are perhaps less convincing. In fact they seem to contradict his findings. Osborne argues that Tony Blair is suffering from a "collapse in trust" because "few people now believe what the Prime Minister, the security services and the police tell us about security matters." No doubt true. But to then argue that, "[t]his dissonance is a massive problem [because] Britain today faces a threat from international and domestic terrorism which is far more dangerous and insidious than anything it has confronted before" seems bizarre. Surely Osborne's investigation has shown that this is absolutely not the case. We should not replace one scare story with another.

A War Without War

A Tiny Revolution has this interesting post. It points out that at the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Alberto Gonzalez appeared to argue both (a) that Bush can ignore a statute because of his inherent authority as a wartime president, and that (b) "we are not at war," and hence, can avoid applying various restrictions and treaty obligations that are part of the laws of war. To paraphrase Robespierre, they want a war without a war. Now, one might say that this kind of legal confusion is an inevitable byproduct of a war against an abstract idea or mental state such as terror. But the curious war without a war paradox also expresses something essential about our developing constitutional regime of emergency powers: an existential logic of national survival extended to the most mundane threat, a normalization of emergency powers, a near-permanent state of international intervention and belligerent occupation that has not violated the Congressional war powers so much as rendered it archaic. After all, aside from the first Gulf War, the last time Congress unambiguously declared war was WWII. The truth is, we’ve been through many wars without being at war, and Gonzalez’s skewed logic reflects this disturbing fact.

Trust me--I'm the President

Monday’s New York Times had an interesting editorial about what it called ‘The Trust Gap’ between President Bush and the American public. Predictably, the Times casts the dangers of a presidency based on trust as undermining the ‘checks and balances’ that exist to limit the power of the executive. Previous posts on this blog have argued that fetishizing ‘checks and balances’ – typically the left’s first line of defense against Bush initiatives – substitutes legalistic wrangling for political debate.

But there is also another element to this politics of fear. In demanding that the public trust him on a directly personal basis, Bush is trying to solicit a more immediate type of political legitimacy – a legitimacy based on a intimate, emotive relationship with the individual, instead of a relationship mediated by public institutions, that intercede between citizens and their elected representatives. While we may wish to question the extent to which we subordinate the political process to non-political ‘checks and balances’, the idea that political life can take place without collective public institutions is profoundly un-democratic.

As society is not a single organism, nor a beehive, but is organized around individuals, collective deliberation can only take place in the form of public institutions. To try and jump over the institutions of public debate, and hook leaders up directly to individuals, is to eliminate the substance of the political process itself. While this phenomenon has deep roots in twentieth century American political history, Bush’s limitless appetite for ‘trust’ indicates that presidential authoritarianism is being taken to deeper and darker depths. This reflects the degraded state of America’s political life. For Bush is no Caesar, decisively undermining the proud institutions of the Republic – these were already rotten through. In place of public reflection and debate, we have a sickly sweet, therapeutic authoritarianism whose preferred medium is television and passivity rather than mass rallies.

Rights of Holocaust Deniers

In this superb editorial, Ronald Dworkin reminds us that free speech is an essential democratic right worth defending, but that the West's commitment to it has been contingent at best. If it were truly committed to the principle it would eliminate the prohibition on Holocaust-denying. At the moment, it appears that the West only defends the right to free speech when it offends a few Muslims, but not when it offends mainstream multicultural sensitivities. This creates an odd situation in which Iran's major newspaper can play the same game as Danish newspapers: solicit Holocaust cartoons in the name of free speech. As we argued before, the real problem illustrated in this whole affair is not radical Islamist antipathy towards free speech, but the West's own lukewarm appreciation of its value. Here is an excerpt from Dworkin's editorial:

"Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression; its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements. So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended...

...Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons point out that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European convention on human rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands."

Judicial Review and the War on Terror, Part II. Law and Politics Revisited

In response to our post questioning the efficacy of judicial review of emergency powers, a perceptive reader responded:

"But are you really saying judges shouldn't act when faced with a president claiming the right to torture, to hold people indefinitely without trial, or to violate the laws of Congress? And if your point is that judges are wimps when faced with security issues, isn't that a problem of too little, rather than too much, judicial review?"

This question goes directly to the issue at stake here. Yes, those whose rights have been violated - including detainees of various stripes but also including thousands of immigrants who have been subject to arbitrary and unfair application of immigration law - should have their day in court. Yes, judges should respond when the president violates acts of Congress. There's nothing wrong with courts protecting individual rights; that's a big part of what they are supposed to do, and they should be criticized when they fail to do so.

But, as a matter of political engagement, it is a grave mistake to confine our arguments against the war on terror to the language of legality, or to concentrate our hopes on an unelected branch of government to save us. There are a number of reasons to be skeptical of judicial review as a means of preventing the abuse of emergency powers, and we will be discussing the issue in depth during our upcoming teach in. Here we just want to make one point: framing political problems in exclusively legal language (so that, for example, aspects of the war on terror are objectionable only if they can be shown to be illegal) is a bad political strategy. It implies an alienating discourse that is intended for "experts," it distracts from the need to clarify and convince other people in terms of fundamental values, and it ignores the fact that the constitution is permissive of a range of horrifying laws. Perhaps most importantly, excessive legalism narrows the horizon of our political imagination. A rote insistence on the rule of law forecloses the possibilities of thinking creatively about political transformation.

So, if the question is whether judges should be doing their jobs, we say, fine, more judicial review. But the judiciary is an organ of the state. As a rule, the judiciary will not oppose both branches of the state and defend constitutional rights against emergency powers. The history of the institution reflects this without exception. Under some circumstances, courts can be a forum for defending individual rights, but they cannot take the place of a political movement. Nor can petitioning of the government to protect one's rights take the place of the collective assertion of rights that are not recognized by the state. Our critique of legalism is not about inventing a pure distinction between law and politics (as though such a thing were imaginable). It is about two different visions of political activity: legalism encourages us to petition an organ of the state - the judiciary - to protect our rights for us, and when it fails to do so, it calls for more judicial review. The view we are advocating (in an admittedly experimental and probing sort of way) assumes that rights can only be expanded through their political assertion in the public sphere, and that they must be claimed against the state at times. Here, judicial review is totally ineffective. So if the question is whether there is too little judicial review as a means of the expansion of rights and the assertion of political liberty, our response is that the left would be better off with no judicial review at all.

Surveillance goes Sci-Fi

Yesterday we posted on the general acceptance of surveillance as part of our daily lives. See this Financial Times story, which one of our readers kindly sent us, about a company implanting 'RFID' chips, or small radio-transmitters, in two of their employees.

Who's In Guantanamo, Anyway?

The National Journal has another great reported piece on the 'enemy combatants' detained in Guantanamo. After sifting through unclassified files of 132 detainees, and transcripts for 314 prisoners who had plead their case before the military tribunals, the National Journal found little evidence that the administration is detaining terrorists.

According to the magazine, "The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorists attacks outside of Afghanistan." Of those eight, one, an Australian, says he confessed under torture and has been released to Australia; another, a Brit, was 'cleared after a few hours of questioning in London.' The other six turn out to be Bosnians, accused of planning an attack on the American Embassy, but who's charges had been dropped by a Bosnian judge just before the US seize them anyways.

The grab-bag character of the Guantanamo detainees is further evidence that the administration is constantly stubbing its toe as it prances around the world. It is not merely that the administration is incompetent, but that it has deployed a massive apparatus wholly out of proportion to the nature and extent of the threat. Not encountering many straightforward enemies, the government has turned the thinnest of rumors, vaguest of conjectures and weakest of associations into evidence of participation in terrorist plots, and grounds for indefinite detention.*


*See here and here for a follow up National Journal article and op-ed, with profiles of various defense lawyers and a few prisoners. One quote from the article 'The lawyers representing Guantanamo prisoners say the evidence against their clients is weak, indirect, and often based on lies from other detainees. Defense Department documents suggest their right.' These aren't ideologically committed ACLU lawyers, but rather an array of attorneys from mainstream firms who arrived without strong, pre-formed ideas about the nature of the cases. (Thanks to Political Theory Daily for alerting us to these National Journal links.)

How We Learned to Love Surveillance

When the NSA domestic wiretapping scandal broke, there was the sense that the Administration could be facing serious political fallout. Yet, culminating with the State of the Union Address Bush has regained the offensive by emphasizing the threat of terrorism and the need for extraordinary action. Some Democrats are now reduced to arguing that we should revise FISA so that the Administration's action aren't technically illegal. A large part of why Bush has transformed a political liability into a rousing defense of security is because critics refuse to challenge directly claims about the terrorist threat. It is simply not the case that we live under extreme circumstances that warrant the kinds of powers the Administration asserts.

But, this is only part of the story. Even if politicians are too timid to state the obvious, more and more Americans realize that terrorism is not the all-encompassing threat it's made out to be. Such recognition would make it all the more surprising that the Administration hasn't faced sustained public backlash. Yet, the general indifference to wiretapped phonecalls is at root a reflection of how routinized surveillance has become. A 1998 article by the Village Voice remarked that in one eight block radius in New York over 300 hundred street level cameras could be detected. Today, we take for granted that our phone calls and emails are monitored at work, that cameras cover much of our public movements -- all supposedly for our own good. Such surveillance is so commplace that NSA wiretapping seems to invoke the response, "what else is new."

The problem with monitoring is not that the U.S. will devolve into a military dictatorship -- East Germany 2006. It's that we've become so acclimated to the state caring for our every need, that its paternalism is taken for granted. We accept ourselves as children of the state, and presume that their surveillance merely comes with the territory. But, this relationship undermines any sense of popular control over government, or that the state is solely an instrument for articulating our collective interests and projects. Such self-determination rests on a politics of adulthood -- a condition fundamentally negated by the ubiquity of monitoring and our general ease with it.

Freedom of Speech on the Defensive

Britain's conviction on Tuesday of Abu Hamza al-Masri for "racial hatred" should help to clear the air around the cartoon/free-speech debacle that became world news this past week. Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who originally published the Muhammad cartoons last September, has stated that he solicited the cartoons as a flagrant show that speech should not be stifled for fear of offending. While it is likely that there is a good dose of racism to Rose's frustrations, this does not change the fact that what Rose was attempting to slaughter was not Muslim sentiment per se, but Europe's multicultural consensus.

Rose's somewhat pathetic cartoon display is not about Muslims at all, and most especially not about a clash of civilizations. As much as Europeans would like to understand the current unrest as definitive evidence that their culture is vastly different from that of Muslims, this reading couldn't be farther from the truth. Rather than a Europe that, with firm resolve, embraces a robust free speech principle, what the cartoons express is the very weak position of free speech in Europe. The criminalization of "hate speech", institutional speech codes, and the growth of anti-offensive behavior ordinances have all seriously eroded free speech. Britain's conviction of Abu Hamza al-Masri, solely on the basis of controversial speeches he has given, is one more example, propelling us further down the road of suppression. This conviction represents a shocking disfigurement of traditional liberal criminal concepts. For, as the judge in the case himself pointed out, "No one can now say what damage your words may have caused. No one can say whether your audience, present or wider, acted on your words." The judge's assessment makes clear that we have shifted away from the once-cardinal requirement of a crime: action. Speech without action is now enough. And even in cases where there is action, prosecuting the speaker pushes the autonomy of the listener aside, as he is presumed to be the mindless instrument of the speaker.

Of course, the war on terror has served as a powerful pretext for why speech should be deemed dangerous, and not merely unpleasant. In Denmark, where Muslims only comprise 2% of the population, the current government was voted-in riding, in part, on an anti-immigrant agenda. Unsurprisingly, free-speech loving Denmark then proceeded to change speech laws to make it illegal to instigate terrorism or provide advice to terrorists. But the war on terror is far from the only arena in which Europeans are willing to compromise on the principle of free speech (for a good example, see last month's excellent column in the Christian Science Monitor, or France's conviction last week of a French Parliamentarian here, or Brigitte Bardot here).

This does not mean that, since Europe compromises on speech a lot already, it should now crack down on anti-Muslim newspaper content as well. But it does mean that Europe should stop hiding behind its Muslim obsession and see the problem for what it really is: an internal crisis of faith in the West's own commitment to liberty. Denmark's tiny Muslim population can't really be the cause of all this fuss. Europeans are worried that their Muslim populations won't assimilate and accept European values because Europeans themselves have lost sight of what those values are.

Are We Terrorists?

James Bovard has an op-ed in the LATimes describing some of the expansive and just outright bizarre ways the government has described what counts as a terrorist suspect. We, among others, apparently fit the profile: 'The Department of Homeland Security in May 2003 urged 18,000 local and state police departments to treat critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists, according to a confidential DHS memo made public in 2004.' Read on.

Of Cartoons and Civilizations

Rami G. Khouri in the Daily Star has a thoughtful piece on the Arab-Islamic response to the Danish cartoons. According to him, the outcry isn't about cultural difference, the inherent "extremism" of Islam, or the competing "civilizations" of Western and non-Western societies. It's about politics: in particular, post-colonial antipathy to Western policies that are experienced as new, more subtle forms of control, and which undermine self-determination and meaningful independence. Republished in various European newspapers, the cartoons symbolically express these policies. They are taken as vivid proof of Europe's continuing claim to political and ideological supremacy. In other words, we don't need a