Kicking Sand In Libya's Face

Earlier this week, Harper's Magazine posted a kind of 'gotcha' article about Bush and Libya. The author, Ken Silverstein, points out that Bush claims he will not tolerate 'state sponsors of terrorism,' yet Bush has been actively cooperating with Qaddafi on intelligence matters, even hinting that Qaddafi's Libya might be taken off the State Department's list of Sponsors of Terrorism if Qaddafi continues to help the US with terrorism-related intelligence. Silverstein's 'big discovery' comes in the form of a lawsuit, brought by the families of the victims of the Pan Am bombing. These families claim that Libya actively sponsored the hijacking, refuses to admit responsibility, and is therefore a state sponsor of terrorism. Silverstein summarizes the evidence and smugly concludes 'It is hard to imagine a more textbook definition of “state sponsorship".'

According to Silverstein, this case constitutes a 'fresh embarrassment for the Bush Administration' but we fail to see anything critical about this argument. First of all, Silverstein seems to have done no research on his own, instead relying on documents provided to him by the plaintiff's law firms. That the victims say so does not make it so. There is even good evidence that Libya was framed by the US and UK as part of Cold War politicking. That Silverstein doesn't even look into the facts independently, as a normal journalist might, is, well, just poor journalism.

Silverstein's willingness to be an uncritical mouthpiece for the plaintiffs reflects the simple-mindedness of his enterprise. Like many opportunistic critics, Silverstein seems to be looking for any potential contradiction, hypocrisy, or inconsistency, no matter how minor, and no matter how unrelated to broader principles, so long as they 'further embarrass' the Bush administration. For this reason, and this reason only, does Silverstein seem to care about the family's lawsuit - it further proves Bush's supposed mendacity.

But a closer examination of Silverstein's own facts suggest that he is the prisoner of that famous hobgoblin of small minds: a foolish consistency. In fact, Bush's relations with Qaddafi embodies a rare moment of diplomatic skill for this administration. That Qaddafi is cooperating with Bush on finding terrorist suspects right now suggests that, whatever relationship he did or didn't have to a terrorist hijacking more than twenty years ago, he certainly is no longer any kind of state sponsor. This is the kind of diplomatic acumen and flexible thinking Bush is normally accused of not possessing (although one would think that a normal adult should be capable of similar political reasoning). Even worse, we wonder what exactly Silverstein wants. Should we continue arbitrarily to persecute Libya with punitive sanctions? It's hard to see what's very progressive about that.

The point here is not really that Silverstein is being annoying and small-minded. It is to underscore the problem with such opportunistic critiques. They achieve their effect by leaving in place a broader structure of argument that we should reject. Silverstein's critique only works if we accept a dogmatic understanding of 'state sponsors of terrorism' whereby 20 year old actions count more than those in the present. Even more problematically, for Silverman the best way to criticize our leaders is by taking the language of the war on terror and trying to use it against them. Only if we accept these premises does something the critique make any sense as a claim to 'further embarrass the administration' - although in this case, even then it isn't clear it works.

Once again, the goal of critique should be to reject security-based reasoning itself. Ostensible progressives, like those who write for Harper's magazine, aren't going to get anywhere if they think all they need to do is hunt for embarrassing hypocrisies in the administration's behavior. Superficial self-contradictions are a dime-a-dozen, but their political significance depends on the overarching frame of interpretation we give them. Politics should not be a game of trivial embarrassments, with each side keeping score on how many hits it scores.

Law in Search of a Political Movement

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released a report stating that since 9/11 it has collected hundreds of allegations of detainee torture and abuse, implicating some 600 military personnel in acts of violence against 460 detainees. The numbers once again underscore the systematic nature of detainee mistreatment and the clear complicity of the civilian and military leadership in legitimating such practices. Among the various recommendations HRW makes, it calls for the prosecution of all individuals, regardless of rank or position in civilian leadership (that means you Rumsfeld), "who participated in, ordered, or bear command responsibility for war crimes or torture."

Like all efforts at legal redress such reports have their limits. In particular, they are unable to confront the political context in which military misconduct takes place. The greater problem isn't the single instance of torture by the soldier on the ground, but the war on terror's very logic, which justifies virtually all acts of state violence under the theory that the U.S. faces a permanent and global emergency. Merely prosecuting each legal violation won't in and of itself alter the political framework -- which perpetuates such violence and breeds a sense of collective insecurity. Simply put, legal methods are at root unsuited to addressing what is fundamentally a political problem.

Yet, this critique of legalism is only half the story. HRW in raising the sheer number of individuals involved in torture and the failure of both the military and its civilian supervisors to take any meaningful legal action, is actually hinting at the political problem. It's the war on terror itself which validates such complicity, and justifies the lack of any accountability. Yet, HRW and other legal organizations, by their very nature, are neither mass movements nor parties which can serve as a political opposition or represent popular constituencies. For their legal arguments to take on political significance, lawyers require social mobilizations, which themselves would do the hard work of questioning the logic of emergency and the securitized state.

It's only in the absence of oppositional politics that the limits of legalism become more pronounced. Under these circumstances, calling for prosecution can easily by coopted by savvy politicians into a way to scapegoat military personnel, while at the same time maintaining or even entrenching the prevailing status quo. The problem then for HRW and for the rest of us is that its reports are a defense of law without any popular mobilization to fuse legality with politics -- to make legal action symbolic of a commitment to political change. It's this fusion that can make law an instrument of popular power and place legal argument in the service of authentic reform.

Mike Bloomberg's Plan For City Schools

Another day, another checkpoint in NYC. This time, school students are to be subject to roving police checkpoints that will deploy metal detectors to search them on their way into school. While metal detectors have been in use for many years at some schools, this move is Bloomberg's own initiative on violence in schools.

Needless to say, no weapons were found in Wednesday's sweep. School shootings are phenomenally rare and teens are much more likely to be victims of violent crime outside school than within. The main item confiscated was students' cellphones, lamely justified by the Schools Chancellor on the basis that they had been used by "to take pictures in locker rooms, cheat on exams and summon friends to start fights."

We have oft noted the corrosive impact of such casual securitization. City schools need to inspire not coerce, a role they cannot play if we turn them into prisons. If kids grow up thinking 'it's a jungle out there' how can we expect them to engage in society to their full potential? Meanwhile, when some spirited youngters showed intiative and protested the cell phone ban two weeks ago, they were arrested. Nonetheless, further protests greeted the arrival of the detectors, perhaps a sign that the children are less easily cowed and assuaged than their parents. Their example should shame the rest of us into halting Bloomberg's creeping securitization of everyday life.

Al Qaeda Season 5

With each new communique from Al Qaeda, its irrelevance and isolation increases. The latest audio tape from Osama Bin Laden is no exception. He calls on Sudan (from which he and Al Qaeda were unceremoniously expelled in 1996) to wage a “long war against the Crusader plunderers” in the western regions of the country. The Sudanese Foreign Ministry flatly declared that “Sudan has nothing to do with such statements.”

A recent pep-broadcast to the newly elected government in Palestine by the more eloquent No. 2 man in Al Qaeda, al-Zawahiri, had the same effect. Reminding Hamas to continue the struggle against Israel at all costs, he suggested that the new government throw out all of the “surrender accords” made between the previous “secular” government and Israel. Khaled Meshaal, in a public rebuff, said that he would not be told what to do by Al Qaeda, and had no need of its advice.

The Washington Post notes that factional disputes within the fundamentalist movement have increased. “The schisms are reflected in Zawahiri’s many speeches, in which he has attempted to assert influence over a host of seemingly unrelated issues: the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, elections in Egypt, oil production in Saudi Arabia and obscure questions of Muslim theology.” Stretched beyond the limit of his portfolio, Zawahiri and Al Qaeda are losing credibility among their fellow travelers.

It is the decentralized nature of Al Qaeda that has allowed such splintering to occur. In the face of Zawahiri’s relentless criticism of Islamic parties throughout the Middle East taking part in any western-style elections, strong Islamic showings in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as the mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have given fresh impetus to local movements. Even militants like Zarqawi in Iraq disagree openly with Zawahiri.

That Al Qaeda’s limited influence is waning even further is no secret. Bruce Hoffman, of the Rand Corp., says of Bin Laden’s latest broadcast: “He’s got to say something about someplace. They’ve got to keep talking or else they’re going to be irrelevant, especially when they’re not directly involved in the fighting.”

Daniel Drezner, sober blogger that he is, asks the question outright: “[I]f there is no spectacular terrorist attack in the next year – on a par, say, with either the London or Madrid bombings – is it safe to say that the threat from Al Qaeda should be seriously downgraded?”

By mentioning the independently orchestrated attacks in London and Madrid, Drezner begs the question by assuming that the objective threat of Al Qaeda has been rationally quantified up to this point. He is on to something, but why wait a year? How big must the attack be to justify continued stress over Al Qaeda? As we have previously said, the magnitude, imminence and likelihood of terrorist attacks have never been factors in the logic of the War on Terror, and questions like this really have very little to do with Al Qaeda's continued popularity on the airwaves.

Dennis Perrin gets it right. Osama's status is that of a celebrity and his shtick is to launch invective against crusaders and Zionists. Just as when our major Hollywood role-models wax rhapsodic on some social matter or other, we are all sure to see it on the front pages, no matter how irrelevant their opinions may be to our lives, so too Osama. As Perrin says, "[T]here remain plenty who are content with the crazed villain scenario, and the major media in hand with the government will continue to screen this until it is no longer useful, though, I'm afraid, it'll be very useful for some time to come."

Save Darfur! Don't March on Sunday

Who knew it would take OBL to make Nicholas Kristof pause in his Pulitzer-prize winning coverage of the Sudanese crisis? Kristof’s article in yesterday’s New York Times advised that he and others advocating for “a more forceful response to genocide in Darfur” should be “sobered” by the Bin-Laden tape. Apparently, Kristof has discovered, there are potential dangers to military intervention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the OBL-induced epiphany does not lead Kristof so far as to consider not supporting the use of force, it merely requires a more clearly thought-out intervention.

So, for example, Kristof suggests the UN may avert the problem of “nationalistic sensitivities” that he fears could be stirred up by the likes of Bin-Laden by ensuring that any UN occupation will not include US ground troops. Instead, significant, well-equipped, and mobile troops should be made up primarily of Muslims, Europeans and Asians. The US and France, meanwhile, will enforce a no-fly zone from the French air base in Chad.

Even with such a plan, Kristof cautions, risks remain that the Sudanese Muslim masses may be manipulated into rioting and “lynching a few U.S. aid workers—or journalists.” But the good news for those lusting after intervention is that “the Sudanese government is hanging on by its fingernails.” In fact, Kristof reports that in an upcoming issue of Foreign Policy, Sudan is ranked “the single most unstable country in the entire world,” in their Failed States Index. This, we are to understand, is good news for the intervention, because Sudan is so weak that it will not be able to stand up to much international pressure.

Kristof is by no means the first to raise such concerns. International analysts have been advocating for non-US (or non-Western) troops in Darfur since 2004, with US/European involvement only in the funding, supply and strategic planning of operations. These strategies are an attempt to distance Darfur-type interventions from the Western nations that instigate them, an attempt to mask the power-play between the weak and strong states that is at work in these “missions.”

The need to disguise the real agents of international intervention has been particularly acute since 2004, as it became increasingly difficult to ignore the failures in Iraq. And for hawkish liberals who opposed military force in Iraq, there is an embarrassing contradiction to try to resolve. Lawrence Kaplan, of The New Republic, sees the contradiction clearly. He states that Sunday’s marchers for Darfur (organized by the Save Darfur Coalition) “will have to contend with an unwelcome guest: the specter of Iraq.” He explains that, “[e]ven the most committed progressive activists seem confused about what exactly should be done next. 'A CALL TO YOUR CONSCIENCE: SAVE DARFUR!,' 'TAKE ACTION NOW'--these are a few of the slogans that the Save Darfur Coalition suggests marchers affix to their placards at the April 30 rally. But it's purposefully unclear what the march organizers mean by 'action' and on whose 'conscience' they intend to call."

He describes progressives as being caught in a “bind of their own devising” as they criticize the US for employing military power in Iraq when it posed no imminent threat, and without support of the international community. In fact, he says, these are “precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.”

Kaplan puts his finger on the contradiction at work, and the main animating power behind the Darfur movement, a self-obsessed moralism that has much to do with personal feelings of righteousness and little to do with the Sudanese they wish to “save.” Kaplan scorns this moral grandstanding: “So, yes, march on Washington. Comfort your sensibilities. Testify to your virtue and good intentions. Offer assurance that your call to action is not a call for the unilateral or unprovoked exercise of American power.” Of course, Kaplan’s vitriol stems from his disgust that these progressives are unwilling to fully support militarism as the only thing that will get the job done (“Don’t pretend that Darfur will be saved by anything else [other than American power]” he concludes.) This, to him, points to a weakness of will, a wavering of conviction. Do we believe in saving the Sudanese or not? If so, we should certainly apply any means necessary.

In fact, Kaplan argues, that is exactly what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo, and what we need to continue to pursue whenever necessary. Kaplan draws the connection between Iraq and other interventions when many liberals are unwilling to do so. He unmasks the moral driver of international interventions, the total self-obsession of these calls to conscience. But rather than supporting his call for the full use of US force in Sudan and other similar places, Kaplan's observations actually point to exactly why such urges to humanitarian intervention must be resisted. Because humanitarian projects must prove the moral resolve of US and European leaders, they are ill suited to addressing the problems of those in whose states they intervene. Western moral resolve requires clear moral absolutes, a wronged victim on whose behalf one can slay the evil perpetrator. Humanitarianism cannot understand conflicts in the developing world for what they are, struggles between differing interests for political control. By simplifying the political situation in Iraq or Sudan or elsewhere, these movements aren’t answering to a higher law; they are attempting to fulfill the needs of the West by acting out a morality play on the stage of the Third World.

Law And Order in Blair's Britain

In Blair's weekend email extravaganza, on which we have already commented, one thing that became clear was the way in which a fuzzy conception of civil liberties allows New Labour and their ilk to bolster the case for draconian legislation. Thus in discussing the use of highly irregular legal measures against the disruptive denizens of British public housing, Blair asks of their persecuted neighbors,

"When we talk of civil liberties, what about theirs, the law-abiding people; the ones who treat others with courtesy and good manners and expect the same back? Don't theirs count for anything?"

The assertion here is that to live free of loud music, unruly kids and other menaces is a form of civil liberty. This is even more explicit when Charles Clarke, Home Secretary, defends his boss in the same venue today. Clarke states that freedom vis a vis the state is less critical today because,

"as democracy has advanced so powerfully across the world, other rights become important too. The right to go to work safely on the tube. The right not to be killed by someone who has served his sentence for violent crime but remains dangerous. The right to live at home without being disturbed by antisocial behaviour outside the front door."

Thus we are left with a battle of rights, and which right (in this case, due process versus the right to live a life unmolested by bad neighbors) wins, can be based on a pragmatic assessment of the costs and benefits of abrogating each right (although no prizes for guessing which right will come out on top for Clarke and Blair). Freedom and security have become two points on a continuum and what we need to find is a balance between the two.

But this is not the case. To give a somewhat idealized schematic, civil liberties emerged in relation to the development of a powerful state that had become the final arbiter in any dispute (thus removing a degree of arbitrariness from individuals' relations with one another). To compare the playing of loud music, an annoyance with which people have dealt for many years without needing to involve the legal system, to the possibility of facing government prosecution stripped of all one's legal protections, is preposterous.

That said, Clarke makes the reasonable claim that liberal journalists have reacted somewhat hysterically to recent legislation, often using terms such as "police state" and "fascist". While they might be right to flag up the novel nature of much current law and order legislation, it would be wrong to try and force it into pre-existing categories. Clarke and Blair are probably right that most Brits have not experienced, and are unlikely to experience, the arbitrary force of the state in their day to day lives. This is not the real danger of draconian measures against nuisance behavior. Instead, what people experience from such law and order drives, is the sense that society is a chaotic place, that their fellow citizens are untrustworthy, and that any dispute between them can only be resolved through the intervention of a third party (the state). This is a sinister development, in which, even as they seek to address the lack of social cohesion through the criminal system, Clarke and Blair work subtly to undermine it further.

INTERVIEW: Corey Robin

As part of a new feature for our blog, AWOT has begun a series of interviews with public intellectuals, professors, activists and journalists. This week, we caught up with Corey Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: History of a Political Idea, as well as of numerous articles in the London Review of Books, American Political Science Review, Social Research, Theory and Event, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, and Raritan. Robin is also the author of a recent essay comparing the neoconservatives to other counter-revolutionaries in American history, which he has generously shared with us. Below are a few tease quotes from the interview, the entirety of which you can read here: Corey Robin Interview.

Corey Robin on the politics of fear:
‘there’s a tendency on the part of political theorists and leaders to turn to fear as a foundation, a negative foundation, for politics. People begin to argue that we don’t know what the good is – or at least can’t agree upon the good – but we do know what the bad is and that fear is the worst bad or the worst evil. So if we can ground our politics in opposing the object that represents that fear – usually some kind of foreign enemy – we can move forward.’

Corey Robin on utopianism and violence
‘many people do think that violence is committed by utopians and ideologues and that security is the necessary antidote to that ideological, utopian violence. But that’s just plainly wrong. There’s an awful lot of violence that is committed or defended by people who think of themselves as the opposite of utopians or ideologues (think Robert McNamara or Herman Kahn), and security is often their calling card.’

Corey Robin on the neocons:
‘I think the neocons are counterrevolutionaries. People get confused by the neocons because they don’t seem like traditional conservatives – or at least what we think of as conservatives. And that’s because they’re not.’

Corey Robin on the dearth of progressive ideals:
‘I’m not sure if the problem is that the Left has no ideas or that it is too afraid to articulate clearly the ideas that it does have. At some level, it doesn’t matter: the Left is not a potent ideological force…The recent book by the guy who runs Daily Kos is a case in point – very little discussion of ideology at all.’

Corey Robin on risk-taking:
‘Risk-taking is not inherently conservative but celebrating risk-taking for its own sake – or for the cultural regeneration it brings – is a classically counterrevolutionary and fascist idea. The counterrevolutionary or fascist sees a prostrate, weak, vapid society and believes that heroism and risk are the only ways to jump start that society into something more vital, profound, and elevated. Having said that, there’s never been any progress – liberal or leftist – that did not depend upon some kind of risk-taking.’

Of Leaks, Lie Detector Tests, and National Security

The firing last week of a CIA agent for leaking information about secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe has produced a flurry of debate. Criticism of the Administration has most commonly taken the form of accusations of hypocrisy. While its own leaks (even to punish political opponents) are okay, leaks by others meant to expose government misconduct are firable offenses. Juan Cole at Informed Comment best captures this view, in his post "All Right, Not All Right." Yet, whether or not the Administration is behaving hypocritically is really besides the point, because what the episode most speaks to is a transformation in how our government views public access to information.

Since 1945, the U.S. has developed, largely within the executive branch, an extensive bureaucratic apparatus organized around providinig domestic and international security. Rather than conducting government's business in the open, such a national security state operates through the flow of secret information. The lack of publicity in turn amplifies concerns with accountability and the misuse of state power. Today, one of the central features of the "war on terror" is its ability to extend such secrecy by enveloping much of government action within the domain of security.

A system of leaks has been the primary way in which, despite such secrecy, citizens have continued to gain access to information. Just think back to the Pentagon Papers. In essence, while government officials assert that journalists have no right to classified material, if somehow such material reaches the press, journalists are free to publish it. Although such a system is far from ideal, leaks do shed some light on state behavior -- particularly in the context of an active and investigative press. In a sense, what the Administration is actually doing these days is shutting down the prevailing mode of publicity. As the NY Times reported today, the CIA has given dozens of special polygraph tests to its employees in an effort to squash any future leaks.

The real problem for citizens, then, is not Administration hypocrisy, but its commitment to eliminating leaks as such and creating a rigid executive discipline. Given the remarkable compliance of the elite press, and the general trends away from investigative journalism, we may well be witnessing a shift of great significance. A government operating largely in secret, with few remaining avenues for public access and accountability, is anti-democratic to its core. Reclaiming democratic government therefore begins by prying open this national security apparatus.

For Roger

For those who missed, it, Roger Toussaint, leader of the Local 100, Transport Workers Union, entered prison this morning for a ten day sentence for leading December's transit strike. Get it straight Bloomberg. If they are essential workers (as suggested by their status under the draconian Taylor laws which forbid their right to strike), then pay them as such. If they are not, restore their right to strike.

In solidarity with Mr. Toussaint, we republish our December 20, 2005 post on the strike:

Sleep Tight

New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg said that in the event of a transit strike he would spend the night on a cot on the floor of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) in Brooklyn, and last night he did just that.

The original OEM offices were located on a secure floor in 7 World Trade Center, and were forced to relocate after that building collapsed in 2001. The OEM Charter gives the Mayor all necessary legal authority to handle “threats from natural hazards and natural disasters, power and other public service outages, labor unrest… explosions… transportation and transit incidents… acts of terrorism…”

The Mayor’s Brooklyn sleepover builds on public statements made by him and his office that suggests the strikers are putting the city at risk for terrorism. In his press conference today, Bloomberg said that “We can't let inconveniences, as massive as they are, stop our economy… or jeopardize public safety.” This comes on the heels of a similar remark by the City Corporation Counsel, (the lawyer for the MTA against the union) , Michael Cardozo, “A strike would pose enormous risks to the city and impose serious economic losses…”
Bloomberg’s inability to govern without reference to terror is too blatant to be manipulation. It is something closer to desperation. The willy-nilly use of terrorism by any and all to foreclose serious discussion isn’t just a cheap debating tactic, it’s also the sign of a bad conscience permeating official rhetoric. Lacking any serious political ideas or persuasive arguments, Bloomberg and Co. roll out the war on terror to paper over their visionless rule. Deep down, Mike, we know even you don't buy it.

Blair Behaving Badly

Tony Blair’s “public email exchange” with Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer is well worth a read. In the exchange, Blair defends his government’s succession of law-and-order legislation, introduced under his so-called ‘Respect’ agenda, and provides a clear look at the reasoning that has driven this frantic expansion of the remit of the law. The exchange is a great insight (especially for American readers) because it both provides a summary of the UK’s stunning rollbacks in civil liberties, and helps us to understand how the government has ended up advocating such intrusive and draconian measures.

Blair simultaneously defends his current policies and advocates expanding the state’s security apparatus still further. His responses, in their unerring pragmatism, make clear just how important it is that those who seek to defend liberty attempt to cultivate a principled, non-pragmatic position. Blair continually argues on the grounds of efficiency and efficacy, defending his policies against Porter’s criticisms by explaining that (a) the new laws affect relatively few people (for example, he justifies ending the jury trial right in criminal cases involving “serious fraud” on the basis that the change affects 20 cases out of 40,000 jury trials per year; he justifies changes in law that allow an inference to be drawn against a defendant who refuses to testify in cases where the charge involves causing the death of a child or vulnerable teenager, because “[t]his again is in a tiny number of cases”); and (b) these policies are highly effective (again, Blair: “You complain of the DNA database samples being retained. Since we allowed this, over 14,000 offences have been successfully matched to over 8,000 suspects including over 100 murders and 100 rapes”). Lost on Blair is the notion that we might have other priorities higher than catching as many criminals (or anti-social types, “thugs” in the Prime Minister’s words) as possible, and that there is potentially more at stake than the pragmatic pursuit of police work.

Furthermore, Blair is using the old guise of crime-busting to attempt to address wholly unrelated concerns about a changing society, and the feeling that people are less integrated into a national social fabric. He correctly recognizes that the criminal law as it has historically developed cannot address such social concerns. But instead of concluding that this must be the case in these non-criminal matters, he advocates continued adaptations of criminal law to provide the government with further coercive authority to, essentially, make people get along.
Blair speaks as if he lives in more crime-addled or violent times than his predecessors (an almost shocking historical amnesia) and that therefore the old liberal institutions will not suffice. “You can't deal with the levels of sophistication in today's organised crime by traditional methods. That's why we are giving the new agency new powers to force suspects to disclose information, to open up their accounts; to ensure that their advisers can't conceal evidence; and to track their movements not just in Britain but abroad. But look at what these people do. They traffic in human beings, often, as I heard for myself a few weeks back, young girls sold into prostitution; they deal in drugs, with levels of violence unimaginable in the past. I am sorry to tell you: I want us to go further in all these areas. The alternative is that they, who do not play by our rules or any rules, get away with it.” Blair’s panic over increasingly sophisticated crime rings is belied by the recent capture of mafia boss, Bernado Provenzano, who was hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse in rural Sicily. He had allegedly escaped capture for decades by communicating exclusively through written notes carried by trusted lieutenants.

Rather than facing a more significant threat than ever, it seems that Blair is in a quandary of facing no significant threats—not in the classical sense, at least—and is, rather, facing an internal “crisis” of meaning. Blair describes Britain as “ages away” from “the stable communities of 50 years ago” (but whether the instability of today’s communities is a reality is seriously in doubt).

Of his critics, who claim he is undermining fundamental liberties, Blair says “they are out of touch with their own voters.” If he is, as he claims, more “in touch” with the concerns of the people, these are concerns that are expressed as nebulous anxieties without a particular focus. Consider Blair’s justification for developing a regime of punishment for offenses that would not meet the standards for criminal prosecution:

“Please speak to the victims of this menace. They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.
It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an ASBO or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison. And yes, because often these thugs terrorise those who challenge them, we allow the police to give the evidence as hearsay. But the result is that where these powers are being used, the law-abiding no longer live in fear of the lawless.”

What Blair appears to be trying to tackle is whether Brits are “happy” and feel “respected”, whether British society feels like a community of old—it seems at the moment that the answer to all of these is no. As he explains: “[O]n anti-social behaviour I agree the causes of this are very deep - to do with shifting communities, dysfunctional families, globalisation and myriad influences, not all benign, to which our young people are subject. And, at the risk of opening another front, the remedies here are quite stark too. The system intervenes once kids are off the rails. This is usually hopeless. We need intervention at an early age… People aren't naive about it. They know the old days aren't coming back. The age of deference has passed and a good thing too. But people mourn the loss of respect. That is something utterly basic to any society. They want it back; and if, in order to get it back, we have to alter our traditional way of thinking and doing, then people, and I mean wholly reasonable, moderate people, will make a very conscious decision to do just that.”

As to how to battle this demon, Blair is clearly at a loss. And his plans for increased state intervention, for criminalizing new realms of behavior and mediating between individuals in conflict cannot help. Indeed, to blow every minor squabble into a matter deserving legal intervention can only increase the sense of estrangement that people experience. Blair may correctly pick up on a mood of alienation in Britain, but his actions can only intensify it.

The Democrats And Foreign Policy

It has been easy to pillory the Democrats for their position on Iraq, or really lack thereof. Supposedly Senate Democrats ‘convened a private meeting in late June [2005] to develop a cohesive stance on the war and debated every option -- only to break up with no consensus.’ As a recent Nation article reports, besides being incoherent they have also lagged well behind public opinion:

'Sixty-six percent of the public want the United States to "reduce its number of troops," with those respondents favoring a timeline for withdrawal by a margin of 2 to 1. Some 72 percent of American troops serving in Iraq think the United States should exit the country in the next year, a recent Zogby poll found. "The elites in Washington are thinking a hell of a lot different than the people right now," says Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager. "And someone's really wrong."'

Not to mention, they basically authorized the war when they signed the carte blanche ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’ bill in 2001 and then many added their John Hancock’s to the ‘Congressional Resolution on Iraq’.

But perhaps all this is by the by. Suppose we accept the argument that the above is simply the efforts of a party out of power trying to stay in the game, but that their real foreign policy, should they be in power, would be substantially different. At the moment, they are just trying not to look weak. EJ Dionne has incisively criticized this logic on its own terms as self-destructive:

“Democrats are so obsessed with not looking “weak” on defense that they end up making themselves look weak, period, by the way they respond to Republican attacks on their alleged weakness. Oh my gosh, many Democrats say, we can't associate ourselves with the likes of Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who recently called for a troop withdrawal within six months. Let's knife them before Karl Rove gets around to knifing us. Talk about a recipe for retreat and defeat.”

But even this is perhaps not the point. Let’s take Democrats at their word, and judge them not by what they have done, but by what they say they would do. If the Democrats really had their way, wouldn’t it still be better than what we have – less militarism, more cooperation, greater legality, higher respect for weak countries? Let us then investigate what some of the leading foreign policy experts, most likely to influence a Democratic administration, have to say.

Forget, for a moment, the rather annoying tendency of all Democratic foreign policy documents to begin with some need to acknowledge that the Democrats ‘need not to appear weak on security’. Let us imagine the extremely unlikely possibility that the Democrats will want to end the war on terror, and carve out a new path altogether. We cannot look at the views of all the foreign policy experts, including Fareed Zakaria, Peter Beinart, and Jessica Mathews, most likely to influence or even govern in a Democratic administration. Let us look at two other Democratic experts whose ideas are not strikingly different from the aforementioned three. Consider first, the view expressed by Will Marshall, the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, in the major magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council.

‘How can the United Nations be a source of legitimacy if it can't prevent mass murder?... If we can't make it work better, we will pretty much guarantee that the United States winds up being the global gendarme by default…As long as just one country can use its veto to keep the Security Council from acting, the United Nations is more likely to be an obstacle to multilateral action than a catalyst…Ultimately, however, America needs a reformed United Nations that can shoulder more responsibility for preventing conflicts and restoring peace.’

In other words, when the United Nations does what the United States thinks is right, its functioning properly, but when it doesn’t, then it is illegitimate. And what is the problem with the United Nations right now? – that it provides too many procedural mechanisms that might frustrate America’s ethical projects. What exactly is the new role for the UN that Marshall envisions? The maid to America’s muscle. The US supplies the military might to humanitarian missions, and the UN cleans up for all the hard, post-invasion reconstruction work afterwards. This is not a commitment to global democracy or international law, but rather to developing an international architecture that could intervene more effectively, and more pervasively, in the affairs of other countries (we have already discussed our views on sovereignty and on non-intervention previously). This is not that far off from how Bush treated the UN. In many ways, it is more insidious than Bush’s brazen and club-footed attempts at diplomacy. With Bush it’s at least more transparent who is really in charge, no matter how much Bush subsequently has tried to avoid being held to account. But the Democrats seek to hide behind the UN and its ‘international legitimacy’, thereby avoiding responsibility for their own decisions and policies. Even worse, their view rests on the fantasy that one can blow into a country, kill the baddies, save the victims, then send in a team of international experts to rebuild the state, as if there were no political issues involved in such a reconstruction.

The fact of the matter is that the Democrats don’t have any more respect for the autonomy and self-determination of other countries than do Republicans. They just don’t like the fact that Bush is in charge. Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and widely considered a favorite for a foreign policy post in a Democratic administration, recently said this about Bush’s foreign policy: ‘So the challenge for us "muscular Wilsonians," is to break out of the corner that the neocons have boxed us into.’ The defense of ‘muscular Wilsonianism,’ by which she means the United States reserving the right to intervene whenever it finds its conscience offended, even after the double debacle of Afghanistan and Iraq, is surprising to say the least. And the attempt to blame the failures of interventionism on neoconservatives is nothing short of lame. It serves as an excuse for the broader project of re-enchanting global American power, and war for ethical ends. Even were it to abandon the war on terror, there is little reason to expect less militarism and global mucking around from a Democratic administration.

The Fervent Imagination of the Liberals

A focus of this blog has been the crude nature of 'backlash' arguments deployed by opponents of the war on terror. From yesterday’s Guardian, an excellent example of the type by Timothy Garton Ash, Britain’s equivalent of Thomas Freidman. In his ‘thought-piece’, TGA imagines a world 3 years from now, in which, having been attacked by the administration of Hillary Clinton, Iran unleashes a string of suicide bombings in the UK and US killing 10,000.

Not only does TGA join the routine exaggeration of the number of Muslims willing to be recruited to jihadi causes (“Tehran, claiming it already had more than 50,000 volunteers for operations…”), he also makes the mistake of conflating jihadis, mainstream Islamist political parties, and state actors. In his scenario, “Iran's ability to wage asymmetric warfare through Hizbullah, Hamas and its own suicide-bombing brigades”, has been underestimated by the West.

In fact, none of the 9/11 bombers, nor the subsequent bombers in Madrid, London, Istanbul, Bali or anywhere else have had any kind of connection with state-actors. Nor have they been part of political Islamist movements of the type that Hamas or Hizbollah represent. While these mainstream political groups may not have eschewed violence as a political means (although both seem to be in the process of abandoning that tactic), nor have they been involved in the rootless nihilism of Al-Qaeda and its ilk. This is not a careful analysis of the likely fallout from a US invasion of Iran (which might well be disastrous), this is the bandying about of a series of prejudices and clichés about the Middle East. As long as the liberal anti-war position adopts such presuppositions of the war on terror so fully, they stand little chance of producing a more progressive vision for contemporary politics.

This is Your Life

One can't help but wonder whether the old television show, This is Your Life, came to mind for anyone in the Moussaoui courtroom on Monday, as the defense began presenting evidence of "mitigating factors" in its effort to stave off a death sentence. Some of the evidence seems to provide legitimate considerations for the jury in the grave decision that awaits it. For one, a psychologist who had interviewed Moussaoui on numerous occassions testified that the defendant suffers from schizophrenia (though we may wonder, if he is a paranoid schizophrenic, why has he even been determined fit to stand trial). Some family testimony also seems to speak to Moussaoui's mental fitness. A clinical social worker discussed the long history of mental illness in the Moussaoui family, explaining that when she interviewed Moussaoui's father in a mental institution, he was incoherent due to heavy medication. Jurors and Moussaoui were shown videotapes of his two sisters, both also institutionalized for mental illness.

But the evidence about Moussaoui's background did not stop there. The social worker described his father's violent tendencies; that Moussaoui was placed in orphanages intermittently for the first six years of his life; that his father used starvation as a method of control. Myriad childhood and teenage friends testified, either in person or by videotape, stating that Moussaoui had been a loyal friend, that he and a Jewish friend used to believe they "exemplified the possibility of two people of different origins to come together to have an understanding." The jury even learned of Moussaoui's six year relationship with a French woman, who he had hoped to marry, but for her family's objections to his Moroccan origins.

Unfortunately for the defense, no personal horror story could live up to the emotional show put on by the prosecution the week before. The jury was presented with an entire week of "victim impact" testimony, in which scenes of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center were replayed, along with final phone calls to 911 from people trapped in the buildings, and a tearful narration of the 9/11 footage by a woman who filmed the whole disaster. One policeman, whose wife died in the attacks, testified about all the things his son would not be able to do with his mother. Another woman described how her young son suffered motivational problems ever since his father died in the Pentagon attack. Giuliani testified that he remembers some part of September 11th "every day." Descriptions of last week's courtroom proceedings read like an account of group therapy or a collective catharsis.

Though both victim impact testimony and evidence of mitigating factors are a standard aspect of criminal procedure, they are on unique display in the Moussaoui trial, which threatens to make clear just what a disfiguration of the judicial process they represent. In the victim impact/mitigating factors analysis, the focus is shifted from the careful legal assessment of responsibility, and--intentionally--the courtroom door is opened to a parade of social and emotional factors, with questionable relevance to the criminal act, that can sway the jury to harden or soften its heart.

Because the Moussaoui trial has never been about holding this particular defendant accountable for his specific crimes, the scope of these fuzzy factors is broader than ever. The trial has, from the outset, been geared toward vindicating the government's prosecution of the war on terror and providing a theater for vengeance. Thus the prosecution reached wildly, managing to hold Moussaoui responsible not only for an attack in which he never planned to take part, but also for the deaths that resulted. And therefore, any and all tragic stories of September 11th were deemed relevant to the jury's determination of whether Moussaoui should suffer the death penalty for (don't forget) withholding information from FBI interrogators. An observer would have been forgiven for assuming that the hijackers were on trial, or even, all of Al-Qaeda.

After the defense's social worker presented the harrowing tale of Moussaoui's childhood, the prosecutor asked her about Moussaoui's brother. Did he not also suffer the same difficult family life? Why, then, had he not also become a terrorist? Now, the prosecutor appeared to be putting on trial the whole notion of "mitigating factors." And the prosecution seemed to be asking the right questions--of what possible relevance is Moussaoui's childhood, riddled with abuse, or his long love affair with a French woman, for that matter, to his criminal sentencing? But since the trial seems to have long since lost sight of what exactly Moussaoui did, or in what ways he acted criminally, it is anyone's guess what relevance means.

British Invasion

New Yorkers can look forward to a future in film as the ever vigilant Ray Kelly, NYPD Commissioner, announces the installation of 505 surveillance cameras around the city. Further funds will establish computerized license plate readers and vehicle barriers taking their inspiration from our friends across the pond. In the words of the New York Post “The security measures would be similar to London's 'ring of steel,' which gained worldwide recognition after that city's terror attacks of last July, when police cameras provided images of the suspected bombers.”

But of course the images captured by the ‘ring of steel’ showed four bombers who had already immolated themselves in the subway system, proving that such systems are largely ineffective against the (tiny) threat of determined terrorists. As yesterday’s news illustrated, even Israel, whose supposed expertise in matters of security is often vaunted by US pundits, cannot eliminate risks entirely. In the meantime the rest of us will conduct our lives, loves, work and play under the watchful eye of NYPD. Thanks Ray.

The importation of the British model is worth a closer look. While researching his excellent 2004 book, The Naked Crowd (enthusiastically recommended to all our readers), Jeffrey Rosen visited that most surveilled nation on earth (Britain), where, “By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by more than 300 separate cameras from 30 separate CCTV [closed-circuit television] networks in a single day” (37). There he finds that the evidence that security cameras have had an impact on crimes rates, let alone terrorism, is highly contested. But of course we cannot know either way because “When crimes goes up, the cameras get the credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.”

Commissioner Kelly would do well to observe Rosen’s stirring conclusion on Britain’s experiment: “When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don’t mean a transparent society—one where neighbors can peer into one another’s windows using the joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by the past…If the twenty-first century proves to be a time when this ideal is abandoned—a time of surveillance cameras and creepy biometric face-scanning in Times Square—then Osama bin Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine.”

On Liberal Misanthropy

After the 2004 election there was a brief fad for apologies. One liberal entrepreneur started an ‘American Apology’ T-shirt, while a website apologizing to the rest of the world received more than 27 million hits in the first few days after the election. One of the worst things about Bush is the way his regime has become an excuse for these outward expressions of liberal misanthropy. Consider the following two contributions, one from Anatol Lieven in the New York Times, and the other from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Review of Books.

First, Lieven, who concludes a book review on American intervention with the following:

“I must confess that I put down this fine book with a feeling of deep disheartenment. For what, after all, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" — each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?...As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.' " They still don't.”

Not to be outdone, Schlesinger out and out blames Bush’s existence on American stupidity. This is from a meandering essay whose only reason for being published seems to be that it was authored by the eminence gris of the liberal establishment:

“Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity – the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat – fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which he knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests at stake. Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity.”

It is easier for liberals to blame their abysmal failures on ‘the stupidity of our culture’ and national ignorance, than to accept the fact that they don’t come much closer to representing the interests of the majority than conservatives. Liberals have never been that comfortable with democracy in America, preferring popular sovereignty at a distance. They have preferred to see the people as a political resource, led by a highly educated, technocratic elite. These outbursts of liberal misanthropy express their discomfort with the fact that to rule at all they have to call on the public for support. Always mystified at why Americans ‘act stupidly’ or vote against their interests, they forget the fact that politics is about winning arguments with people, not just organizing stage armies and keeping the base in line.

Liberation, Take Two

According to the British Sunday Times, the U.S. is planning a "new liberation of Baghdad" as soon as Iraqi politicians can form a viable government. With the Iraqi military as cover, the U.S. would attempt to retake the city neighborhood by neighborhood.

What's interesting about the rumored initiative is that while the U.S. may be designing plans for such an attack, at this point it is in nobody's interest to support one. Iraqi politicians, after months of fruitless and embarrassing wrangling, have no desire to waste what little credibility they still have on a massive U.S. offensive. And the Bush Administration will find it hard to justify the casualties, let alone the fact that three years on "liberation" needs a make over. This of course doesn't mean that we won't see such an offensive. When you have no vision, policy, or discernible tactics, sometimes you just role the die. But it does mean that any attempt to "liberate" Baghdad would have to overcome what seems to be the central characteristic of American presence in Iraq at the moment -- keeping our soldiers out of harm's way and stationed in massive military bases. It also tells us exactly what state the war in Iraq has reached. The options being pursued by the Administration are a) re-invasion or b) watch from the sidelines and hope for the best. In other words, without direction or ideas, Bush and company are swaying between stasis and overwhelming violence. Which tactic will predominate is impossible to predict.

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As you may have noticed, we have had interruptions in our daily posting. This is because we are experiencing technical difficulties with our web hoster. We still plan on posting at least once a day while these problems are sorted out. We appreciate your patience.

America On The Move?

The war on terror is one part of a wider set of social phenomena that we don't always understand to be linked. A recent article in Reason provides us with an opportunity to begin to get to grips with this broader context. The article tackles an enduring myth about American life: that it is marked by an increasing geographic mobility. It walks us through the various arenas—journalism, academic writing, social theory and policymaking—in which the idea of the US as a “nation on the move” is relied upon to explain various social changes. In public health, increased mobility has been used as an explanation for changing rates in malignant melanoma, and for rising AIDS transmission rates in rural areas. In public funding, Americans’ alleged nomadic lifestyle is used to advocate the allocation of increased public funds toward family support services, or toward elder care. The number of social trends or concerns to which the mobility explanation has been applied almost boggle the mind: the breakdown of family units, environmental problems, the culture of materialism, increased social stratification, to name a few.

The staying power of the mobility myth is even more striking when one considers the powerful evidence, laid out in the Reason article, indicating that, if anything, Americans are more settled than ever before (due to factors such as significant increases in homeownership and the prevalence of two career households). As Reason puts it, “Americans are more likely than ever to stay put. You might think that basic fact would give the social critics and policy makers pause. But it hasn’t stopped them from asserting that rampant mobility is destroying the environment, undermining the family, and increasing anomie. More important, it hasn’t stopped them from proposing…measures to curb a problem that doesn’t exist.”

If all research on the subject undermines the theory that society is increasingly mobile, why is the idea so widely accepted? Reason provides one explanation, that the mobility myth’s popularity is due to a general anxiety about seemingly uncontrollable change. “Mobility is an easy scapegoat for complex changes in the American social fabric.” But then the Reason article bolsters its case through a discussion of the motivations behind the myth; groups invoke the mobility myth because it is politically expedient in furthering their interests. This interest-based explanation fails to place the myth within a context of similar developments, and to understand how its appeal relates to broader trends.

The mobility myth is but one example of demonstrably false social theories which continue to carry sway, because they resonate with a wider anxiety in society. For instance, top-down fear-mongering is often used to explain the strength of myths that prey upon fear. One such analysis which has proved popular is Michael Moore’s "Bowling for Columbine" which explored the growth of fear in American life—and the depoliticizing role it plays. But Moore’s account could only explain the spread of fear through a conscious manipulation on the part of ruling elites who cynically terrorize the populace in order to better control it and further their own personal interests. This a conspiratorial account of the problem, similar to claims that have been made about the war on terror. Such an explanation falls far short, while allowing society at large to shirk its responsibility for widespread and baseless anxiety. The Reason article was much closer to the mark when it recognized that theories that play on social anxiety are popular partly because we live in a society which seems to be in a state of flux, and we lack any feeling of control over the changes, nor any systematic way of making sense of them, or even better, of controlling them.

Because generalized fear and risk-aversion play an important role in shaping and perpetuating the war on terror, specific examples of widespread social anxiety (like the mobility myth), as well as how we come to explain these, are important in helping us get a handle on both what the war on terror is, and how best to challenge it. The “culture of fear” reaches well beyond even the broad parameters of the war on terror, and its development relies on social phenomena far more fundamental than the self-interested plotting of limited interest groups.

Friendly Fire: The Generals v. Rumsfeld

This week a number of retired generals, including those who commanded troops in Iraq, called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. This is not the first time that that the Administration has faced opposition from the military. In December of 2004, soldiers in Kuwait unexpectedly confronted Rumsfeld with a series of questions regarding the lack of adequate armor, to which he rather infamously responded, "you have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Yet, what makes the current uproar particularly damaging for the Administration is not only the seniority of the military officials, but the unprecedented decision to speak publicly. Even during Vietnam, retired generals who fought in the war kept grievances private and never took the step of calling for a change in civilian command.

At the moment, what we're witnessing is the inversion of the traditional civil-military relationship. The ostensible reason why we have civilian control of the military is because civilian leaders are subject to popular pressure. Political opposition in a democratic society ensures that elected representatives and those to whom they delegate power are constantly confronted with competing perspectives. As a result, military decisions are meant to be the product of general consensus and permanently subject to the popular will. Today, by contrast, the Administration's war policies exist almost entirely outside the domain of public accountability. As we've mentioned before, even massive protests have little capacity to alter decision-making. It's civilian insulation rather than responsiveness that has become the political rule.

In this context, the military has for all intents and purposes become the politically significant voice of opposition. On a variety of fronts, from torture and global detention to the war in Iraq, JAG officers, retired generals, and enlisted soldiers have posed some of the greatest practical challenges to the civilian establishment. While such criticism is clearly necessary, it also raises serious questions about American political life.

To begin with, precisely because the military culture is structured around obedience and task-completion, one cannot expect soldiers to pose a meaningful challenge to the goals of public policy. Criticism, to the extent that it's even aired publicly, will inevitably focus on tactics and limited objectives -- such as body armor or whether Rumsfeld should stay or go. The fact that such criticism is being voiced at all does suggest deeper opposition to Administration policies. If the U.S. was engaged in a war with the popular support and political legitimacy of World War II, soldiers wouldn't be complaining about their combat vehicles or calling for resignations.

Yet, the act of moving beyond tactics to articulating and altering public policy is something that can only be done by citizens and their representatives. Thus, on the one hand, the increased willingness of military officials to question civilian leadership is clearly a positive development. Yet, on the other hand, it also marks the hollowing out of ordinary politics. The very fact that only generals have the legitimacy and power to call for civilian accountability tells us much about the capacity of citizens to assert control over their own ostensibly democratic institutions. Without viable avenues for political change, we're left with military officers struggling in incomplete and ideologically limited ways to fill the void. This may be better than nothing, but not by much.

A World Annual State Terror Report?

Fred Halliday usually can be counted on for sharp, original insights into Middle Eastern politics. Arabia Without Sultans, for example, still stands as one of the best books on Saudi Arabia; his Making of the Second Cold War remains in various ways unsurpassed; and in recent years he has peppered the public sphere with a series of commentaries on Islam and the West, the Middle East in international relations, and September 11. So it is no surprise that a recent essay of Halliday’s opens with a series of cutting observations about the faux-professionalism of the ‘terrorism industry,’ its one-sided approach to the issue, as well as an unusually nuanced analysis of terrorism.

We were perplexed, however, to find that what begins as a critique of ‘the group of experts from universities, government and policy institutes’ concludes with a call for a ‘World Annual State Terror Report’. What kind of a critique ends by arguing for an internationalization of an industry that basically should be shut down? What is the logical process that moves from criticism to institutionalization? It is important to unpack this logic because Halliday is representative of a specific way of thinking that is common in progressive intellectual circles.

He starts with the legitimate, even if commonplace, point that terrorism is not a movement but a tactic: ‘Terrorism is not a movement or an environmental trend but a tactic used for political ends.’ This means it has to be analyzed contextually, and different movements distinguished conceptually. Halliday’s next move is to distinguish between national and transnational terrorism, pointing out that national groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have been moving away from terrorist tactics, while transnational groups look like they may be becoming more dangerous. Halliday’s argument, here, makes some useful distinctions, and does clear some waters.

However, he has also been seduced by the power of a trendy word – transnationalism – into thinking that he has already one-upped the simple minded experts of the terrorism industry who see only a terrorist monolith. Having sub-divided, Halliday then goes in for the kill with a final, ‘progressive’ step of logic. He reminds us that terrorism is also committed by states: ‘the denial of the violence of states themselves, and the failure to register and evaluate this violence, reflects a larger crisis of moral and political imagination.’ Halliday is caught up in a web of progressive humanitarian ideas, in which attacking ‘state-centered thinking’, and coming up with new ways of exposing the moral depredations of states, is taken for critique. That is why his conclusion is not to attack the war on terror directly, but rather to adopt and expand the category of terrorism for seemingly critical purposes:

‘The most important conclusion, for practical politics and for its study alike, is that we need to measure the incidence of killing, beating, torture, illegal detention and humiliation by states – the United States, Britain, Russia and Israel included – as much as to measure the bombs and other depredations of terrorists. We need a World Annual State Terror Report to set against the crimes of al-Qaida and its associates. It would not be difficult to compile; but, in the current political and moral climate of the western world, it is rather improbable.’

By making Halliday’s arguments seem marginal and unpopular, the last sentence gives the essay its critical cast, but this is only an appearance. Internationalizing the terrorism industry, reinterpreting terrorism in light of trendy international relations concepts, and branding Western states ‘terrorist’ hardly provides an alternative. If anything, it uncritically relies on the emotive force of the word terrorism, and plays on the underlying politics of fear driving the war on terror itself. Adding up atrocities on all sides, and weighing the numbers, is not really a political argument. It doesn’t tell us whether one side might nonetheless have a pol