The Bloviator has a teriffic post on the Administration’s smallpox plans, and on issues in managing bioterror generally.
Take a look and comment.

Ranting Screeds takes me to task for laying the roots of hostile political discourse at the feet of Newt Gingrich. They go far deeper, says he, and liberals were among the founders.
I’ll have to hit the books and think about this…

Just a quick one between under-6 soccer and an afternoon of work.
Devra M, over at Blue Streak (whose link I’ve fixed on the blogroll, BTW) has a followup on Dawn’s parenting post I’ve commented on below (enough dependent clauses and links yet?).
Devra’s post is a great, nakedly honest, self-revelatory comment on her fears about being a good enough parent.
I think the fact that she has those fears and can articulate them certainly means that she almost certainly is someone who can be a good enough parent. I largely raised myself; my parents, while competent adults in the outside world were certainly not competent parents, and my brother and I carry the burden of that. I resolved long ago that I would be the parent my parents couldn’t be, and that’s the rock I’m always pushing up the hill.
She says:

But I wonder if they weigh the mistakes they’ve made against the positives & find they’re somehow lacking. I can’t imagine that a loving parent would say they ‘regret’ having children, but I wonder if there isn’t a small voice inside asking “Are you sure you made the right decision?”
If you’re a parent, are you allowed to wonder if you’re the last person in the world who should be trying to raise children? If you’re a parent, are you allowed to doubt yourself? How do you get past that terror? How do you get through each day without thinking you’re fucking it all up?

Let me answer for a moment by telling a story.
When my oldest was an infant, we had a dinner party and had some friends over. It was early, he was still up, and then as happens, he needed changing. I ran upstairs with him and changed him (with poop, sub 30-second changes were always my goal – I was the Woods Brothers of diaper changers), then not wanting to miss the conversation, hurried back down.
I was barefoot, as I often am in the house, and slipped on the carpet at the top of the stairs.
Today, seventeen years later, I still remember what it felt like to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to recover; to feel my body stretching out over the stairwell, and to know that I had my son in my arms. I thought I had killed him. I thought my life was over, that I had through carelessness failed as a father and that I was worthless as a man who should take care of his children. And while I was thinking that, some other part of me…some part more active and less articulate…dropped my shoulder and pulled him into my chest so that when I fell, I hit and rolled around him.
I wound up lying on my back on the landing, my feet in the air, with two cracked ribs…and my son was laughing and waving his arms, suggesting, I’ve always felt, that that was a lot of fun and we should do it again.
Every parent I know has a story like that.
Not all these stories end well. But what I know about the good parents…the ones who try, the ones who, when the moment comes, drop a shoulder and roll into whatever is being handed them…is that regardless of the outcome, they are better people for having tried it.
This doesn’t mean I think everyone should have kids. I desperately wanted them. But I do think that fear is a bad reason to choose not to, because what I’ve learned from being a parent is that a child brings out the part of you that has the will to walk through whatever fears you have and come out the other side.

As a man who enjoys a well-turned phrase almost as much as a well-turned ankle, I often find myself reading one, and giving my usual reaction: “Bastard! I should have written that!!”
Recent email from reader Marshall has had me muttering under my breath.
I said:

“I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can
build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that
perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for.”

He replies:

“The root of conservatism is that belief that human systems are not built
but grow naturally, believing that perfection is unattainable and therefore
not worth struggling for.”
“The root of socialism is that belief that we can strive toward building
the system, believing that perfection is attainable and is worth
legislating toward.”
“The root of totalitarianism is that belief that we can build human systems
that are perfect, believing that perfection has been attained and is worth
killing to maintain.”
“The root of libertarianism is that belief that we can discard inconvenient
human systems, believing that that is perfection and is worth blogging for.”

Bastard.

So I’ve been wrestling with my own stuff this week…moody, frustrated at the outer world’s ambiguity and my own lassitude…trying to get back to a mindset where I can see some clarity in my life and in the world of ideas outside.
And everything seems kind of…off. Voices I’m reading are less thoughtful and interesting, and I’m wondering if it’s just my mood and what I’ll have to do to shake it off (land one of these consulting projects, for starters!).
And then I read something, and the world becomes clear.
I’m randomly clicking links as I tend to do when I’m not really paying attention (and which in my darker moments is what I imagine my 200 readers do to find me…), and read this:

None of these things were true of Sullivan when he edited The New Republic a decade ago. You could disagree with him but often his pieces showed a relaxed respect for his adversaries and the joys of an inquisitive, independent mind at work. If that Sullivan could have seen what he’d let himself get reduced to … maybe he’d just have let the HIV take its course.
— from SullyWatch

And my eyes snapped wide open. I put it into context with some quotes from Hesiod about Den Beste’s series:

It’s time for an intervention. Take a day or two away from your blog.
Then go back and read your manifesto again. This time substitute the words “Jew” and “Jews” for the words “Arab” and “Muslim.”
If it doesn’t send a chill up and down your spine, check yourself into a mental hospital, or seek professional counseling.
And I’m not being sarcastic about this.
You accuse the Arabs of living in the 14th century. Arguably, your “solution” comes right out of the 20th. Roughly from the years between 1932 and 1945 to be precise.
It’s not to late to wake up and re-think things.
— from Hesiod’s email toDen Beste

It’s the overall dismissive and contemptuous tone that I’m seeing in Hesiod’s (and some other) liberal sites.
I don’t know if they’re hoping to get tryouts on cable talk shows, or if their rhetoric has just been infected by it. It’s the evolved state of the Newt Gingrich “no-more Mr. Nice Guy” politics, and what we’ve done as liberals is to adopt the worst features of that politics: harsh and divisive rhetoric, which we think makes us clever; an unwillingness to engage political opponents on any meaningful dialog, because playing attack-dog until you or your opponent backs down seems like a better way of reaching compromise than simply sitting down and compromising (not to mention an attachment to seats in SkyBoxes and the largesse that well-heeled donors can provide). I think this kind of politics sucks, and not just because I’m too polite to call people names or wish for their slow death by AIDS.
I talked about it before:

And we’re at a point in our political history that’s been made by single-issue warriors…for and against development, for and against abortion, for and against parks for dogs…and damn those on the other side of the issue.
I had the unique opportunity to have dinner once with then-State Senator John Schmitz. He was a genuine John Birch society member, elected from Orange County, who lost his office when it was discovered that his mistress had sexually abused their sons. (His daughter is also Mary Kay Le Tourneau, so I’ll take as a given that the family had…issues…). He was still in the Senate, and made a comment that I’ve always remembered:
When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.
And that’s why I think the [Pledge] decision was stupid, and why the forces behind it…the Church of My Wounded Feelings…and their soldiers, the Warrior Cult of the Single Issue…are incredibly destructive. And right now, we don’t have the time for it.

Look, whether you are in agreement with Den Beste’s arguments or not; whether you agree with Sullivan or not, the fact is that there are important issues that can no longer be treated as theoretical about how we deal with the rest of the world; hard discussions need to take place. And when I see the folks I would logically side with talking like adolescents with a bad need to Be Bad, it doesn’t fill me with warm fuzzies that I’m gonna see one.
And in case Hesiod and whoever does Sullywatch don’t care if I have warm fuzzies, I’ll remind them that preaching to the choir is pretty satisfying, but it doesn’t make the church grow, if you know what I mean…

Latif’s Cavern, apparently written by a Pakistani living in the UK, with a lot of Arab and Islamic history and some interesting prescriptions for the future. I don’t yet know enough to have an opinion…

The Bloviator looks at the process of distributing Federal funds, and gives a great off-the-cuff definition of ‘public health’.
I was at a dinner with friends last night, and the impending closure of the Harbor-UCLA trauma center was much discussed; my friend’s wife had her life saved there last year after she was struck by a car, and it is the Class I trauma center me and mine would go to if we needed it.
This issue is cutting ever closer to home…

My new target-of-jealousy-because-he-blogs-so-well William Burton takes Andrew Edward’s and my discussions on gun control and spins them up to 78rpm. Go check them out; this will be a fun discussion!

Frequent commenter Ziska has been drilling me on the issue of ‘terrorism” as opposed to “legitimate warfare”. He has drawn several parallels to wars of national liberation, and our discussion has moved from Algeria to Eire, and from India to Sri Lanka.
Others have joined him in criticizing the distinction I make, which seems very clear to me….but obviously not to them.
So I thought I’d take a stab at a broad discussion of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” uses for force, and what I perceive to be the tragic, if moral, consequences of legitimate warfare versus the equally tragic and immoral consequences of terrorism.
First, and foremost, let me dwell on the tragedies involved. Innocent people die, are maimed and wounded, have their lives shattered irrecoverably. Whether they are killed by a stray Allied bomb in WWII, a cannon shell in a besieged city in one of the sieges of the 30 Years War, a Palestinian bomb in Tel Aviv, or an Israeli tank shell in Gaza. Some starve because the crops have been ruined or irrigation systems destroyed or livestock killed; some die from treatable diseases because hospitals have no power or are inaccessible. Each of these tragic stories represents an individual noncombatant who did not deserve to die.
But the reality of human existence is that innocents die. The earliest human stories…for example, the ballads of of Homer…talk of the tragedies that befall humans at the capricious whim of the gods.
Our civilized society has little appetite for this, and we have erected structures that ostensibly protect the innocent, in international law and custom. Not everyone follows those laws and customs, however.
So let’s talk cases.
During World War II, German and Allied forces bombed each other’s cities; the stated reason for Allied bombing was:

The deployment of the air forces opposing Germany was heavily influenced by the fact that victory was planned to come through invasion and land occupation. In the early years of the war, to be sure, the RAF had the independent mission of striking at German industrial centers in an effort to weaken the German economy and the morale of the German people.
source: THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY (authors J.K. Galbraith, among others)

The German justification was somewhat different:

I believe this plan [raiding RAF airfields] would have been very successful, but as a result of the Fuhrer’s speech about retribution, in which he asked that London be attacked immediately, I had to follow the other course. I wanted to attack the airfields first, thus creating a prerequisite for attacking London . . . I spoke with the Fuhrer about my plans in order to try to have him agree I should attack the first ring of RAF airfields around London, but he insisted he wanted to have London itself attacked for political reasons, and also for retribution.
I considered the attacks on London useless, and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British.
— Reichmarschall Hermann Goering, International Military Tribunal Nuremberg, 1946.

Notice two points of difference: the Allied strategy was set to a) weaken the fighting effectiveness of the German Army by collapsing the industrial economy that supported it, and secondarily weakening the morale of the German people. The German strategy was out-and-out retribution…a lashing out at the British people, and secondarily, if at all, attacking their means to wage war.
The Hague convention of 1923 states:

Bombardment from the air is legitimate only when directed at a military objective, the destruction or injury of which would constitute a distinct military disadvantage to the belligerent.

In general, we understand and support attacks which logically support weakening the ability of belligerent soldiers to fight. The allied raids on the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt may have destroyed whole neighborhoods, but they can be justified as attacking a target of military importance (precision machines need bearing); similarly the Allied attacks on steel, oil and nitrate production necessary to produce weapons gasoline and explosives, as well as the roads, waterways, and railroads necessary to transport them – and the food needed to support an urban industrial economy.
The Allies did not limit themselves to ‘militarily useful’ attacks, however. Dresden and Cologne certainly were not. But the other stated purpose was to attack the morale of the enemy, and realistically, satisfy the emotional need to damage the opposing state. How well did they work?

The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to “black radio” listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence — in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work. However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident.
— Strategic Bombing Survey

So it appears that the goal of demoralizing the enemy seems to have had some effect. The interesting thing is that the bombings in England seemed to have the opposite effect, of infuriating the population and strengthening their will to fight. I might suggest that part of the difference lay in the magnitude of the attacks, meaning that while the attacks on Britain were damaging, they did not represent a force overwhelming enough to call victory into question (there were certainly other issues…of national character, political leadership, the perceived legitimacy of the government, etc.), while the devastating attacks by the RAF and then the Americans certainly would have had to make the average German question the viability of the war enterprise.
Finally, you cannot talk about aerial bombardment without talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are three broad questions: 1) were the attacks on nonstrategic targets legitimate at all? 2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first? and 3) to what extent was racism toward the Japanese people an element in making us more willing to bomb them?
Serious books have been written on these subjects, and will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve read a few of them. My father was also a cryptographer in Army Intelligence in WW II, stationed in India and Burma, and then Japan after the war, and he and I had some extensive talks about it. Here’s my (personal, inconclusive) take on these three questions:
1) were these attacks legitimate?
Yes, to the extent that the attacks on Cologne, Dresden and Tokyo were also legitimate. Part of the enterprise in national war is to both destroy the fighting ability of the enemy, which can be done both by destroying the men and equipment in their armed forces, and in a modern industrial society, by destroying the economy that supports them. In addition, the effects on morale – both of the enemy and of the attacker – must be considered. Fights are won, in no small part, on emotion. My personal judgment, is that in the context of a global war like WW II, strikes against enemy population centers were not unjustifiable. By hastening the collapse of the enemy as an effective fighting force, they may have saved combatent lives on both sides lives in offset to those non-combatant lives the bombing cost.
I’ll address the ‘combatant’ vs. non-combatant’ issue later.
2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first?
There has been a lot written and discussed about this; about the effect of an announced demonstration over Tokyo Bay or an unoccupied islet. It strikes me as a nice idea, but we are far removed from two things: a) the uncertainty that was widely present at the time about whether the bomb would actually work, or would simply produce a conventional explosion and shards of U238; and b) the genuine emotional hatred in effect at the time, which feeds into:
3) was racism the key to using the Bomb in Japan?
Yes, but. But we would have used the Bomb in Germany if it had been ready in time. But it was racism that cut both ways. The level of cultural misunderstanding between the Japanese and Western politicians and military is probably matched by the level of misunderstanding between the militant Native American tribes and the European immigrants. The Japanese military was to the American view, insanely – no, suicidally – brave, and equally insanely cruel. The Western military was – to the Japanese view – cowardly and weak. From talking to my father and to other men of his age who fought the Japanese (and my father’s battles were quite cushy and non-life-threatening), the real differences in the warfighting styles, amplified by the propaganda machines, led to real and deep feelings of fear and hate. Had this picture of the Japanese not been pervasive – and again, I’ll state that it had its roots in real cultural differences, amplified and ‘played up’ by propaganda – I wonder what we would have done.
The Germans were, on the other hand, perceived as ‘fellow Westerners’, and even the knowledge of the extermination camps did not drive them out of that place. But according to contemporary documents, the fear that the Germans were close to a bomb, and the certainty that they would use it if they had it, I believe would certainly have led to the use of the A-bomb in Europe if VE day had been sufficiently far away.
So, in summary, I’m trying to justify the collateral death and destruction on civilian, nonmilitary targets in WW II as a part of a larger war plan, and in the context of those intentions, legitimate.
Remember that criminality (and hence morality) depends in large part on intentions. The dead are just as dead. But when we judge the living, we have to judge them in large part by what they meant to do.
Next, nuclear war and Homeric war.

So I’m tied up in arguments over the police, the definition of terrorism, the progress of peace in Palestine, and I can’t articulate my ideas and my head just hurts. I usually take this as a good sign, one that means that the purpose of this blog – forcing me to think through and clearly articulate my thoughts and opinions – is being met.
(thanks by the way to everyone who is tossing rocks into the soup)
But right now I can’t write about them worth a damn.
Then, scanning the blogs, I read Dawn’s prayer to become a better parent, and there’s something I can start to talk about.
I love being a dad, even when one of my kids gives me shit online. Somehow especially then…
I think I’m a pretty good Dad, although time will tell. I know that I work harder at it than I ever have at anything in my entire life, and that it gives me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done in my life.
It’s also true that it’s different – and I think harder – for moms. It may be coincidence, but both of my marriages started to splinter about the time the first child were born, and while I certainly have to carry my share of the weight for that, I can also say that I saw the women I’d married…smart, tough, professional, independent women…crack under the burden. Not only the burden of physically bearing children and tending them when they are small and helpless…I was up nights, too, and we were lucky enough to have household help…but the burden of conflicting expectations and conflicting images of who they ought to be and what they ought to hold important.
But those are issues for them, and their blogs, if they ever choose to have one.
For me, becoming a parent has been so incredibly liberating, because it has taken me out of myself.
The best story I can tell is about a ski trip we took with the boys and two childless good friends … they had the ‘first chair up, last chair up’ attitude we’d always had when we skied together.
But now we had the boys…ages six and four…and the reality was that we were going to move on what I called ‘kid time’…we were going to get it done, but on the boys’ pace. By the end of the trip, we were so frustrated with our friends, and they with us, that violence felt like a real possibility. And I felt like I had to make a choice, and I did…I chose to move on ‘kid time’. And learning about ‘kid time’, and the ability to still get them where I want them to go while accepting that the path we take may not exactly be the one I planned on, is the best lesson I could have received.
This means that I’ve always dealt with my sons as ‘people’ even when I recognized that when young, they didn’t have the capacity to be truly independent. I called this ‘peas or carrots’; they always had choices at dinnertime…I just determined what the choices were…peas or carrots? And they were always willing to stand up and tell me what they wanted…while I determined if they got it or not.
I have close friends who have raised their children along the other paths…where the children were browbeaten and given no say; and where the children basically ran the house. In both cases, both the parents and kids seem to be coming out broken.
It’s damn hard. You get called away just as you’re getting ready to go to the important meeting, or there is a knock at the bedroom door at the worst possible breathing-hard moment. Their shoes come untied – again – as you are late getting them to school.
And for me, somehow, the burden always lifts just as it becomes unbearable. I find another bit of patience when I thought I was done. I turn and apologize after saying something that I wish I hadn’t said, and the anger lifts. And the road ahead becomes that much less steep when I do. And that ability…the ability to reach a little further,to be a little better…is the gift my sons have given to me.
We’re not done yet…one is away at school, one in high school, and one in first grade…but I’m proud as hell of them, and hopeful for all of our futures.
Hang tough, Dawn. It’s all worth it.