Commenter Abu Frank is one of the folks whose challenges to Joe’s and my thinking are most welcome in the comments here. As I’ve noted, one reason I do this is to sharpen my own arguments, and if there was no one to sharpen them against…

Yesterday, he commented, in response to my post on an Op-Ed in the LA Times that I felt ‘blamed the U.S.’ for Saddam’s intransigence. Here’s his first (and core) comment, in it’s entirety:

Armed Liberal:

Why are you letting this bunch of old news upset you? Meisler’s article isn’t saying anything new to anyone who’s been following the story.

What’s your counter-claim?

(1) that the US didn’t do what Meisler says it did (send signals that the sanctions would remain as long as Saddam, and use UNSCOM as a cloak for its own intelligence gathering)?

(2) that even if it did, those actions didn’t create disincentives to Saddam to cooperate with the inspections?

(3) that even if they did create disincentives, they were only minor?

(4) that even if they created major disincentives, Saddam’s non-cooperation was not the USA’s fault?

If (4), that doesn’t contradict Meisler; he doesn’t discuss the law or morality of the situation, just the power play: “Hussein never had much incentive to cooperate”, not “It’s all our fault”.

I don’t agree with him – even though I still think it was a ‘damn good argument’, and the issue I have is found not so much in parsing the historical record as in deciding how we want to view that record.

I can sift the record and find connections from and to almost anything; I have to judge which ones to give primacy and call causes.

Part of my objection to the modern philosophical interpretation of history is found in Fackenheim’s ‘Metaphysics and Historicity’, which I quoted over at Armed Liberal a long time ago. The relevant quote looks like this:

And from historical self-consciousness there is but one step—albeit a long and fateful one—to a wholesale historical skepticism: to the despairing view that history discloses a variety of conflicting Weltanschauungen, with no criterion for choice between them anywhere in sight [A.L.: except essentially artificial and arbitrary ones, per Derrida]. But when events move as they do today, this step is easily taken.

Just how commonly it is in fact taken may be illustrated by a review of three typically contemporary attitudes. The first is what may be called skeptical paralysis. Here historical self-consciousness has led to two results: to the insight that wherever there has been great purpose, there has been great faith; and to the loss of the capacity for commitment to such a faith. Hence there is paralysis which recognizes itself as paralysis and preaches doom.

Which pretty closely maps to what I’m seeing in Abu’s argument. There are conflicting narratives that can be built around our interactions with Saddam, which certainly supports Abu’s point. But…

…the act of building and accepting those narratives it itself not without consequence. By coincidence, Joe just linked to a great Norman Geras post on Arendt and Eichmann. In it he says (forgive the long quote, and do go read the whole thing):

I also have a wider theoretical misgiving about the emphasis on perpetrator normality: this is that it runs the risk of permitting the sociology and psychology which is involved in trying to understand what happened to displace the ethical perspective. Let us return to Arendt’s writing. On the face of it she was unambiguous about Eichmann having to bear the moral responsibility for his deeds. From a moral point of view she dismissed the notion that, in similar circumstances, others might have acted similarly to him. As though addressing the man himself, Arendt declared:

there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done.

But in explaining Eichmann, his mentality, his normality, Arendt also speaks of his committing crimes

under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

If it is well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel it, though, mustn’t this at least mitigate the degree of his moral responsibility?

From an interpretative point of view I think we are bound to stick with Arendt’s assignment of full responsibility to Eichmann, since she is so clear and emphatic about it. On the other hand, I believe that all the talk, in the relevant literature, of the normality of the perpetrators carries a danger of encouraging us to think: well, because of these psychological pressures, these social mechanisms or administrative structures, those patterns of internal rationalization and so on, what the perpetrators did is ‘understandable’. But isn’t there a sense in which, as Primo Levi wrote, one must refuse to understand? Or one must say: each and all of the factors – social, psychological or whatever – that tempted or pressured you, they are understandable; still, you made a choice or choices which you should not have made and which others did not make – you crossed the line.

I think that in judging history, particularly political history, we have to keep in perspective the moral issues; we have to be willing to keep in mind that what we’re watching isn’t chess, and that there is a moral balance which must be weighed. And I simply can’t weigh Hussein’s desire to hold on to power as the moral equivalent to Clinton’s or GWB’s intent to remove him.

Clearly there is an argument to make about diplomatic strategies and the tactics of negotiation – and the need to leave an opponent an out in order to get them to comply. There are also counterarguments to that about the trustworthiness of the other side, and whether they are worth negotiating with at all.

Go over to Armed Liberal and check out the new look…swag (t-shirts, mugs and mousepads all) to follow, both from AL and WoC, but more on that in a bit.

Actually, an interesting ‘soft feature‘ on the Governator, with a gratuitous insult aimed at yours truly and my friends:

As he and his entourage arrived at the Rock Store, a place deep in Malibu Canyon where old men take their new bikes, the crowd lunged before composing itself, going from giddiness to indifferent manliness.

(emphasis added)

Hey!! I … I … I actually kind of resemble that remark…

But if the Times writer wants to see indifferent manliness, he needs to be there when Leno shows up on his jet-turbine powered motorcycle…

According to the NY Times, Saddam apparently didn’t do too well in those late-night dorm poker games.

A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.

Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border.

And I’m more and more convinced of some variant of my ‘Bad Software‘ where-are-the-WMD theory.

Dr. Kay, the former chief C.I.A. weapons inspector, has said that his team learned that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons — but that all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had them. He said it appeared that the Iraqi officers were the victims of a disinformation campaign by Mr. Hussein.

…

The interrogations yielded a portrait of a government disconnected from reality in peace and in war, where members of Mr. Hussein’s inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities.

And, I guess there’s humor in the notion that they were so paranoid they couldn’t believe that it was us calling, as opposed to Saddam:

When a wave of calls went out to the private telephone numbers of selected officials inside Iraq, asking them to turn against Mr. Hussein and avoid war, the Arabic speakers making the calls were so fluent that the recipients did not believe the calls were from Americans.

Instead, the Iraqis believed the calls were part of a “loyalty test” mounted by Mr. Hussein’s secret services, the officials said during questioning. Afraid of arrest, incarceration, torture and even death, they refused to cooperate.

What a bunch of evil clowns.

I’m probably as tired of writing about them as many of you are tired of reading me writing about them, but what can I say, someone’s got to do it.

I’d laid off this column in the LA Times Opinion (annoying registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) this Sunday, because I thought everyone else would cover it.

But no one has, and it’s me alone, standing between idiocy and the Internet.

You know how it’s all our fault? Here’s a serious commentator – the former U.N. correspondent for the LA Times – who suggests that Saddam’s failure to comply with the UN inspectors – and therefore avoid war – was, of course, the fault of the US Government.

…one factor, just as important as the others, has been overlooked. U.N. inspections were undercut from the start by U.S. policy.

American officials boasted continually that the United States would never allow the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, imposed after the Persian Gulf War, as long as Hussein remained in power. As a result, Hussein never had much incentive to cooperate with the inspectors. If the U.S. carried out its threat, sanctions would remain no matter what he did.

The United States corrupted the process of inspection.

…

But Iraqi frustration with U.S. policy may have been a significant factor in the decision by Iraqi officials, representing a weak and humiliated government, to preen and bluster and stand in the way of Butler — foolish and dangerous behavior that bolstered the view that the Iraqis had a lot to hide. When the new presidential commission investigates the flawed intelligence about Hussein’s WMD, it should not overlook the U.S. role in the subversion of inspections.

You know, at some point this kind of misjudgment of the world is no longer a matter of politics, but a matter of psychology.

The United States is not the omnipotent parent we all need to rebel against, and yet complain about when it can’t magically solve our problems without pain.

Since – by the way – he was in Vietnam, I’ll use one of my touchstone Vietnam experiences to comment.

ARMED LIBERAL WAKES UP, STAGGERS TO WINDOW, PULLS CURTAIN ASIDE, LOOKS OUT.

“Kerry. Shit, it’s going to be Kerry.”

At this point, Clark is out, Dean is running so that he doesn’t disappoint his supporters (except that Joe Trippi is already starting a new organizing effort that will suck what oxygen is left out of his room), Edwards is doing “OK”, and were there other candidates? I forget.

I was almost in a brutally tough position on this one, but Kerry’s impending coronation makes it somewhat easier. While Bush’s domestic policies aren’t criminal, exactly, they are amazingly stupid in almost every dimension in which I can think to measure them. But he is doing the war thing sort of right. Unless he’s planning to pull out too soon in the face of domestic political pressure. Now my head really hurts.

And if the Democrats had a candidate who had a strong track record on foreign policy and had some kind of remotely consistent plan for what to do now that we’re here (see some of my ideas, as examples of what I’d like to see), I’d have to weigh the cost of switching teams mid-game against the net advantages of domestic policies I liked better against the likely effect of the proposed foreign policies against the fact that I’ve always supported Democrats, and that a strong Democratic Presidential showing would have coattails in local races that I value a lot.
I’d been watching and reading about Edwards, and had pretty much set myself to actually do some work on his behalf in the event it was close come the California primary.

I can rebudget that time elsewhere, it appears.

And, to be frank, I think that I can dodge the tough issue of whether I’d rather support a Republican – for the first time in my life – or someone whose foreign policy makes me all itchy and nervous. It won’t matter who I support, Kerry is going to get tubed.

Why do I say that? Glad you asked!

He’s being supported because people believe he can be elected, not because of any deep attachment to him or his policies, which are almost as variable as Boston weather.

On every issue where Kerry ought to be able to just nail Bush, there is a strong and obvious counter.

* Unlike Bush, Kerry served in Vietnam, while Bush did (something) in Texas [Wrote an antiwar book featuring radically unkempt demonstrators, threw (someone’s) medals over the White House fence, was on stage with Jane Fonda, gave testimony to the Senate that certainly challenged the notion that he supported the troops, appeared in a photo in front of the NVA flag];

* Unlike Bush, Kerry didn’t trade on his father’s position to get bailed out of bad businesses [married his way to wealth];

* Unlike Bush, Kerry didn’t use his political connections to reward campaign investors [well, OK, skip that one];

* Unlike Bush, Kerry isn’t guilty of malapropisms [Unlike Bush, is perceived as an arrogant ass by many who come in contact with him]

Look, there is nothing in the world I’d like more than a serious debate about our national ends and the means we intend to use to get from here to there. If there were a Democratic candidate who combined some rational domestic policy with a serious foreign policy, I’d take out a HELOC and spend three or four months helping out.

This is arguably the most serious election in my adult life. I believe that the Communists would have collapsed sooner or later even if Reagan hadn’t spent them into the ground (although he certainly made a difference). I think that Clinton did some good stuff in refocusing our domestic social-welfare programs.

But there’s a big-ass hole in lower Manhattan, and our people are being beheaded on home video. It’s not going to get better by itself, and we need to have a coherent set of policies and the resources and will to carry them out. Kerry’s actions and statements to date don’t give me an ounce of confidence that he’s the guy to do this.

Bush is challengeable on that front, and I’d like to see him challenged in order, if nothing else, to get him to better articulate and defend what he’s doing.

I’m not going to stay up late seeing if Kerry can make that challenge.

Got to spend the morning Monday with Jim Hake at Camp Pendleton, meeting with a bunch of the Marines he helped so much (thanks, Jim, for having me along!).

My first comment is one that’s kind of embarrassing to me, because it shows how parochial my life has really been. I can’t believe the intelligence, depth, and just plain competence of the officers and troops we met. It’s scary, because comparing them to the general run of managers I deal with doesn’t necessarily paint a good picture of the civilian world. And worst of all, it violates a bunch of my own biases and preconceptions.

I’ll have to learn to deal with that.

The interesting note of the morning was this: We were met at the gate by Eric, the young officer who acted as our guide around the base. He was driving his personal car, a Toyota Prius hybrid.

I asked him how he liked it (a lot) and why he bought it (just can’t see buying something that uses a lot of gas these days).

Anyone else want to make the connection??

Fascinating article in Sunday’s NY Times, essentially asking the question ‘has Al Qaeda metastasized?‘.

The landscape of the terrorist threat has shifted, many intelligence officials around the world say, with more than a dozen regional militant Islamic groups showing signs of growing strength and broader ambitions, even as the operational power of Al Qaeda appears diminished.

Some of the militant groups, with roots from Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus to North Africa and Europe, are believed to be loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, the officials say. But other groups follow their own agenda, merely drawing inspiration from Osama bin Laden’s periodic taped messages calling for attacks against the United States and its allies, the officials say.

OK, here’s a question. My knee-jerk reaction is that this demonstrates the fragility of the ‘pursue Al Qaeda’ strategy espoused by many of those who oppose the Iraq War. There is, however, a strong counterargument that our attacks on Al Qaeda dispersed enough of the people involved that, in essence, the operation spread the cancer.

Discuss…

(spelling correction thanks to reader Kalin Harvey)

Atrios, my fellow pseud-blogger, has a tough-talking piece up on the aftermath of the war.

This is quite creepy, really. Hundreds of urban professionals have been assassinated in Iraq in the past year.

The existence of an open civil society requires that the vast majority of people, for the most part, choose to be civil. There are so many scores to be settled, so many competing factions, so many reasons for general popular discontent for the current state of affairs, that I really don’t comprehend how we’re really going to be capable of doing much of anything to improve things. Maybe – just maybe – there was a narrow window in the immediate aftermath of “major combat operations,” when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Baathist bureaucracy, had an army of engineers in to fix the place up the way all those breathless NPR reports kept promising us, etc… when we could have put things on the right course. But, they just lost the thread pretty quickly.

…

There’s a cancer in our press right now, and it’s going to continue to grow and grow. Even now anti-war critics, despite being ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, are being marginalized because for some reason in order to criticize the war you have to have been for it to begin with. I have no idea why this makes any sense, but there it is. It’s aided and abetted by the “liberal hawks” who for the most part seemed to just want to prove they have bigger testicles than the rest of us. But, why the hell should anyone listen to them? They were wrong, and I don’t really care about reading their tortured essays of self-evaluation. The issue isn’t simply that they were wrong, but they were wrong in a particular offensive manner. They, too, for the most part encouraged the marginalization of war critics with their smarmy condescending “we know best” tone. You know what, guys, it ISN’T ALL ABOUT YOU. Stop with the narcissistic navel-gazing. The consequence of your crap wasn’t a wee bit of embarassment at cocktail parties, it was this.

Boy, I guess the simple answer is that either Atrios is a) consumed by partisan desire and intends to look at the world in whatever way he has to in order to fulfill that desire; or b) someone whose sense of history has been overly shaped by the neat wrappers we put around events when they’re reduced to inevitable narrative after the fact.

Look, let’s set a few things out. I can’t tell you how sincerely I hope that no one within a kilometer of power in the Administration genuinely believed that once we took the palaces, that the people in Iraq would rise up, hand over Saddam and his henchmen, join Rotary and Toastmasters, and start figuring out how they could underbid high-paid American workers for jobs. Nothing in recent history – well, maybe Granada – would prepare any thoughtful person for that belief. It may well be that someone did, or even that many of them did, but I have a basic rule which is to never assume that people who are rich or powerful are truly stupid; the ones who are are usually out of cash and out of office amazingly damn fast.

I don’t doubt (and have written about here and here) the case that the Bush administration -as has virtually every Administration since Truman, at least – has undersold the difficulty of the war we face, and failed to put together the broad and compelling case for why and what we’re doing.

But, jeez, Atrios, what did you expect? By any measure the war is going stunningly well for our side. We are engaged in what is going to be a protracted low-level battle against groups within Iraq. We do have a tough political bridge to cross in that Bush has set some amazingly aggressive dates for the transfer of political power, which unless symbolic, are going to be impossible to meet without in effect cutting and running. And if they are symbolic, they will build local resentment that we will then have to defuse.

As I’ve said in the past, if we had a set of facts in the ME that compared to recent news from Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – except was opposed to our strategic goals as opposed to aligning with them, there isn’t a chance in hell that Atrios & co. wouldn’t be trumpeting them as conclusive evidence that the Administration’s plans had failed and that we faced the long-feared but never seen ‘uprising of the Arab street’. While I’m not prepared to look at these partial steps as anything but conditional, it’s nonetheless true that they are conditionally breaking our way.

But Atrios is ready to call it defeat; the problem in accepting his judgement of events today is that, of course to him it was a defeat before it started.

In the past, even as I’ve supported him, I’ve dinged him for being part of the ‘Jackie Goldberg, lemming wing of the Democratic Party’ and I’ll suggest that we’d probably disagree on a number of policy issues but that even in our disagreements we would be far closer together than I am to GWB and his Administration. But from what I can tell, he (and he’s far from alone) believes somehow that with a dash of Kyoto and a bit of ICJ, we’d somehow have managed to pull together a coalition of Western states willing to – well, willing to do exactly what? Invade North Korea? Invade and hold Pakistan? Start a campaign of covert action and assassination throughout the Arab world?

I wish I knew. And I genuinely wish that I could see a way to support him, because I’m all too damn sensitive to things like the real costs of wars.

There have been a flurry of blog posts triggered by the article in Chronicle of Higher Education on ‘Occidentalism’ (a clever play on Said’s ‘Orientalism‘) – we were tipped by MaroonBlog.

I’ll try and catalog some of them here and then wrap up with some of my own views (which are, unsurprisingly almost completely in agreement).

First off, the article itself:

However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothèque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.

Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of “U.S. imperialism.”

It’s been blogged several places that I’ve found; here’s the full Technorati list.

This is a subject right at the beating center of my interests, given my early posts on Romanticism and Terrorism and The War on Bad Philosophy.

Ultimately, I think that we’ll win this war with philosophy, not with violence (but in the short and intermediate term, we’ll certainly need violent men and women to protect the philosophers while they philosophize).

Here’s the ‘money quote’ I pulled from Isiah Berlin’s ‘Roots of Romanticism’:

Suppose you went…and spoke with [long list of European Romatic intellectual figures, including Hugo, de Staël, Schlegel, Goethe, Coleridge, Byron] Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind. The values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to an ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advancement of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even loyalty to your king, or your republic. You would have found common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it…this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.

Map that against the Occidentalist article:

Calculation — the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on — is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze pilots.

The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. And the Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so. When the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with the “Zionist Crusaders,” whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower Manhattan, or a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted.

and against my own comments on terrorism and Bad Philosophy:

Finally, that the roots of terrorism, or rather the roots of the political decision to assume terrorism as a tactic, have to do as much with the desire to have an impact on people’s awareness as on their behavior. When I accuse the Palestinians of adopting tactics aimed at dramatic TV coverage as much as at damaging the Israelis, I’m pointing out that in terrorism the desire to psychologically defeat the opponent may outweigh the desire to defeat them in practical terms.

Now what is unique about terrorism is that it stands alone as a kind of “media war” in which the rhetoric and media images matter more than the actual balance of power “on the ground”. Terrorists almost never attack targets that would have substantive impact; they attack airport waiting areas, and not the radar or air-traffic control facilities that would shut down the airport. Even when they do attempt attacks against infrastructure (the Pi Glilot refinery), one wonders if it was for the effect on fuel supplies of the size of the explosion that mattered.

I think we’re on to something; a picture of a Western philosophical movement that ultimately connected to a Middle Eastern religious one. In fact the connections are explicit. NewsRack blog has a great piece on the connections between Qutb and Alexis Carrel:

It turns out that Qutb had a more direct connection to a variety of European mysticism and nascent totalitarianism in the writings and philosophy of one Alexis Carrel — Nobel Prize in Medicine winner for his work on circulatory surgery and transplants, arch-conservative Catholic, Vichy regime supporter, and, in the end, apologist for Nazi euthanasia and eugenics programs.

Rudolph Walther, a historian living in Frankfurt, recently wrote a piece for the German newsweekly Die Zeit that discusses the Qutb-Carrel connection, “The strange teachings of Doctor Carrel: how a French Catholic doctor became a spiritual forefather of the radical Islamists.”

This is gonna be fun.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the great discussions on Qutb at Demosophia, Ideofact, and Regnum Crucis.