The American Conservative

We forget easily that natural rights theory, depending as it does on postulates concerning an anterior “state of nature,” is the worst enemy of human freedom yet to be devised by the mind of man.  Liberty is precious to most of us, particularly to a people who have learned from their frontier heritage to connect a personal sense of worth and merit to what they achieve in making private decisions.  Yet only men who belong to something are in any durable sense free.  And belonging to a society also means citizenship in some kind of commonwealth and submission to some kind of law restrictive of our presocial freedom to a degree that goes beyond the mere prevention or punishment of crime.  Our forefathers knew the costs of the civil condition, but did not speak well of life in a state of nature.  They avoided “constructivist rationalism” (to use Hayek’s terms), regardless of its ostensible connection with “the rights of man.”  Even the most liberal spirits among the Framers of the Constitution and heroes of the Revolution fall short of compliance with the full libertarian paradigm.  Thomas Jefferson, with very slight revisions, fought to keep the English common law in force in Virginia: that law “beyond the cunning of reason,” where custom reigns supreme….Usually the freedoms of which they spoke with fervor were part of the warp and woof of an established way of life.  Most of them understood that “Liberty, like happiness, is most perfect when least remarked.  As most misery is caused by the pursuit of abstract happiness, distinct from the occupations that make men happy, so most tyranny springs from the struggle for an abstract liberty, distinct from the laws and institutions that make men free.” ~M.E. Bradford, Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative (University of Georgia Press, 1985)

Man’s bodily existence is also the basis of his social existence.  This may grow quantitatively from the family, to the labor-dividing small society, to that size in which ordering consciousness finds the material basis for the unfolding of the eu zen, the good life, Aristotle’s criterion of the eunomia, the good social order.  No matter how well ordered society may be, its corporeality, compelling it to provide material care and the control of the passions, requires an existence in the form of organized rulership.  The organization of society through representatives charged with care for the social order within and for defense against external dangers is the conditio sine qua non of society to such an extent that the investigation and description of the various pragmatic organizations is a main part of political science.  A theory of politics cannot stop there, however, since this part deals only with that aspect of political reality that is founded in man’s corporeality. ~Eric Voegelin, “The Concrete Consciousness” in Anamnesis (University of Missouri Press, 1978)

A rare exception to the talk-for-talk’s-sake norm of recent years is Washington’s approach to the Israeli conflict with Hizbollah. But all signs point to a weakening of resolve inside the Bush administration. Earlier this week, trial balloons began floating from Ms Rice’s mission to the Middle East: perhaps talks in Rome could bring a call for a peace-making force and a ceasefire. Talks are likely to bring little more than concerted pressure on the US and Israel to back down on the ultimate disarmament of Hizbollah. A ceasefire under any circumstances other than Hizbollah’s complete disarmament would be construed as another victory for the terrorist agenda.

Throughout the Middle East, American priorities have lost steam. Mr Bush’s signature issue democracy promotion has been thrust aside by resurgent dictators, with few real consequences. Egypt’s abrogation of municipal elections and a brutal crackdown on civil rights and press freedoms, for example, brought a threat from the US Congress to cut Egyptian aid but little more than limp language from the administration. ~Danielle Pletka, AEI.org

Via Doug Bandow at 4Pundits

There’s just no pleasing some people.  How much more latitude would Mr. Bush need to give Israel to satisfy Ms. Pletka?  The mind boggles.  Also, while I’m sure this is perfectly clear to those ensconced in the shining halls of AEI, what does it mean when she says “the terrorist agenda,” as if all terrorist groups had the same agenda?  Shi’ite terrorists in Lebanon have one set of priorities and the agenda their masters give them; Salafist terrorists likely have very different priorities, one of which probably involves killing Shi’ites.  Perhaps the very vagueness involved in describing our enemy as “terrorism,” which was once useful for covering a multitude of groups and states entirely unrelated to one another, has become a burden that is dragging down neocon rhetoric and depriving it of its previous influence.

Perhaps because “democracy promotion” isn’t really an American priority, but an ideological one cultivated by AEI members and their friends, its importance is no longer what it once was.  But does Ms. Pletka really think that an unfettered democratic process empowering the Islamic Brotherhood across Egypt is the recipe for more stability and the security of American and, for that matter, Israeli interests?  How did that work out in Lebanon?  Oh, that’s right, it didn’t.   

On a minor note, why can we not establish some standard transliterated spelling of Hizbullah?  Most news accounts spell it Hezbollah, which I believe does not really transliterate the pronunciation of the word correctly.  Now we have the hybrid Hizbollah.  As my readers may be aware, I’m in favour of orthographical diversity, but surely we could have a little more accuracy.

The Prime Minister’s views and even more inflammatory statements by other Iraqi officials — including a parliamentary resolution branding Israeli attacks “criminal aggression” — prompted 20 congressional Democrats to call for the cancellation of Mr Maliki’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress overnight, Melbourne time.

While Republican leaders refused, they also expressed concern at Mr Maliki’s statements. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said: “Maliki’s criticism of Israel’s right to defend itself is unacceptable. Unless Mr Maliki disavows his critical comments of Israel and condemns terrorism, it is inappropriate to honour him with a joint meeting of Congress.”

Some Democrats were weighing a boycott of the speech, but Democratic leaders were expected to attend and were not encouraging absences. ~The Age

The Democrats certainly know how to keep the colonials in their place, don’t they?  When it comes to endorsing Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force or tolerating excessive Iraqi rhetoric, they will choose the former every time.

There’s practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah’s side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah “started it” when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side. ~Ze’ev Maoz, Haaretz

Via Thomas Fleming at Cultural Revolutions Online  

 

In a recent radio interview (transcript here), after very ably reviewing the nature of Hizbullah and the woes of Lebanon’s dysfunctional polity, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic adds:

The only mystery in this sad story is why are the Israelis being so indiscriminate in their response. Two decades ago they were capable and skillful in separating the Druze and Sunni and Shia Muslims from the Christians. In southern Lebanon they had allies like Major Haddad controlling the border and the area to the Litani river, thus preventing attacks on Israel proper. Current attacks by the Israeli Defense Force on anything that moves in Lebanon are generating support for the Hezbollah not only among Muslims—including those who are not Shi’ites—but also among Lebanon’s Christians. Once the rockets start falling and the infrastructure is targeted, you don’t blame the force that has inserted itself into your daily life, you blame those who press the trigger that releases the missiles.

In time of war, people tend to lose all sense of proportion.  This is true when it comes to the kinds of domestic government measures they are willing to endorse during the “emergency,” which always overreach and violate fundamental legal protections to the general indifference of the masses, or when it comes to the latitude they are willing to grant their armed forces in attacking the hostile state (and nation), resulting in excesses and crimes to which the general public typically reacts with relatively little concern.  Thus violations of principles of discrimination (distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants) and proportionality are frequently shrugged off or the assumptions behind these principles are questioned or denied.  Even when it is an ally that is at war, there is the tendency to lose a sense of what the proper limits to waging war ought to be, because anything less than solidarity and arguments in defense of the ally’s war effort will appear to be hostility to the ally and an expression of a desire to see the ally defeated. 

Because of a desire to show steadfast support for an ally, in this case Israel, there have been a number of expressions of outright hostility to the very idea of proportionality as a legitimate principle governing justice in war.  Quickly vanishing is the trope of Israel’s tremendous restraint.  The new idea is the virtue of her disproportionate violence. 

This does no credit to Israel and rather reinforces the notion that a perpetual state of “existential threat” from her enemies somehow justifies behaviour that would, were it committed by any other government, be a cause of condemnation and sanctions, which muddies Israel’s image and makes it appear as if Israel is exempt from the standards that her benefactor, the United States, applies only too rigorously to other states.  How any of this serves the long-term interests of Israel genuinely does escape me.  At the same time, it hardly serves American interests, which are my primary concern in matters of foreign policy, to have an ally committing excesses that our government tacitly or openly endorses.  

Some have recourse to the experience of total war in WWII, as Mr. Chait does.  Of course, between the notion of a moral total war and the just war tradition, of which the principle of proportionality is a part, is a vast and unbridgeable chasm.  If you believe that total war is just, you will never see any virtue in proportionality, just as you will scarcely see any virtue in discrimination.  Indiscriminate killing is the essence of total war, so why would any supporter of total war be interested in a principle that automatically makes total war unjust?  Proportionality exists, in part, to limit the destructiveness and cruelty of war, rooted in the virtue of charity.  Total war, on the other hand, does not even admit the humanity of the enemy, so why should it wish to show him charity?   

Others, such as Mr. Cohen, take refuge behind an argument from pragmatism: responding in limited fashion to small-scale attacks does not establish deterrence.  This is a more serious argument, divorced as it is from Chait and Podhoretz’s nostalgia for the good old days when bombers turned tens of thousands of people to ash.  This is harder to argue against, because the priority of deterrence is security for your side and the priorities of proportionality are justice towards both sides and a desire to act virtuously.  Particularly when you are of the opinion that the other “side” does not deserve to be treated justly, proportionality simply seems incredible. 

But let me take a stab at showing why this deterrence argument is nonetheless mistaken.  Deterrence relies to a certain degree on predictability.  Both sides refrain from large-scale provocations or attacks on the assumption that they will call forth absolutely overwhelming retaliatory force from the other side.  If every incident, no matter how small, results in a large-scale response, there is nothing–short of their physical annihilation (which may or may not be achievable)–to keep those whom you are trying to deter from making ever larger and more destructive attacks.  They will attempt to do the maximum of damage before the inevitable large-scale response comes.  The more disproportionate the response now, the less restrained an enemy will be by deterrence in the future.  If a string of border incidents over several years, capped off by the kidnapping of two soldiers, leads to waves of air strikes and a ground invasion, it is not hard to see that Hizbullah or its successors will initiate hostilities next time on a much more destructive scale.  The disproportionality of response seems effective in pummeling your adversary this time, but it is only truly effective as a deterrent to others if the adversary is wiped out or permanently disarmed (an objective that would currently require an even more disproportionate response than Israel has so far employed).  Of course, the entire notion of proportionality rests on such quaint notions as having a causus belli and obtainable objectives that, once met, bring an end to the need for war.  It assumes that the waging of war is done to achieve redress of specific wrongs.  It has no meaning for partisans of theories of “total victory,” because there is no justice in “total victory,” which presupposes the degradation and complete surrender of all protections of the defeated party to the mercy of the victors.  Vae victis is not a motto that we should want to take to its logical conclusions.  Proportionality is an essential feature of governing Macht by means of Recht.  We would be extremely unwise to throw out this principle, if for no other reason than that we should want to hold to something that justifies our claims to civilisation and which keeps the line distinguishing us from the likes of Hizbullah bright and clear.

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? ~John Podhoretz, New York Post

Via Rod Dreher

Since the acts Mr. Podhoretz cites are remarkable for being 1) massive war crimes and 2) entirely irrelevant to the outcome of the war, I would like to think that he is joking.  However, he is in deadly earnest.  In his view, these hideous crimes are proof of the mettle of past Western governments in war, compared to the irresolution of today’s Western powers.  Had he wanted to make a more serious point that large-scale modern warfare inflicts incidental casualties on civilian populations that are sometimes entirely unavoidable, he could have done so without running straight to the most heinous Anglo-American crimes of the ‘Good War’, but I suspect that it is all the same to him. 

The firebombing of Dresden (like the firebombing of Tokyo) was a singular act of spite, a demonstration of contempt for the lives of German civilians.  Its aim, to punish the population to get at the government and break their will to fight, was as surely a terrorist aim as ever there has been or will be.  Americans can take some consolation that it was the RAF and not our Air Force that did the ugly deed.  The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became “necessary” only because of FDR’s demand for unconditional surrender; there had been opportunities for a negotiated peace as early as 1944, had Washington been interested in negotiating a surrender.  For a serious Christian and far more conservative view of the immorality of the bombing of civilian populations, see Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s comments on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Leftism Revisited or his novel Black Banners written under the pseudonym Francis Stuart Campbell.  The barbaric logic of total war ruled out negotiation, and the same barbaric thinking justified the incineration of tens upon tens of thousands of innocents; that the second target, Nagasaki, also happened to be the cradle of Japanese Christianity only drives home just how barbaric these acts were.  If the ideas of civilised warfare and war crimes mean anything, they apply to all belligerents.  Defending one set of far more minor, but still serious, excesses by referring to the past war crimes of the Allies is pitiful.  It is, however, an effective rhetorical bludgeoning tool: don’t judge Israel, because your governments have done far worse.  It is not a real argument for the rightness or justifiability of what Israel has been doing to the Lebanese population, but an argument that because Israel’s cause against Hizbullah is good her means, like those of the Allies, are automatically justified as well.  That is a profound error.

On a couple different occasions, I have drawn parallels between the American response to the limited Yugoslavian anti-terrorist campaign of 1998-99 (NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 for having the audacity to fight terrorists on their own territory) and the official response from Washington to Israel’s wide-ranging strike against Lebanon that came in response to Hizbullah’s kidnapping of two soldiers (a general outpouring of initial support).  Our bombing of a Christian country has an eerie parallel with Israel’s bombing of a country that is roughly 40% Christian; the flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Kosovo, precipitated by our bombing campaign, bears a striking resemblance to the flood of refugees from Lebanon: both are primarily large Muslim populations (in both cases, there were many Christian refugees as well) uprooted by the attacks of the benevolent, freedom-loving bombardiers.  Last time, NATO was supposed to be helping the hundreds of thousands of refugees; this time, the refugees seem to be targets just the same as everyone else.  Last time, it was an anti-genocide campaign that caused massive displacement and what would otherwise be called ethnic cleansing; this time, it is an anti-terrorist campaign waged by terrorising civilians.  The mendacity and doublespeak defending the attacks on civilian targets remain the same–the real villain is always someone else who is “forcing” the benevolent bombardiers to blow up Belgrade or Beirut.  Bombardment shall lead to disarmament and glorious liberation.  We have heard it all before, and it is, by and large, a pack of lies.  But keeping the two wars in mind together is helpful in understanding American indifference to Lebanese suffering: Americans were equally indifferent when our own airmen were blasting innocent civilians for the crime of being Serbian.

“Bleeding Lebanon” is the ripest fruit of the Bush administration’s catastrophic foreign policy. In similar crises, previous administrations at least pretended to make diplomatic efforts to arrange cease-fires and find grounds on which a tenuous peace might be maintained. As my friend Ron Hatchett points out, in a Dallas Blog article posted on this site, Ronald Reagan, though a strong supporter of Israel, took effective measures to discpline Israel during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In the present case, however, both President Bush and his Secretary of State have openly supported Israel and chosen to treat the invasion of Lebanon as a morally responsible act of self-defense. It is only as an afterthought and in response to international criticism that Secretary Rice has seen fit to visit the region, but the best she can offer is a peace-keeping mission to be sent just after the nick of time, that is, after the IDF has accomplished its mission.

If there had ever been any doubts that the security of Israel was Bush’s primary motive for invading Iraq, those doubts have been dispelled by his unequivocal support for a war against Lebanese civilians that is being condemned around the world.  Our Iraqi “allies” seem to understand. A headline in the LA Times tells the story: “Iraqis find rare Unity in Condemning Israel.” Even some Iraqi Christians have joined with Sunni and Shiite Muslims in condemning Israel and her bullying big brother. Perhaps they have seen the news stories describing Israel’s inexplicable attacks on Christian neighborhoods.

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The temptation, in any conflict that engages the attention of Americans, is to choose a side and believe the propaganda told about it. If we are Christian Zionists, then Israel is a righteous nation doing too little to defend its people from Islamic terrorists. If we are tired of our Zionist foreign policy, then we may conclude that Israel is a bellicose national socialist state, guilty of war crimes against the unoffending Lebanese. If truth be told, however, none of the sides (Israel, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Syria, Iran) is guiltless. Hezbollah, undoubtedly, incited the current conflict, with a manifest disregard for the lives of the Lebanese people. While Hezbollah is, from one point of view, a legitimate political organization and a recognized party in Lebanon, it also has a long history of violence and terrorism. I say “violence and terrorism,” because not all of Hezbollah’s violence can be described as terrorism. Killing or kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an act of war, not terrorism, while randomly shelling Israeli cities is terrorism.

But if Hezbollah’s initial missile strikes were acts of terrorism, so is the much greater Israeli campaign that has so far killed nearly 400 Lebanese, mostly civilians. This is ten times the number of Israelis who have died in the conflict. If sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, that makes Israel ten times more terrorist than Hezbollah. If the Muslim terrorists are recklessly sending missiles every which way into Israel, the IDF is deliberately targeting civilian neighborhoods. They say it is because they believe they have located missile launchers or military installations or vehicles carrying weapons. In many instances, this belief was mistaken. Everyone is now a target, whether they are residents of formerly peaceful neighborhoods or fleeing refugees. ~Thomas Fleming

The same is true of “World Trade Center.” It is undeniably powerful, an immensely affecting and well-meaning real-life tale of two Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble underneath the collapsed concourse between the North and South Towers.

Nonetheless, because “World Trade Center” tells a story of joyous survival rather than a story of death, it is a fundamental falsification of the meaning of 9/11 – even though the story it tells is true. ~John Podhoretz, New York Post

Via Michelle Malkin

So, in Little Pod’s estimation, even a film that is widely regarded on the conventional NR-bandwagon right as a good and uncharacteristically decent Oliver Stone film must hew to some political line of what 9/11 means or else it becomes false (even when it is true)?  Leave it to some neocon to be a killjoy and impose the requirements of their stale ideology on something that, by all accounts, they ought to be able to appreciate.  Podhoretz reveals what really bothers him about the movie at the end:

“United 93″ ends with a plane crash. “World Trade Center” ends with a smiling child. One wonders what Stanley Kubrick would have made of that.

Perhaps it is meant to say that life goes on, or perhaps it could mean that terrorists do not get to have the last word in dictating how we live.  It could mean any number of things, but because WTC does not end on a note of grim horror it has somehow failed to convey the horror of the day.  That, I would suggest, says more about the problems with Mr. Podhoretz and the warped world he inhabits than it does about any of the merits or flaws of this particular picture.