The transcript shows that Bush consciously intended to go to war without a United Nations Security Council resolution. The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a treaty signatory (so that it has the force of American law), forbids any nation to launch an aggressive war on another country. ~Prof. Cole

This is all true, but then we have known this to be true since the spring of 2003.  Of course he intended to go to war without a U.N. Security Council resolution that authorised it.  He and his supporters essentially admitted as much at the time (all those pro-administration pundits spinning far-fetched theories about “punishing” Iraq for violating the Gulf War ceasefire and 17 or however many U.N. resolutions weren’t just talking for their health), and they bragged about their steely-eyed resolve when they said it.  I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have the war’s illegality confirmed for all to see.  Still, if the spineless Congress can’t bring itself to defend the Constitution, what makes us believe that it will hold the executive accountable for breaking other laws?

Prof. Cole also points to a story about how the war could have been avoided with Hussein going into exile.  He is rightly angry that Mr. Bush launched the war anyway when it might have been avoided, but then the war was always unnecessary.  It wasn’t just unnecessary because Hussein was apparently willing to go into exile.  It was unnecessary because there was no cause for war.

I’ve made mistakes in the past, and I’m going to keep making them. ~Bill Richardson

That’s our governor–no spineless flip-flopper is he!  Anyone can stick to his guns when he’s right, but this kind of steadfastness in error is exceptional.  Now you can begin to understand the bizarre nature of New Mexican politics, in which this guy is considered a genius and a conquering hero.

Apparently, Daniel thinks I spend a good deal of time saying nothing more substantive than that I do not agree with things I disagree with. ~Will Wilkinson

In the twoparticular cases in question, I think that a skeptical reader might not find that much more to the arguments Mr. Wilkinson advances beyond his assertion of moral abhorrence for policies and norms that he does not support, plus the occasional dismissive reference to nationalism or a “national coalition” thrown in here and there.  How substantive that is, I will leave to others.  My concluding remarks for both responses sought to draw out what seemed to me to be the root of the disagreement, which was a disagreement over basic assumptions.  In the remainder of both posts, I did attempt to address at least some of the rest of what Mr. Wilkinson had to say.  Perhaps these attempts were lacking. 

In any case, the two posts in question are expositions of the observation that conservatives do not hold his kind of libertarian assumptions about national identity and borders, because, among other things, they do not and cannot take liberty to be the moral baseline.  They make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, nationals and non-nationals, which they consider to be not simply prudent but actually obligatory and right.  Neither do conservatives, or most people for that matter, judge the efficiacy and worthiness of U.S. immigration policy on the basis of whether it aids the populations of “developing” nations, because we do not think that it is the role of the U.S. government to set its policies to maximise the prosperity of the populatiions of “developing” nations.  Having put up a rather eccentric set of standards, Mr. Wilkinson finds that conservatives are not measuring up.  That’s all very well, but I don’t know that it tells us very much.  That is why I wrote the concluding remarks that I did.   

My concluding points in these two cases were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else.  They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values.  He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong. 

He wrote:

For example, this liberal finds the claim, implicit in much of the immigration debate, that I ought to heavily discount the welfare gains to non-citizens simply because they belong to a different national coalition morally abhorrent. I don’t doubt that many people take themselves to have an “inescapable” moral obligation to treat outsiders unfairly, or to even positively harm them (even kill them!), if it redounds to the benefits [sic] insiders. But I deny that there is any such obligation to escape in the first place. 

There’s no question of an obligation to treat outsiders “unfairly”–the so-called “unfairness” comes in distinguishing between insider and outsider–since it only seems like unfair treatment to someone who thinks there should be no distinction.  Yet there is no good rationale for abolishing the distinction, or at least none that has been presented in these posts.  The point is that there is not an argument I can see for why there is no obligation.  It is simply a restatement of Mr. Wilkinson’s assumption that none exists.  Hence my original conclusion. 

He then made the point that the (to use Levin’s phrases) “contractual way” and moralising according to “continuity and generation” are both equally artificial, which prompted me to respond that, if this is true, their equally artificial nature simply underscores  that people opt for one “way” or another depending on what functions they valued most.  This drives home the point, implicit in the entire discussion about moral sentiments, that the adherents of the two “ways” judge morality by significantly different standards.  If it is true that “the liberal dimensions of the moral sense are uniquely amenable to defense by rational argument,” it would be interesting to see some of that kind of argument in these cases.        

In the latest post, Mr. Wilkinson tells us that “the global system of exclusion through citizenships, visas, and borders has manifestly failed to make the world’s least well-off better off,” though the system was never designed specifically to make the “least well-off” better off.  The basic question remains: why should that system be upended or radically changed, when the system of exclusion has actually worked to promote competition and innovation that have benefited most nations enormously?  Furthermore, is it even certain that such a proposed massive influx of poor labourers into developed economies would have the beneficial effects attributed to the proposal?  The idea might be as humanitarian and high-minded as you please, yet the costs of absorbing all these people (and the more, the better, because we wouldn’t want to be heartless and cruel, would we?) could weaken or stall those developed economies to the detriment of all.  

Conservatives argue that there is a hierarchy of loyalties based on natural affinities and social relationships, and that it is, in fact, a disordering of moral priorities to pretend that our obligations to our next-door neighbour and to a man on the other side of the world are effectively the same or even close to being comparable.  Proximity, kinship and shared citizenship create bonds between people that do not exist with others.  Conservatives here are no more personally “indifferent” to the suffering of the world’s poorest nations than are the people of any “developed” country.  What Wilkinson calls “indifference” to foreigners’ suffering, conservatives call loyalty to compatriots (and a rejection of the sentimentality that allows us to see nothing around us closer than Africa).  The false choice that Mr. Wilkinson would have us make is to believe that there is something particularly pernicious and vicious about valuing such loyalty, and that the only way to show concern for the suffering of the world’s poor is to open the gates and create a huge, exploited underclass in our own country.  

I assume that Mr. Wilkinson’s concern for the world’s poorest is not a kind of rhetorical moral blackmail, though he still deploys it rather heavy-handedly.  Naturally, he does not extend the same assumption of good faith to his interlocutors, but imputes to them “morally abhorrent” views, he hints of bad faith and disregard for other people’s human rights, and describes the ideas to which he objects as “repugnant, and dangerous” and “poisonous.”  He says things like: “Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits.”  Levin argues that there are some obligations that we owe family and neighbours that we do not choose, which means in Mr. Wilkinson’s view that he would not really think twice about tacitly endorsing the worst aspects of a dehumanising caste system. 

Don’t you see?  Any reasonably strong concern for purity and hierarchy must lead to tolerating the treatment meted out to untouchables.  That sounds like a very fair conclusion based on what the man said.  This is the sort of tendentious stuff that religious conservatives in particular have had to put up with for years: if you strongly espouse a moral precept, you must obviouslyendorse the worst fanaticism imaginable and you cannot possibly object to it.   Oh, yes, and then there is the charge of indifference to the suffering and injustice suffered by billions.  But, no, really, there is an argument in there somewhere.   

Telling us that that our immigration policy should be geared towards reducing global poverty is revealing in its own way, but takes no account of the ever-greater immiseration of the population left behind by the mass emigration advocated here as a solution.   Is Mr. Wilkinson “indifferent” to the suffering and injustice that those people who remain  behind (and inevitably many people will remain behind) will experience?  I wouldn’t assume that he is.  Yet that seems to be a likely outcome of the proposal he has endorsed.  Rather than stripping the most destitute of nations of their human resources, it would be best for all involved in the long term if they remained in their own countries.  This would in all likelihood hasten the pace of domestic reforms that would gradually make these places increasingly liveable and prosperous.  For each horror story from the “developing” world, there are success stories in the same parts of the world that suggest that mass abandonment of the poorest countries is not the only alternative to dead-end developmentalism.  As Easterly says:

But this doesn’t quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today’s rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa’s history. 
  

At the moment when things may be looking up, with the obvious notable exceptions, we should call on people to flee their countries just as they beginning to enjoy some limited prosperity?  The failures of international development efforts in many parts of the world are well known, and Mr. Wilkinson and I are in agreement about that much.  However, some “developing” nations have actually managed to improve social and material conditions quite considerably (those Dalits that concern Mr. Wilkinson so much are politically mobilised now and have elected officials drawn from their ranks–unthinkable only a couple decades ago).  It seems to me that the benefits for future generations in these countries would be greater still, if more of their most capable and industrious people did not resettle elsewhere but instead remained to build up those countries rather than essentially abandon them.

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia seemsto be workingtohis advantage back home and in our own press to some extent.  Bollinger’s introduction has been the focus of much of the criticism, which has apparently helped to create sympathy for Ahmadinejad.  It would have been better had the exchange never took place if the only “acceptable” way Bollinger could approach the encounter was as a hectoring critic.

Here’s an amusing item from the Time article/Ahmadinejad press release:

He notes that Americans don’t understand Iranian history, saying that the movie 300 — with which he seems intimately familiar — was a “complete distortion of Iranian history.” Iran, he says, has never invaded anyone in its history.

For modern Iran, this is certainly true.  If the Achaemenids count as being part of the same Iran (and they did call their country Iran), then this would be another one of Ahmadinejad’s “creative” history lessons. 

But can China compel the junta to do the right thing?

——-

Surely China will have to “fix” the problem, analysts argue, because of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. 

————

Last night I saw the news reports saying two military divisions had arrived in Rangoon, including the 22nd —one of the same units deployed to Rangoon in 1988. ~Melinda Liu

This last point is one of the more telling observations of the article.  The question about China forcing the junta to “do the right thing” assumes that Beijing sees the “right thing” to be the same as other outsiders do.  I am doubtful that the Chinese government sees it this way.  As the article relates, China has tried to distance itself from its more disreputable satellites in recent months, but any expectation that China wants to stop the crackdown in Burma because of the ’08 Olympics seems mistaken.  There is no guarantee that China’s economic interests in Burma would be seriously threatened by a destabilisation or ousting of the junta, but it is likely not something that the Chinese government wants to risk.  Any government that replaced the junta would be made up of those democrats who will remember China’s backing of the junta for all these years. 

Even if economic realities dictate that Burma remain tied to China for the present, resentment against China’s role in the junta’s grip on power could fuel a strong reaction against the Chinese.  (Consider how radicalised Iranians reacted against the United States as a model of what might happen.)  There have been strong expressions of anti-Chinese sentiment in other outposts of Beijing’s informal empire:

While China likes to portray itself as a benign force in Africa, free of the historical baggage carried by the former colonial powers, Beijing’s conduct is already resented.

During last year’s presidential election in Zambia, the leading opposition candidate, Michael Sata, campaigned on an explicitly anti-Chinese ticket. Beijing’s investment was, Mr Sata argued, almost entirely worthless for Zambia.    

China has every interest at this point in backing the junta, even if it engages in a brutal crackdown.  Those who think that hosting the Olympics inspires good international behaviour should recall that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of the year before the Moscow games.  There was a U.S. boycott, of course, which did nothing substantial to harm Moscow.  If one of China’s satellites does something vicious between now and next summer, it will affect Beijing even less.

P.S. Joshua Kurlantzick has a good article on Burma in The New Republic, which concludes:

Apparently convinced they’d risk no serious sanction, in September 1988 the Burmese military stepped in, staging a kind of auto-coup. In the course of suppressing protests, Burmese troops killed as many as three-thousand people. Today, similar fears are rising. More soldiers reportedly are taking positions in Rangoon, and the regime reportedly is recruiting criminals, possibly to infiltrate protests and cause havoc, a tactic utilized in 1988. Burmese opposition radio has reported rumors that senior junta leader Than Shwe has ordered that authorities can use violence to squash demonstrations. Twenty years on, 1988 looks nearer than ever.

Simply excellent.

Via Ambinder

So if it’s wrong to consign someone to second-class citizenship based on skin color, why should we feel any more comfortable about forcing someone to live someplace horrible like Zimbabwe simply because that’s where he happens to have been born? ~Tim Lee

Because we’re not “forcing” someone to live in Zimbabwe (or wherever), but rather preventing him from living here.  Second, Zimbabwe was not always so horrible, and is not doomed to be so.  It is horrible for very explicable reasons of bad “policy,” if you can call systematic plunder and looting a policy, that are a matter of record, and which could be corrected if the Mugabe kleptocracy were no longer there.  I feel “comfortable” about stopping Zimbabweans (or anyone else) from coming to this country en masse, if they could actually manage it, because I see what this massive influx of refugees is doing to Zimbabwe’s neighbours and I do not want that for my country.  I would prefer that it not be happening to Zimbabwe’s neighbours, either.  The refugee crisis is a product of corruption and misrule on an epic scale.  The solution is not found in constantly offering maniacal despots a safety valve to release the buildup of social discontent, but in keeping the pressure on until the tyrannical goose is well and truly cooked by domestic rebellion.  Mass emigration not only drains other countries of some of their most industrious members, but it also serves as a much-needed relief for people in control of the sclerotic and bankrupt political institutions of many “developing” nation-states.  Western guilty consciences and the policies based thereon are their insurance policy and one of the means for their continued domination and exploitation of their subjects.  I have a hard time coming up with a moral theory that justifies that.

Update: On the subject of Zimbabwe, would you believe it if I told you that Zimbabwe was still 31st in a ranking of states for good governance in sub-Saharan Africa?  That means that there are 17 countries that are considered to be governed even more atrociously.  That seems worth nothing.

When will Christopher Hitchens berate those lousy Buddhist monks for sowing “discord” and “hate” in Burma?  After all, he knows how religion poisons everything*, so I anticipate his denunciation of those troublemaking fanatics any day now.

*I hadn’t thought of it before, but this is just an adaptation of a phrase attributed to Mao: “religion is poison.”  Keep the faith, Hitch.

I used to think that it really mattered whether or not I referred to Burma as Myanmar or Burma.  No, really.  I can remember when the change happened.  The Economist suddenly started talking about Yangon and Myanmar out of the blue.  Oh, the treachery, I thought.  SLORC said Myanmar, so obviously all right-thinking people had to say Burma.  Of course, at another time the British said Burma, so other right-thinking people would have insisted that something else be used.   

Then you spend about ten minutes looking into the significance of the change in Burma and you realise that this is silly.  Mranma/Myanma is one name that has been used to describe the country, and Bama is another.  One is apparently a literary style, the other is used more often in colloquial speech.  The traditional name of Burma evidently may or may not originally come from Bama, but is definitely held over from the British colonial designation for the place.  Why a different name can’t be reflected in English usage is a bit of a mystery.  Of course, it comes back to who made the change, rather than the substance of the change itself.  The logic seems to be: we won’t give them the satisfaction of using the new name!  That’ll teach ’em a thing or two!  Of course, the Burmese government doesn’t really care that much which name we use–it isn’t about us–and so our valiant defiance of the dictators is so much huffing and puffing over nothing.   

All the time we use inapt names in English for countries that have never called themselves by that name (e.g., Armenia, Finland, Hungary, Greece), which has often puzzled me, since some of us get very annoyed with people who insist on calling us estadounidense and norteamericano.  These are the established names, and so for convenience I understand why we don’t run around talking about Hayastan and Hellas, but it would be nice if we could admit that it is a matter of convenience (and, one might say, a certain laziness) to use the non-indigenous names of other countries.  Strangely enough, we are more than happy to oblige foreign countries when other governments change their countries’ names (e.g., when Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, or Zaire became Congo yet again, or British Honduras became Belize).  Perhaps it is high time that we fought back against Fasoan tyranny and returned to the ridiculous-sounding geographical designation that preceded the current name.  Sometimes I will still say Zaire out of force of habit, but calling it Zaire for all those decades (which virtually everyone did) was, according to the logic of the anti-Myanmar crowd, a concession to Mobutu.  Since Mobutu was on “our” side in the Cold War, Westerners, so far as I know, did not worry themselves about whether or not they were giving in to some supposed anti-colonialist blackmail by using the official name of the country. 

Some people are upset by the official renaming of Bombay because Hindu nationalists were the ones who did it (I believe the old name is still frequently used out of habit), but it puzzles me why we shouldn’t, generally speaking, use the names for countries that the inhabitants themselves use or those that they say they would prefer.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with continuing to use old names, especially when they are well-established and familiar (we will not start calling Egypt Misr nor will we begin styling India Bharat anytime soon, I think), but actively protesting against the official name of a country–when it has as much claim to being a “legitimate” name as its alternative–seems like an odd way to express opposition to a regime.  It’s not as if the regime cares whether we use the new designation or not–the change is for domestic consumption anyway–and we are not lending aid and comfort to Burmese dictators if we happen to call it Myanmar.     

For instance, Iran has been the official name of that country in foreign relations since the 1920s, but there are still some who will insist on calling it Persia, thinking that they are somehow sticking it to the Ayatollah.  They are, if anything, sticking it to the ghost of Reza Khan and the Pahlavi rulers, which is pointless.  That Iran is the older indigenous name for the place only underscores how irrelevant this posturing over names really is.