Benedict Brogan offers another nostalgia-laden lament for the end of the shuttle program. He then unwittingly sabotages his own argument:

At one level, it is easy to wonder quite why $180 billion has been spent on keeping an out-of-date white elephant in the air. But a few weeks ago when Prof Brian Cox gave a show-stopper of a lecture at Hay in which he included a picture of the distant speck of Earth taken by Voyager from the edge of the solar system [bold mine-DL], I was reminded of the irresistible attraction of this greatest of human adventures. The moment the wheels of Atlantis touched the ground earlier, it ended and our ambitions suddenly look earth-bound.

Notice that Brogan was reminded of “the irresistible attraction of this greatest of human adventures” by a picture taken by Voyager, an unmanned space probe that had nothing to do with the shuttle program or any kind of manned space flight. Had the shuttle program never existed, the Voyager probes would still have been launched and would still have reported back information on the outer planets. Sending probes to gather data about the rest of the solar system is one thing that NASA has done that has been genuinely worthwhile and has actually advanced the cause of science. Once we strip away the romanticism, national greatness rhetoric, and talk of adventure, that is the sort of thing NASA should be doing. It shouldn’t serve as a government project to make Americans feel good about themselves.

The Washington Post has interviewed John Bellinger on the U.S. decision to recognize the TNC as the Libyan government. Bellinger previously discussed the legal implications here. As Bellinger explains, one of the problems created by recognition is the uncertainty over which regime has the responsibility to adhere to Libya’s international obligations:

It really does raise questions as to whether the NTC now owes international obligations to the United States and the outside world and whether the Gaddafi regime, which is no longer recognized by the United States and certain other countries, no longer has those obligations.

The State Department has not made clear exactly how it is going to treat the question of treaty obligations. I suspect that they want to do both … that they want to both recognize the NTC as the governing authority but, at the same time, they don’t want to let Gaddafi regime off the hook and certainly not suggest that the Gaddafi regime no longer has the obligation to comply with the Vienna Convention or human rights law or the laws of war.

No doubt they would like to do both, but I’m not sure that they can. Bellinger speculates on how the administration overcame the reservations of the lawyers at the State Department:

To my mind that means essentially that the lawyers were pressured into going along with this formulation while throwing down the yellow flags to say there are some problems here and that these are still being worked out.

He also observed that many of the other governments represented at the Istanbul meeting were unwilling to endorse formal recognition:

What’s interesting to me is what some of the other countries have done at the same time. The U.S. government’s statement by Secretary Clinton goes farther than what the Libyan Contact Group’s statement said last Friday. The 32-member Contact Group was only apparently willing to say that they agreed to quote “deal with” the NTC and does not use the word “recognize,” which to me means they could not get 32 countries to agree on the word “recognition” and the U.S. than went further out on its own.

One of the countries that apparently didn’t go that far was Great Britain. Britain, which has historically been a stickler for finer points of international law, has been willing to go along with the “deal with” formulation but has pointedly refused to recognize the insurgency because of the various international legal problems it raises.

For another installment in Amazon criticism, I give you John Judis:

There are, of course, reasons to believe that Amazon could keep its business and collect sales taxes. Its prices would still be competitive, and what it can offer that local stores cannot is the convenience of having your purchases delivered to you without having to leave your house. It also has a vigorous business in eBooks and online movies and music. But the question of revenue aside, there is also a good reason to protect local stores from unfair competition. Local realtors sustain neighborhoods and suburban malls; they fund local newspapers and theater groups. They are part of a community in a way that Amazon or Overstock—its Utah-based partner in fighting state sales taxes—will never be [bold mine-DL].

There is a clear difference between a firm that flourishes solely because of its superior services and one that can avoid costs that all of its other competitors are legally required to pay. Amazon naturally wants to keep every advantage that it has, but it doesn’t follow that the rest of us should take the same view.

David Rieff explains why the Libyan war is worse than America’s other wars:

The truth is that doctrines like humanitarian intervention and R2P are ways of waging war without taking responsibility (or accepting accountability, both moral and democratic) for doing so. That is why they are so pernicious, and why, even in cases where an intervention may be warranted, far from being an improvement on the traditional way that nations and coalitions of states have come to the decision to go to war and how they have waged war, they are actually a very large step in the wrong direction. They allow us to pretend we are not going to war, but, instead, are just trying to protect the civilian population from harm. War, however, is not police work, not armed humanitarianism, not human rights activism with an air force, and it should not be allowed to become anything of the kind. The Libyan precedent is so disturbing precisely because, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or (again) Somalia, whether one supports U.S. actions in these places or instead favors withdrawal, it reflects such tendencies.

This is one of the worst things about “humanitarian” wars. By pretending to be something less or other than what they are, they trivialize warfare, and they make wars much easier to start and continue on the authority of a relative few people. Worse still, because they are “humanitarian,” one would have to be “heartless” (as Juan Cole put it) to object to such an arbitrary war. This abuse of language leads Harold Koh to say that the administration is complying with the War Powers Act, and then in the next breath assert that the War Powers Act does not really apply to the Libyan war, and then he very solemnly assures us that the executive doesn’t have the very sort of arbitrary authority to start a war that he is effectively defending.

On the question of moral and democratic accountability, this appears to be mostly an American problem. All European governments directly involved in the war have sought and received approval from their national legislatures, and the Canadian parliament has voted its approval twice. Even in France, Sarkozy has gone to the National Assembly and Senate to seek and receive ongoing authorization and funding for the war. French law did not require Sarkozy to seek prior approval, but it does require parliamentary consent when a foreign war lasts this long. None of the other allies has any need to twist and abuse language by pretending that this is not a war, because none of them is trying to disregard and violate the law.

Rieff also writes:

Just wars don’t have to be defensive. But they have to be wars, and the dismal folly of R2P and the Obama administration’s use of it in Libya, is that it involves war-fighting without either the seriousness (and the serious will to win) or the moral gravitas that war requires.

Indeed, the governments waging the Libyan war don’t even aspire to the seriousness that the doctrine used to justify it theoretically requires.

A review of Maurice Glasman’s The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (via Andrew) helps explain the meaning of the “Blue Labour” project:

In many ways ‘Blue Labour’ is an unfortunate label, because neither Glasman nor most of the other contributors to this volume give much indication of sympathy for recognisable brands of conservatism. What they do show is a deep antipathy towards Liberalism. We are not talking here about Liberal Democrats, who barely merit a mention. The ‘Liberals’ Glasman has in his sights are not bound by party affiliation but by intellectual heritage and political instincts. They can be found in any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of radical Tory cuts (which is the way Baldwin would like to spin it). Glasman thinks the problem goes the other way. The Big Society is precisely what we need, but it’s been misappropriated by the people who champion it. It’s a good idea fallen among liberals.

What do liberals do that Glasman rejects? The way that I would put it is that they undervalue the common good and defer too much to concentrated wealth, but this is the review’s description:

The sin of omission is the inability of liberal politics to resist the depredations of international finance capitalism. This is the real passion that motivates Blue Labour: a sense that the country has been raped by the bankers, and all on the watch of a Labour government. They want someone, or something, to stand up to what the editors call in their introduction ‘the destructive, itinerant power of capital’, and they are acutely conscious that New Labour barely even put up a fight. That’s because liberals never put up a fight: all they do is talk about individuals, with their rights and responsibilities, their choices and their freedoms, without noticing that individuals are like confetti in the face of the whirlwind power of money.

As Glasman sees it, it is communal and social ties that provide protection against this:

Glasman is not fussy about what provides the glue: family, church, local pride, a sense of place, a sense of tradition (this, I guess, is the something ‘blue’ about Blue Labour).

Glasman’s other main objection to liberalism will be very familiar to traditional conservatives:

The other problem with liberalism, and the reason it is no good at this sort of micro-politics, is that liberals have a fatal weakness for abstraction. They prefer concepts to concrete experiences. In the end, they prefer nice ideas to real people.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee began its Wednesday markup of the State Department authorization bill by voting to end funding for the Organization of American States (OAS), with Republicans lambasting the organization as an enemy of freedom and democracy.

The one-hour debate over the GOP proposal to cut the entire $48.5 million annual U.S contribution to the OAS is only the beginning of what looks to be a long and contentious debate over the fiscal 2012 State Department and foreign operations authorization bill written by chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Democrats accused the Republicans of isolationism and retreat for their proposal, while the Republicans accused the OAS of being an ally of anti-U.S. regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. The OAS Charter was signed in 1948 at a conference led by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall.

“Let’s not continue to fund an organization that’s bent on destroying democracy in Latin America,” said Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL), the head of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and the sponsor of the amendment. “You will support an organization that is destroying the dreams of the people of Latin America.” ~Josh Rogin

Charges of isolationism and retreat are obviously ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean that the reasons being offered for eliminating funding for the OAS make any sense. It is possible that the U.S. can’t do without this $48.5 million, but maintaining a regular role in our own main regional organization that the United States helped to found seems like the sort of normal engagement with neighboring states that generally serves American interests. The real problem with this anti-OAS sentiment is that it appears to be motivated by a desire to exercise greater regional hegemony. Opponents of the funding also appear to exaggerate wildly how important and influential Chavez is, and it seems likely that they are conflating political outcomes in democratic contests that they dislike with the collapse of democracy. As a regional organization filled entirely with democratically-elected governments that tend to look askance on American influence in Latin America, the OAS is not going to be a compliant or reliable instrument of the U.S. The notion that “the people of Latin America” would associate the OAS with destroying their “dreams” is comical. By and large, the OAS is far more closely aligned with the political aspirations of most nations in Latin America than the U.S. is., which is what one would expect since their states make up the overwhelming majority of members.

A few important distinctions need to be made here. There is no question that some of these governments are illiberal and a few are explicitly socialist in their ideology, and these governments tend to be very favorably disposed towards Cuba and ill-disposed towards the U.S. Of course, there are seriously flawed governments, including those of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, but they represent a small number of the organization’s members. Gutting the organization’s funding to make a point about these states is frivolous at best. As Rogin reports, Cuba is not a member of the organization:

In fact, the organization lifted its ban on Cuban membership in 2009 but stated that the present Cuban government could only join if it adheres to the group’s democratic principles.

Nonetheless, the idea that the OAS is “bent on destroying democracy in Latin America” is laughable on its face. U.S. funding accounts for almost 60% of the OAS’ budget, and it seems unlikely that the OAS would be able to function at its current level without that funding. The worst thing that might be said of the OAS is that it doesn’t do very much, but most of what it does is fairly innocuous or even constructive when it comes to election monitoring and development aid.

Update: Ali Gharib has more on the alleged democracy-destroying activities of the OAS:

And the OAS has actually strongly criticized Chavez and Venezuela twice in the past two years. In early 2010, the OAS issued a blistering report about Venezuela’s human rights record and slipping democratic credentials. In January of this year, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza criticized a Venezuelan law passed in December as being “completely contrary” to the Inter-American Democratic Charter passed by the OAS in 2001. Insulza added that the issue would likely come before the OAS.

According to one Georgian opposition leader, the recent espionage charges against the three photographers discussed here are part of a larger pattern:

But some in Tbilisi believe the Saakashvili administration is taking things too far. In July 15 comments published by the Russian daily Kommersant, opposition politician Irakli Alasania, who was formerly employed in Georgian intelligence, accused Saakashvili of using espionage as a cover for politically motivated arrests. “This is his [Saakashvili’s] spy mania,” argued Alasania, a onetime Georgian ambassador to the United Nations. “Saakashvili sees everything as connected to Russia’s special services and politics. … He says anyone who is against me . . . is my enemy and is helping Russia.”

Tellingly, the government relies heavily on confessions in espionage cases:

Government critics contend that the sheer volume of cases against suspected Russian agents, coupled with the fact that the evidence made available to the public is often sketchy, with strong emphasis on confessions, indicates that espionage has become the government’s idée fixe. Self-incriminating statements, critics add, can be obtained through the use of psychological pressure.

These most recent charges are among the most suspicious because of the role the photographers had in publicizing the May 26 crackdown on protesters:

The latest instance — espionage charges brought on July 9 against three photographers — has raised concerns that Interior Ministry officials are using the accusations as a payback for the trio’s photo coverage of the bloody May 26 police crackdown on opposition protesters, an event that sparked heavy international criticism of Georgia.

Two of the photographers were working under government contracts at the time; Irakli Gedenidze as President Saakashvili’s photographer and Giorgi Abdaladze as a freelance photographer for the Foreign Ministry. The third photographer, Zurab Kurtsikidze, worked for the Frankfurt-based European Pressphoto Agency.

The possible use of the Interior Ministry and judiciary for political ends is just one aspect of Georgia’s heavy-handed justice system. Thomas de Waal described the results of the “extreme order” policy of Interior Minister Merabishvili in his recent report:

Under Merabishvili’s guidance, crime rates have fallen in Georgia. Levels of street crime, car theft, and murder have all dropped. Polls show the police have a high degree of public support. However, there are concerns that police officials wield power that makes them politically unaccountable. In 2011 the European Court of Human Rights rebuked the Georgian government for obstructing justice in a notorious case in which police officers were accused of murder. At the same time, the “zero tolerance” policy on crime has swelled the prison population from 6,654 in 2004 to 23,684 in 2010. That makes Georgia the state with the fifth-highest prison population per capita in the world. Prison overcrowding is a major problem, and the public defender complained that in 2010, 142 prisoners had died in jail, a sharp increase from the year before.

De Waal raises concerns about these trends in his concluding remarks:

In 2011 there are worrying signs about the direction Georgia is heading. The modern Georgian project has many internal contradictions to it and is much less free than it looks. Some of the modern Georgian reforms have cured one problem while creating another. Reform of the police force and a broadly successful fight against crime and corruption, for example, have resulted in a criminal justice system in which acquittals in criminal cases are almost impossible, the prisons are overcrowded, and the Interior Ministry is the most powerful arm of government. Law enforcement bodies, such as the tax police, possess great power and are perceived as an instrument of political control. h is raises Juvenal’s famous old question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, “Who is guarding the guards themselves?”

Micah Zenko insists that advocates of regime change rhetoric account for how that would translate into practice:

More important than what the United States says, however, is what it is willing to do to achieve the objectives it expresses. It is one thing to make aspirational statements that shape administration thinking, test allied support, and gauge public opinion. This is what President Obama did on March 3, when he stated flatly, “Muammar Qaddafi has lost the legitimacy to lead and he must leave.”

However, neither President Obama nor any members of the western-led intervention into Libya ever presented what military strategists call a “theory of victory” for how this could be achieved. This glaring disconnect between maximalist objectives (regime change) and minimalist tactics (selectively-enforced no-fly zones and arms embargoes, and close air support) should have been a clear indicator that the intervention would not proceed as quickly or easily as was believed.

Those now demanding that the U.S. government clearly articulate its support for regime change in Damascus should also seek a plausible explanation for how this happens. Then, we can decide if that plan is believable, what the likely costs and consequences are, and whether regime change in Syria is in the US’s national interest.

One of the more tiresome things about the constant demands for a harder line on Syria, such as this one from Max Boot, is that advocates of promoting regime change there take it as a given that it is obviously in the national interest. Apart from rattling off things about Syria that everyone already knows, they can’t be bothered with explaining why it is in our interest or how it would happen. It simply must happen, and as far as they’re concerned there are no good reasons why the administration isn’t bending over backwards to make it happen…somehow or other. It is one of the best recent examples of how hawks insist on expressing “moral clarity” for its own sake. It has no practical application whatever.

Christopher Caldwell had a column on Amazon last week that made much the same point I did earlier this week:

More dangerous for Amazon will be that a referendum turns attention to the kind of business it is in the first place. It is the tax exemption, not the technology, that most distinguishes Amazon from its rivals. Its price advantage is the most important thing about it. The ruthlessness with which Amazon is resisting tax reform might be a measure of the centrality of tax-privilege to its business model.

It’s understandable that Amazon would want to retain this advantage over its competitors, but it is an advantage that the company has thanks to what amounts to an act of government favoritism.