Not Like-minded

Op-ed attempt

2007-12-04T21:15:00.001-05:00

Exams are upon me, and thus the paucity of posts of late. I am posting an attempt at an op-ed, which I have circulated to a few papers, but without success so far:

Pakistan, a Pluralist Democracy?

Pakistan's descent into civil chaos and yet another crisis of leadership has forced many American officials to reconsider their unwavering support of a country that has allowed Islamist violence to flourish even as it reassures its Western allies that it remains a central bulwark in the fight against terrorism. It is easy to forget, however, that once upon a time Pakistan was a secular democracy that sought to protect minority rights, even as it maintained a Muslim majority – a reality at odds with the repression of judges, lawyers, and opposition parties that defines the nation today.

What's more, it wasn't the presence of Christians or Jews that encouraged Pakistan's eventual slide into sectarian strife and intolerance. It was a campaign of legalized exclusion directed against a pacifist strain of Islam. That conflict formed part of these religious extremists' ultimate goal of controlling Pakistan and, from there, launching a global Islamic revolution. It is crucial to understand the history of Pakistan over the past several decades, for it illustrates how intolerance toward a single Muslim community eventually formed the ideological underpinnings of a worldwide jihadist movement that threatens the livelihood and stability of people of all religions.

While Pakistan is often regarded as having been founded as an "Islamic state," the nation's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, articulated a strikingly different vision: "You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the State." This secular credo reflected a vision of Pakistan as a Muslim democracy, a country where Muslims would form a majority but all citizens would have equal rights and the laws would reflect the sovereign will of the people, not the dictates of any particular faith. This was anathema to the radical Islamists, whose most prominent leader, Maulana Mawdudi, formed the Jamat-e-Islami, an organization with the stated aim of establishing the "sovereignty of Allah" in Pakistan by imposing sharia law and subordinating non-Muslims to Muslims. The ultimate goal was to take over not only Pakistan, but to destroy all non-Islamic states by means of a violent revolution.

The successful implementation of an Islamic state requires the silencing of dissenting voices. By this reasoning, anyone who disagrees with the use of political violence to establish an Islamic state does not belong in the fold of Islam. Thus, the Jamat-e-Islami launched a bloody campaign of violence against Ahmadi Muslims, a group that renounces all forms of religious violence and espouses a secular form of government. Never before had a group been legally excluded from the Muslim community. My father, an Ahmadi who was a medical student in Pakistan at the time, vividly recalls the climate of fear whipped up by the Jamat-e-Islami's activists. Fleeing for his life, he narrowly escaped the fates of thousands of others who have been brutally murdered by the radical Islamists. The ultimate result of this campaign was a constitutional amendment that declares Ahmadis non-Muslims. This new development had an effect far beyond the Ahmadi community, as it legitimated intra-Muslim strife, leading directly to the vicious sectarian carnage that is still ongoing. Today, Pakistan is not so much a country of Muslims but a hodgepodge of up to 72 sects, each convinced of their exclusive claim to Muslim identity. Confessional affiliation has become the centerpiece of personal identity, leading to the balkinization of Pakistani politics and society along religious lines.

The zenith of the Jamat-e-Islami's influence came during the years of Zia-ul-Haq, a military dictator who brought about the Islamization of Pakistan. Under his rule, the Jamat-e-Islami was able to impose a medieval form of sharia law that is still in effect today. As a result, women's and minority rights were severely curtailed. Rape became almost impossible to prove, and Christians and others faced capital punishment for suspicions of insulting the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Those who stood up for minority rights were killed or imprisoned, a practice that continues today under the rule of General Musharraf.

Having enjoyed such success in implementing its domestic agenda, the Jamat-e-Islami was emboldened to infiltrate the army and the intelligence services in order to achieve its larger global goals. It was instrumental in creating the Mujahideen, a group of fighters originally formed to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan but who later evolved as the precursors to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Indeed, Mawdudi's message of a global Islamic revolution forms much of the ideological bedrock of al-Qaeda today.

Even in the midst of such a grave crisis, there is opportunity for Pakistan's politicians to roll back the Islamization of their society. If they fail to do so, however, the poison of sectarianism will consume the country, and it will almost certainly slide into the abyss of radical Islamic revolution. To avoid that fate, the state must extricate itself from the business of defining religious identity, sharia law must be repealed, and Pakistan's civil and military services must serve a secular political order, not the Jamat-e-Islami's vision of a global Islamic state. These reforms are not only desirable, but frankly necessary if freedom is to prevail in Pakistan.

Man bites (actually kills) dog, then atones by wedding one

2007-11-13T12:15:00.000-05:00

The holy grail, the Man [blank] dog story in the Times.

Not Like-minded

2007-11-09T09:45:00.001-05:00

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Pakistan, the abyss of American fear

2007-11-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

The past few days in Pakistan have brought a mix of hope and sadness to all who have been following closely. I realized, however, as I was watching the online stream of GEO, the UAE-based private news network which has been taken off the air in Pakistan (along with most other private news outlets), that the courage of the news media stands in such stark contrast with the response from the White House these past few days. Why are we not taking a stand against the choking of the free press, the arbitrary arrest and detention of opposition activists and lawyers, the dismantling of an independent judiciary? The answer: Fear. Our government is paralyzed with fear as to what would happen if Pakistan's dictatorship ended, terrified that less pro-American forces would take over. Is this really the best we can do? Hold on to an oppressive tin-pot dictator who is clearly unpopular among his population? Lest there be any doubt, the only reason the Pakistani population is not on the streets is because they are afraid of losing their life and liberty. Thus, by supporting Musharraf both politically and financially, we are preventing Pakistan from reaching that tipping point where the people rise up and take back their rights, their liberties. This is what the war on terror has become. Shame on us! Never before has history seen such cowardice on the part of those who ought to be leading the world!

Pakistan, the birthplace of radical Islamic terrorism

2007-11-08T14:26:00.000-05:00

The events of the past few days in Pakistan have generated an enormous amount of commentary, most of it deeply critical of General Musharraf's decision to impose what amounts to martial law. Not enough attention has been brought, however, to what is surely the most significant underlying problem, the influence of an extremist brand of Islam on the country's legal, political and social order. In particular, Pakistan's current woes can be traced to a long tradition of repressing minority rights. I happen to belong to one of the groups whose rights have been trampled upon in the name of Islam, and therefore probably enjoy a fairly unique perspective on the situation.

In 1974, the Jamat-e-Islami, which is now a prominent opposition group and has figured in the protests against Musharraf since March, began a systematic campaign of violence against the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Because Ahmadis (as the adherents of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are called) believed in the coming of a latter-day Messiah, the Jamat-e-Islami felt that they had violated a basic tenet of Islamic theology, the doctrine of the "finality of prophethood," under which no prophets can come after the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Without entering into an extensive theological discussion, the Jamat-e-Islami's ultimate conclusion can be summarized as holding that because Ahmadis believed in a prophet after the Holy Prophet, they should not call themselves Muslims. Having formed this belief, they began what was perhaps the first successful campaign of violent political Islam, precisely the phenomenon that culminated in the attacks on September 11th. The basic idea was precisely the same- if an "Islamic belief" cannot be implemented using peaceful means, then political violence will be undertaken until the objective is achieved. In this particular instance, the Jamat-e-Islami's intimidation and murder of Ahmadi Muslims led to a debate in the legislature on the issue, and ended in the most remarkable and bizarre constitutional reform the world may ever have seen.

Thus, the Second Amendment to the Pakistani Constitution of 1973 states, in pertinent part: "A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophethood of MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law." This use of the Constitution to prescribe who is and who is not legally considered a member of the Muslim community not only defies notions of religious freedom widely accepted by the international community and codified in various international law documents to which Pakistan is a signatory, but is also simply logically absurd and extremely dangerous.

It is noteworthy that Pakistan had not been this way from the beginning. Indeed, the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, referred to as "Quaid-e-Azam" (the Great Leader), told the Pakistani legislative body that ""You are free, free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State." (Aug. 11, 1948). That one day Pakistan would use the constitutional apparatus to specifically prohibit a group of people from belonging to the religion of their choice would have been preposterous to Jinnah. In any event, Pakistan's downward spiral continued in 1977, when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was prime minister in 1974 at the time of the declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslims, was deposed by Zia-ul-Haq, an army general. Having hung Bhutto, Zia ruled for 11 repressive years, his tenure ending only after a fatal airplane crash. During Zia's regime, the noose was further tightened on the Ahmadis by means of Ordinance XX, passed in 1984. Under this ordinance, any Ahmadi who used Islamic terminology in a mannner deemed inappropriate by law could face three years in prison - this included calling Ahmadi houses of worship by the name "masjid" (mosque in Urdu) and referring to the call of prayer as the Azan. Furthermore, the ordinance provided that " [u]se of derogatory remarks, etc. in respect of the Holy Prophet. Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine." Notice that this blasphemy provision, later the subject of much criticism in the Western media after Christians were prosecuted under it, was inserted as part of the Anti-Ahmadiyya Ordinance.

Now, one may wonder what the attitude of the United States and its western allies was towards the Zia regime. As it turns out, we were supplying him with both aid and arms, allowing him to build up a cadre of fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion of that country. Those fighters became known as the Mujahideen, and later on formed the breeding ground out of which both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were formed. Thus, the very same forces that had a decade earlier begun the transformation of Pakistan from a country where all creeds could co-exist without rancor into a sectarian republic, were now fomenting the seeds of the great terrorist force that ultimate reshaped the world in a definitive sense.

Why does this matter today, one might wonder? To begin with, for all the hoopla about democracy and human rights, you will never hear any of the potential electable political leaders in Pakistan talk about repealing the Second Amendment to the Constitution, nor Ordinance XX, even both are clearly inconsistent with any notion of a Pakistan that respect human rights. Truth be told, these political leaders consider it to be political suicide to take that position, because the Mullahs have successfully convinced the vast majority of the population (which, by the way, is also illiterate) that Ahmadis constitute a grave danger to other Muslims. Thus, this giant travesty continues, and will likely do so regardless of which set of political leaders rule Pakistan.

If Pakistan is to truly extricate itself from the precipitous decline in moral integrity it has suffered in the past few decades, it must begin by affirming a strong commitment to respecting human rights. To do so, it must repeal both the Second Amendment to the Constitution and Ordinance XX, and restore Ahmadis to full and equal citizenship rights with all other Pakistanis. If Pakistan refuses to do this, no secure foundation can be laid for a free society.

Finally, if Americans and other Westerners really want to understand where all this insanity comes from, where its origins lie, I would suggest taking a very close look at the way that political Islam has successfully been mobilized against the Ahmadi community over the past three decades in Pakistan. These people, the Jamat-e-Islami and its cohorts, are the ones who first began the project that ultimately led to the Twin Towers tragedy, and if we don't stop them today, they will carry on toward ever greater michief and evil.

Dividing Iraq

2007-10-23T13:47:00.001-05:00

Galbraith's latest attempt at justifying Iraq's partition. He may very well be right, and if so, it is quite breathtaking to think about what this really means. We invaded a country based on lies, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, and the displacement of millions of others. Now, we are going to destroy it by carving it up into three separate countries. Just think about it....and then realize why the rest of the world hates us so much.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Make Walls, Not War

But over the long term, the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are better analogies to Iraq than Bosnia. Democracy destroyed those states because, as in Iraq, there was never a shared national identity, and a substantial part of the population did not want to be part of the country.

So we should stop arguing over whether we want “partition” or “federalism” and start thinking about how we can mitigate the consequences of Iraq’s unavoidable breakup. Referendums will need to be held, as required by Iraq’s Constitution, to determine the final borders of the three regions. There has to be a deal on sharing oil money that satisfies Shiites and Kurds but also guarantees the Sunnis a revenue stream, at least until the untapped oil resources of Sunni areas are developed. And of course a formula must be found to share or divide Baghdad.

By PETER W. GALBRAITH

Op-Ed Contributor

The case against victimless crimes

2007-10-23T13:11:00.001-05:00

The Florida Supreme Court just upheld the child pornography convictions of a 16-year old and a 17-year old for having taken nude pictures of themselves and e-mailed them to their own e-mail accounts. The rationale appears to be that the pictures could have been sold to a third-party. Let's run with that idea- so, if you are 16 or 17, and you decide to snap photos of yourself nude and then sell them on the internet, you should be criminally liable??? What possible societal good could come of that? If our instincts about criminal responsibility are right, we don't think that people under 18 are as able to make correct choices as adults. If so, how does it make any sense to specifically impose criminal liability on under-age persons, and only under-age persons, for committing an offense that allegedly only harms themselves? This case shows the absurdity of victimless crime, and the unintended consequences of criminalizing such conduct.

Fox's Darjeeling stupidity

2007-10-23T13:07:00.001-05:00

What the hell does it mean for a short to be "too challenging" to audiences? They thought that people who see Wes Anderson movies aren't smart enough to handle a short film?

clipped from www.nytimes.com

‘Darjeeling’ to Be Paired With a Short

“The Darjeeling Limited,” Wes Anderson’s fifth feature film, opened to mixed reviews in about 200 theaters on Sept. 29, but for its wider release to almost 800 theaters, next Friday, moviegoers will first see a short film — one that got rave reviews — and, the hope is, “The Darjeeling Limited” will get a bump in ticket sales.

Nancy Utley, a chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, said that her company did not even know about the short until “The Darjeeling Limited” was completed. Even though Fox was aware of the critical acclaim, the company decided not to release it along with the feature. She said Fox decided to remain “flexible” on what to do.

“We thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run,” she said. “We wanted to make sure ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ got established first as a movie.”

Colbert

2007-10-23T13:00:00.001-05:00

Fascinating analysis of Colbert's appearance on Meet the Press.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

The Gospel According to Mr. Colbert

“I’m doing it, Tim, because I think that our country is facing unprecedented challenges in the future,” Mr. Colbert said. “I think the junctures that we face are both critical and unforeseen, and the real challenge is how we will respond to these junctures, be they critical, or God help us, unforeseen.”

ut the message I draw from Mr. Colbert is not that members of the media-political complex need to laugh at themselves, but that they need to take a hard look. The incipient generation of news consumers has made it clear that it does not want to see a bunch of guys with really nice neckware standing on the White House lawn talking about what they did not learn in the press room behind them and then flick at “sources” who suggest that “one thing is clear.”
One thing is, in fact, clear, from the plummeting numbers for network news: the jig is up.

Religion in China

2007-10-23T12:23:00.000-05:00

Two recent articles, and op-ed (NYT) and a feature piece (WP) explore the complicated attitude toward religion in China. In the op-ed, Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian-born political philosopher, argues that the Chinese approach to religion may in fact be very much in tune with contemporary Western instincts. China treats religion as culture, and is perfectly content to tolerate it so long as it doesn't pose a political threat to the regime. Zizek accurately points out that the Dalai Lama is a threat to the Chinese because he combines secular and religious authority in the same person. Then Zizek challenges us to think about out own attitudes towards religion. We dismiss Fundies as crazies precisely because they take their own religion's dictates and attempt to follow them literally, and shove it down the rest of our throats for good measure. In fact, precisely the same thing is going on in the Muslim world- their Fundies are doing the very thing that Dobson et al. want to do here, except they are doing it in politically unstable societies where violent social change is no longer a thing of the past. If that diagnosis is accurate, then the Chinese model seems alot more appealing. The WP story talks about an increasing trend of immigration to China to "chase the Chinese dream." The Chinese, it turns out, have taken a quite permissive attitude toward Islam, and allow Muslims to practice fairly freely, but under the state's watchful eyes. Most Muslims seem to be ok with this, and are immigrating in ever larger numbers. It is noteworthy that Turkey, the only real success story in teh Islamic world, has taken a very similar approach toward religion, outlawing sectarian mosques and appointing state-salaried imams to lead prayers.

Is the Chinese model the way to contain religious extremism in politically immature societies? My libertarian instincts very much tell me otherwise, and I would never want to live in China for the simple reason that freedom is too precious to me. But it is certainly food for thought.

O Jerusalem!

2007-10-22T11:24:00.001-05:00

I just got an email through Haaretz asking me to preserve Jerusalem as "Jewish for ourselves." I was also asked, however, to "develop [Jerusalem] as a...pluralistic city." I am confused- how does that work? How do you do both of these things at the same time?

Priceless

2007-10-19T11:01:00.001-05:00

The picture of Jindal with the fine voters of Louisiana is a fantastic testament to the greatness of America.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

An Improbable Favorite Emerges in Cajun Country

FRANKLINTON, La., Oct. 17 — An Oxford-educated son of immigrants from India is virtually certain to become the leading candidate for Louisiana’s next governor in Saturday’s primary election. It would be an unlikely choice for a state that usually picks its leaders from deep in the rural hinterlands and has not had a nonwhite chief executive since Reconstruction.

Selective Genocide

2007-10-19T10:57:00.001-05:00

Oh, Abe Foxman, your moral credibility increases by the moment.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

The next day at his home, Mr. Mehr, the son of a Holocaust survivor, voiced the anger many Jews and Armenians feel toward Abraham H. Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director. “Abe Foxman, like George W. Bush, is mumbling that it may not have been genocide,” Mr. Mehr said. “Foxman talks about commissions of scholars who should study this. That, to me, rang exactly like Ahmadinejad saying, ‘Let’s have a committee to study the Holocaust.’ Give me a break.”

Jewish leaders have long sought to focus attention on the killings of Armenians, starting with the American ambassador to Turkey in 1915, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who wrote in a cable that the Turkish violence against Armenians was “an effort to exterminate the race.” Several members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who voted for the resolution, including a key sponsor, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, are Jewish.

Schools give the pill to 11-year olds

2007-10-18T12:55:00.001-05:00

If there were ever a slippery slope....

clipped from www.cnn.com

Maine middle school to offer birth control

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- After an outbreak of pregnancies among middle school girls, education officials in this city have decided to allow a school health center to make birth control pills available to girls as young as 11.

"This isn't encouraging kids to have sex. This is about the kids who are engaging in sexually activity," Richard Veilleux said.

Pakistan, Failed Democracy? (Part I)

2007-10-18T12:07:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking alot lately about the problems of democratically elected governments that don't turn out to be particularly "good" governments. Today, as the media is profiling Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan after a decade-long exile, I find myself quite torn about this situation. There are undeniable facts: Musharraf has improved Pakistan overall during his regime- the economy has grown, the stockmarket has skyrocketed, and it seems like even ordinary Pakistanis are doing somewhat better than previously (not that that is saying much given the extraordinary poverty in the country). Indeed, even freedom of speech has flourished during his years in power, which is in part why he has found himself on the defensive in the past year or so, with media outlets getting quite aggressive and holding his feet to the fire on issues such as judicial independence and his own seemingly endless hold on power. The opposition parties have capitalized on this, becoming increasingly vocal and wrapping themselves in the mantle of democracy.

And yet, if anyone can remember back to the 1990's, when Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif more or less took turns ruling Pakistan, it was an absolute disaster.

• Human rights were a disaster. People were arrested on the whim of the government, frequently under the guise of “corruption” charges. Religious minorities’ rights were trampled on to appease the clerics. Rape was rampant, and seldom prosecuted.
• The economy was an absolute mess, public services deteriorated to the point where people simply gave up on having basic things like power.
• Above all, the so-called “democracy” was in fact nothing more than a façade; in reality, landlords, clerics and other powerbrokers effectively controlled the votes of the largely illiterate masses through a variety of means, some of them quite underhanded, even outright illegal.

It is this last point that deserves a great deal of emphasis. Pakistan is a feudal, yes, feudal society. I don’t mean that in some metaphorical, “oh they are so backward” kind of way, I mean it literally. The majority of the country’s land is owned by a small number of families, who then treat the people who farm their land as serfs. This system has both benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, it means that the serfs are able to count on the landlord helping them out in times of need, e.g. helping with a daughter’s dowry or settling a dispute with a neighbor. The flipside, however, is that the serf has to vow complete loyalty to his landlord, and must do as he says on a number of fronts, including voting in elections. For a lot of poor people, this is not a bad deal: they get a modicum of security in an otherwise very uncertain existence, and in exchange they give up something that is hardly worth anything to someone who does not already enjoy the basic comforts of life.

This, then, is one important aspect of Pakistan’s political life. It is worth mentioning that Benazir Bhutto belongs to the landowning class, and while Nawaz Sharif was an industrialist, he did not do anything to alter this feudal system either.

With all this background, I want to move on to asking a basic question. In this sort of society, one that I would call a failed democracy, what should be done?

Next, I will try to explore this question in more detail.

Sarko is single...

2007-10-18T11:54:00.001-05:00

I recall the NYT exclaiming the virtues of the more low-key French way of treating first spouses.....considering that Sego split with her other half, and now this, might a re-thinking be in order?

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Shortly after a presidential spokesman, David Martinon, told a hastily called news conference that he had absolutely no comment about his boss’s marriage, the Élysée palace dropped the bombshell that Mr. Sarkozy and his wife, Cécilia, “announce their separation by mutual consent.” The palace later clarified that the duo had divorced.

That makes Mr. Sarkozy not only the first divorcé to have been elected as France’s president, but also the first to separate from his spouse while in office.

On Thursday Mr. Sarkozy, the 52-year-old French leader, faced setbacks on two different domestic fronts: a wave of strikes that swept through France and an official announcement that his 11-year marriage had come to an end.

Insane!

2007-10-18T11:30:00.001-05:00

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk

Black people 'less intelligent' scientist claims

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary
row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure
of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in
Britain today.

More fierce criticism of the eminent scientist is expected as he embarks on a
number of engagements to promote a new book ‘Avoid Boring People: Lessons
from a Life in Science’. Among his first commitments is a speech to a London
audience at the Science Museum on Friday. The event is sold out.

Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions,
made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

TLS article on torture

2007-10-18T11:25:00.001-05:00

clipped from entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Texts for torturers

From Stanford to Abu Ghraib – what turns ordinary people into oppressors?

Martha Nussbaum

Philip Zimbardo
THE LUCIFER EFFECT
How good people turn evil
288pp. Rider and Co. £18.99.
9781844135776

In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his
team of investigators selected twenty-four young men to participate in their
study of the psychology of imprisonment. The men, only a few of whom were
students, had answered an ad placed in both the student newspaper and the
local town daily that offered subjects fifteen dollars per day for two weeks
to participate in a study of “prison life”. The successful applicants were
randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner and guard, fifty-fifty. Prisoners
were to stay in the prison for the entire two weeks; guards served in
eight-hour shifts, three groups per day. Thus began the now famous Stanford
Prison Experiment.

Re-starting the blog...

2007-10-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting series of articles from Ali Eteraz, a Muslim-American lawyer, about Islamic Reform . I will try to blog about this later today, but I think this is some of the most significant and fresh stuff I have seen lately with respect to the Islam and Democracy debate.

Anti-Immigrant? Or Just Fucking Nuts?

2007-03-28T20:14:00.000-05:00

I got a little flak today in the comments to the first story I wrote for my new job. I described the Minuteman Project as a "radical anti-immigrant group" -- actually, my editor changed the original wording, but I think it's still fair/accurate. I think I initially said something like "armed anti-immigration vigilante network," also perfectly true. They call themselves "a citizens' Vigilance Operation monitoring immigration, business, and government," with an emphasis on the illegal nature of most immigrants coming through the southern border.

Why the pushback? Because I didn't say "anti-illegal immigration." Technically, this would be most in line with the Minutemen's stated objectives. But let's be honest. If they were truly only interested in enforcing existing law, they'd be overjoyed if Congress suddenly made all immigration legal. They could pack up their guns and go home.

That wouldn't happen, though: that's "amnesty." I'm betting they'd love to see immigration laws made stricter, because that would mean less immigrants. They just don't like them, especially those whose names end in "o" or "a."

Incidentally, I also got flak from the left, saying I did not characterize FIRE as the conservative hacks that they supposedly are. For shame! It's always the controversial lightning rods that attract both extremes. Another one coming up tomorrow!

300 Update

2007-03-27T00:11:00.000-05:00

A while back, I blogged about friends of 300 in academia. Here is one of them, Victor Davis Hanson, defending the movie in a recent Washington Times article.

Where were the sailors detained?

2007-03-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

In a story in the NYT today, the headline reads "Iran Detains British Sailors in Iraq." When you read further into the story, however, you find:

The sailors were from the H.M.S. Cornwall, a British Type 22 frigate. Commodore Nick Lambert, the Cornwall’s commanding officer, told the B.B.C. that he hoped the incident was the result of a “simple misunderstanding at the tactical level.” The waters separating Iran and Iraq have long been the subject of bitter territorial disputes between the two countries.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters,” Commodore Lambert said of the British sailors. “Equally, the Iranians may claim they were in Iranian waters.”

So, there are three alternative possibilities:

1) The vessel was in Iran's territorial waters.
2) The vessel was in Iraq's territorial waters.
3) The vessel was in disputed territorial waters.

Given that the NYT seemingly has no evidence (if they do, they didn't reveal it) as to which of these three stories is true, it is remarkable that the headline assumes that the sailors were in fact detained in Iraqi waters. What were they thinking?

UPDATE: The Washington Post makes the same error. Bizarre.

US Attorneys

2007-03-23T03:31:00.000-05:00

For some time now, a controversy has raged in Washington now about the firing of seven United States Attorneys. I have been puzzling over the issue of what it means to be a political appointee in this context. I think most reasonable people would agree that "serving at the pleasure of the president" is a legal term of art rather than a natural language phrase. What do I mean by that? Well, to serve at the pleasure of the president basically means that the President is not legally obliged to give you any specific justification if he/she wants to fire you. On the other hand, there has typically been an understanding that while virtually all political appointees serve at the pleasure of the president, not all of them serve literally at the pleasure of the president. So, for instance, if the President wants to replace his chief of staff or his press secretary, he can do so for really any arbitrary reason he wishes. These aren't what we would typically think of as "public servant" positions. Really, these people just happen to be on the public payroll, but they really are just serving the president in a personal capacity, and their loyalties ultimately lie exclusively with the president. They do not take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. On the other hand, some political appointees serve important public functions, and the US Attorneys are perhaps one of the best examples. They are the top law enforcement officers in their various districts. It is their job to make sure that federal crimes are prosecuted in their district. As such, they have an obligation to the public at large to vindicate the public interest. This is an extremely important position, as you can imagine, and one of the reasons it is so important is that one of the features of our justice system is that private parties are unable to enforce the law in circumstances where they don't have a particularized, concrete injury (standing doctrine). Thus, most of us are looking to federal law enforcement officials to ensure that law-breakers are punished.

Now, in the ideal world, US Attorneys would bring all criminals to justice. Of course, we live in the real world, where prosecutorial discretion is a very important consideration. The most important reason for that is scarcity of resources. If the federal government didn't have some sense of prioritization in criminal prosecutions, things would fall apart. As one may imagine, each new president may have a different understanding of what deserves the most attention. Suppose for instance that a particular president believes in the "broken windows" theory, and wants all kinds of petty criminals prosecuted. Suppose another president believes that the federal government needs to focus less on victimless crimes, and focus more energy on white-collar crime. Suppose yet another president believes that prosecuting illegal immigration cases is paramount to improve US security and deter people from coming across. Notice that I am only talking about priorities here. Whether a President can actively stop prosecutions of a certain type of crime because he believes that it ought not in fact be a crime is a different question, not treated here. Now, if the President has a certain set of priorities, she is likely to want someone in charge who shares the President's view of those priorities, such that the President's agenda can be carried out most effectively. It would make sense in that situation for an incoming President to replace the law enforcement officers of a previous President if that President had a different set of priorities. Typically, Presidents have done this on some significant scale, and it doesn't seem to have raised any red flags.

Now, the tougher question is what happens if a President finds that his/her US attorneys are not following through on his priorities. Is he justified in replacing them? As a theoretical matter, the answer would appear to be yes. But there are practical complications. Even assuming that the President is genuinely concerned about the priorities being fulfilled, replacing a US Attorney in this context is likely to be seen by others as an attempt to influence specific prosecutions against specific individuals, either by stopping existing prosecutions/investigaions of the President's friends, of friends of his friends, or initiating new prosecutions/investigations of the President's enemies. What appears to have happened in the current crisis is that those fears are well-founded, and that the President's cronies were genuinely trying to influence specific investigations/prosecutions. Now, one might say, if federal prosecutors are the ones with the discretion and they also serve at the pleasure of the president, what's wrong with the President replacing them because of specific prosecutions? It appears that we have some shared intuitions about what is right/wrong for a president to do, and using the power of the presidency to micro-manage the criminal justice system in a way that rewards one friends and punishes one's enemies appears to fall into the unacceptable category- and good riddance for that intuition.

But I am not sure matters are that simple. Can we draw such a clean distinction between specific prosecutions and abstract priorities? In some of the current firings, the DOJ alleged that the problem was that the prosecutors weren't bringing enough voter fraud indictments. If you have set out a priority, in this case voter fraud, but the US Attorney doesn't press charges, and says that he just doesn't have the goods on the targets of the investigations, is that a good enough reason to let the US Attorney go and replace him/her with one who is more likely to be more aggressive? That seems problematic, and I think we want the President to rely on the qualified judgment of a career prosecutor. On the other hand, if the President asked a US Attorney to focus on drug crimes, and he wasn't bringing enough drug prosecutions, can the President fire him then without impunity? If so, is that because the element of partisan taint is absent from that class of cases, given that drug dealers are no more likely to be Democrats than Republicans? There are tough questions here about to what extent the President should be able to set his own agenda with respect to what kinds of criminal violations should receive the most attention, and then how much supervision he can exercise over a US attorney after the initial determination. Do we want US Attorneys to be like Supreme Court justices, in the sense that once you have made an initial determination, the appointee exercises her own independent judgment, and regardless of what the President may have expected from that US attorney at the outset, now he is stuck with whatever happens? What to do with the Souters?

I am not entirely sure of the answers to these questions, but I think they are quite important, and that we need to start thinking about them. It is an often neglected fact that prosecutorial discretion is one of the greatest powers of the prosecutor. There is an initial stage at which he/she can essentially cherrypick which criminals are worthy of punishment, and which are not. Who should decide, and at what stage, and at what level of abstraction, how those determinations are made? That is the question.

Small-town Amerrica and Iraq

2007-03-23T03:28:00.000-05:00

Driving to school today, I heard a segment on the BBC radio (can't find a link, unfortunately) about the impact of the war in Iraq on small towns in the United States. As it turns out, a significant number of casualties in this war were residents of towns with less than 25,000 inhabitants. The segment featured an interview with residents of one such small town, and one particular interview with the parents of a decased American Marine in Iraq. There were a number of interesting points made during this interview which I found thought-provoking. The interviewees adopted the following propositions:

1) There is the East Coast, the West Coast, and then there is small town America.
2) Kids in small town America not only go to school, they also go to church.
3) People in "that region" started this war, and if we leave the job unfinished, we will be conceding defeat to "those people in that region."

Why are we at war in Iraq? Even taking the administration's most broad justification for the war, it looks something like this: The terrorists attacked us on 9/11, Saddam was a bad guy who we thought had WMD, and there was some possibility that the terrorists and Saddam might co-operate in the future, and that was simply not a risk we were willing to take, since our freedom was at issue. Even on that now thoroughly discredited view, there is no implicit notion that what is at issue in this war is the "way of life of church-going Americans." Here, we see a naked admission of just that, and it is not terribly difficult to infer that many of these people also think this is an essentially religious conflict, between Christianity and Islam.

To the extent that the motivations of the soldiers and their families, their narrative about why they are fighting this war, is incosistent with the purported narrative offered by the Bush administration, what does that mean for this war, and for our nation? Has this happened before in our history?

'Supporting the Troops' Redux

2007-03-16T16:17:00.000-05:00

Following up on Mahmood's alternate-reality scenario....

Most of the Iraq war debate is dishonest, but the arguments over who's "supporting the troops" is the most fundamentally mendacious feature of our public discourse. Let's break this down.

In 2002, most of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- vote for the war resolution that gives the president the power to invade Iraq if he sees fit. This essentially makes going to war in Iraq legal. The instrument with which Congress's and President Bush's new policy -- invading Iraq -- is to be implemented is the U.S. military, a volunteer organization under the Department of Defense.

Today, Republicans routinely demonize Democrats who advocate for any sort of pullout (timed or otherwise) as not "supporting the troops." Democrats, on the other hand -- and probably as a result of this knee-jerk reaction by pandering neoconservatives -- declare their support for America's troops as often as possible. But the idea of supporting the troops is meaningless. The armed forces consist of people who are there voluntarily, and they take orders from those who might send them to war -- the commander-in-chief and his enablers in Congress who make his actions legal.

Troops are needed for war, regardless of whether the mission is noble or selfish, inevitable or by choice. We now have liberal politicians who are using their "support of the troops" as a rationale for pulling them out of Iraq. The logic is hilariously circular: I want to give the president the authority to send our troops to war, so I vote for the resolution. Now I believe (or say I always believed) that this war is wrong, therefore I will point to the instrument of the policy I voted for and use that as a reason for reversing that policy.

I find this "supporting the troops" rhetoric to be hypocritical not only because it's meaningless (some troops will have to die in some wars, whether justified or not; even opponents of the war wouldn't deny troops armor, and in fact that's never in history been a point of contention until this war), but because in civilian life, most Democrats don't like the kind of people who voluntarily join the army anyway.

They're disproportionately conservative, patriotic, and strongly support aggressive defense measures. They're disproportionately white and rural ("hicks," a city person might put it). They're relatively uneducated.

Pro-war Republicans are just as illogical, but their fallacy is the sunk cost: I voted for this war, and since I support the troops that are carrying out this war I advocated for (whatever that means), and since we've put so much effort and sacrificed so many lives so far, I believe they should finish the job.

So how should principled opponents of the war advance the debate? They should go back to the original antiwar arguments before the invasion -- none of which invoked "our troops," because any serious, necessary war must be waged regardless of casualties. The best arguments against the war in the first place revolved around Iraqi casualties, destabilizing the region, and inadvertently boosting terror networks around the world. All three fears have been borne out, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties topping 600,000 (which makes the 3,000+ American deaths seem paltry by comparison).

True opponents of the war would be more concerned with the death and destruction being wrought in our name, rather than the damage being done to our armed forces. I have two friends who are either in Iraq or on the way there, and I'm not diminishing their contributions or the casualties of American soldiers. I am saying that an honest debate would center on the effects of the war on Iraq and the war on terror and not the troops who were sent to implement the war strategy. Anything else is posturing.

Of course I "support the troops" -- I can go to the supermarket and buy a yellow ribbon! Give me a break.