In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit to Kabul for the presidential inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the foreign secretary said: “If international forces leave, you can choose a time – five minutes, 24 hours or seven days – but the insurgent forces will overrun those forces that are prepared to put up resistance and we would be back to square one.”

That David Miliband should think that this is an argument for redoubling efforts in Afghanistan says everything about just how hopelessly irrational the policy is and why it is doomed to go the same way as every other Afghan imperial folly. One of the few hopeful signs is that he is repeating the US Afghan Ambassador Eikenberry’s point that the Karzai government wasn’t the reliable partner assumed by McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy, and therefore that the US president shouldn’t increase his commitment by fulfilling McChrystal’s request for more troops.

The thing that I remember being drilled home in Halberstams’ masterful The Best and the Brightest was that the Vietnam campaign was doomed from the outset because the Americans were trying to prop up a corrupt and ineffectual government. That this was the central point in Eikenberry’s opposition to escalation suggests that Miliband and his briefers are woefully inadequate, or cynical, or our ability to think clearly about war and avoid massive cognitive dissonance is nil, or perhaps some combination of all three.

And then I read this from Barbara Ellen in today’s Observer.

Please be seated, as some may find this item disturbing. It would appear that Hillary Clinton fancies David Miliband. True. Hillary told an interviewer that Miliband was worthy of a “big crush” (her emphasis). She continued: “I mean, he’s so vibrant, vital, attractive and smart. He’s really a good guy. And so young.” Heavens above, get a room, Hillary! And kindly have some respect for Dishy Dave’s married status.

The chances of this ending well can’t be good. It seems to hinge on Obama, Biden and Eikenberry. Will that be enough?

Contrast this with the Dalai Lama’s comments today: “Obama is not soft on China; just has a different style,” and reminding everyone that “I am not disappointed that Obama has not met me yet.”

For somebody who has a ken interest in results and a deep commitment to rationality, this makes perfect sense of course. The Dalai Lama has spent almost all of his natural life trying to reach accommodation with Beijing and has no interest in posturing. He knows perfectly well that an American president in a weak position making loud noises on Tibet is just about the last thing he needs. That Obama isn’t playing to the domestic gallery in this way is indeed a good sign that he is focusing on substantive issues and establishing a good working relationship. For just these reasons it was probably just as well that Obama didn’t meet the Dalai Lama before his trip to China.

None of this means that Obama will prioritise the Tibetan cause. But the Dalai Lama will understand only too well the need for patience and subtlety in dealing with Beijing  and by reminding people of this can hardly be harming his own cause in either Beijing or Washington.

1.

[Fisk] might well be hated by the war-mongering, empire-addicted elements of the right because his skilful and widely recognised reporting of the ‘reality’ that they despise so much.

But yesterday Sullivan in a post entitled The Wages of Endless War quoted this from Andrew Sprung:

An Oxfam poll of 704 randomly selected Afghans reveals untold suffering– 1 in 5 say they’ve been tortured, three quarters have been forced to leave their homes at some point in the endless civil war, 43% have had property destroyed. The survey also has what would seem to be some moderately encouraging findings regarding the counterinsurgency: 70% see unemployment and poverty as a key driver of civil war; 48% blame the government’s weakness and corruption; 36% point to the Taliban; 25% to interference by neighboring countries; just 18% to the presence of international forces; another 18% to d al Qaeda– and another 17% to the lack of support from the international community. After 30 years of civil war, only 3% named the current conflict as the most harmful period (though the report cautions that areas where the current fighting is worst are underrepresented).

The point is not to go after the unhinged ones but to try and identify the habits that are giving rise to the unhingedness. It is relatively easy (and futile) to mock and knock down the arguments of pathological war mongers. While they may represent a kind of thinking in concentrated form, it couldn’t be so effective in setting the agenda if it didn’t gain traction in centrists.

It seems plausible to me that Sullivan lost his balance in the aftermath of the 911 attacks (when he wrote his ‘Fisking’ post). In recognition of this Sullivan is famous for posting dissenting views on his blog, but I think this mitigates rather than addressing the problem, which must be to critically examine our own passions.  Despite all the warnings Sullivan is feeding the Palin troll, just as he get captured by the war-mongers before. It enabled the lunies then and it is doing so again today, in a different way. It would be nice to see Fisk and his philosophy properly appreciated by the centrists that don’t seem to understand how war-mongering is deeply embedded in our culture’s habits of thought.

2. To underline this point, although I critiqued Bryan Appleyard in a previous post I responded to today’s defensive post on his blog with a heart-felt expression of appreciation.

3. This post from Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, attacking their commenter en masse,  must be one of the most ill-advised posts I have seen on a major blog in a long time. It doesn’t say anything that isn’t fairly obvious, is whinny and engages in some of the worst practices it seeks to criticise in getting personal in at least one place.

4. It may be fashionable among bloggers to moan about the quality of the press and pat ourselves on the back but the columns by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in today’s Times on the Palin phenomenon were I thought sublime. Obama’s and Palin’s inexperience became linked in the campaign. They also clearly connect with their base in a way that goes beyond the rational, being figure-heads for cultural forces. Dowd runs with the psychological angle and Rich the cultural perspective. Dowd proposes that Obama learn from Palin’s success; Rich warns that without some remedial action, the political landscape may become more receptive to the Palin populist phenomenon. Commentary of this quality is still quite rare in the more reactive (and complacent?) blogosphere.

5. William Polk’s guest contribution today Juan Cole’s Informed Comment is a good advertisement for blogging. The article is a little long but it provides a thoroughly realistic assessment of what Obama should be doing in Afghanistan from somebody who both understands the neighbourhood and has significant experience in formulating US foreign policy. His warning about the danger to the Republic should be taken seriously.

I have been watching the Palin obsession on Andrew Sullivan’s blog with a kind of fascinated horror. The blog was suspended to digest the almost content-free Palin book, but from the resumption notice it is clear that others have been raising their concerns.

No doubt It is part of the theatre, one of the many reasons, without wishing to be cynical, that I think Sullivan is such a successful blogger. However, as Ezra Klein cleverly points out, Palin is getting her revenge on her media critics. They exposed her lack of substance in the campaign and she is replying in kind, revealing their own vacuousness, while making her and her publishers a great deal of money.

Sullivan spends much of his remaining blog bandwidth reminding us of how demented movement conservatism has become–and well he might know. Before I come to that, I must through a sickening article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer on The Predator War in Afghanistan.  I won’t try to rerun the extraordinarily disturbing thesis of the article about how we have readily accepted that a governments can operate a relatively cheap and risk-free, rolling, assassination campaign, collateral damage and all. Lots of collateral damage, as this incident–just one–from the recent campaign to kill the Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, illustrates.

A few Pakistani and international news stories, most of which rely on secondhand sources rather than on eyewitness accounts, offer the basic details. On June 14, 2008, a C.I.A. drone strike on Mehsud’s home town, Makeen, killed an unidentified person. On January 2, 2009, four more unidentified people were killed. On February 14th, more than thirty people were killed, twenty-five of whom were apparently members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, though none were identified as major leaders. On April 1st, a drone attack on Mehsud’s deputy, Hakimullah Mehsud, killed ten to twelve of his followers instead. On April 29th, missiles fired from drones killed between six and ten more people, one of whom was believed to be an Al Qaeda leader. On May 9th, five to ten more unidentified people were killed; on May 12th, as many as eight people died. On June 14th, three to eight more people were killed by drone attacks. On June 23rd, the C.I.A. reportedly killed between two and six unidentified militants outside Makeen, and then killed dozens more people—possibly as many as eighty-six—during funeral prayers for the earlier casualties. An account in the Pakistani publication The News described ten of the dead as children. Four were identified as elderly tribal leaders. One eyewitness, who lost his right leg during the bombing, told Agence France-Presse that the mourners suspected what was coming: “After the prayers ended, people were asking each other to leave the area, as drones were hovering.” The drones, which make a buzzing noise, are nicknamed machay (“wasps”) by the Pashtun natives, and can sometimes be seen and heard, depending on weather conditions. Before the mourners could clear out, the eyewitness said, two drones started firing into the crowd. “It created havoc,” he said. “There was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for help.” Then a third missile hit. “I fell to the ground,” he said.

The local population was clearly angered by the Pakistani government for allowing the U.S. to target a funeral. (Intelligence had suggested that Mehsud would be among the mourners.) An editorial in The News denounced the strike as sinking to the level of the terrorists. The Urdu newspaper Jang declared that Obama was “shutting his ears to the screams of thousands of women whom your drones have turned into dust.” U.S. officials were undeterred, continuing drone strikes in the region until Mehsud was killed.

Needless to say, while this may be tactically successful (in taking out a rebel leader) it is difficult to see how it can’t unite the Afghan countryside being terrorised by these aerial assassins against the invaders and their quislings (and likewise destabilising Pakistan).

Now cut back to the piece by Andrew Sullivan that gave us the term Fisking. It is a blog post of 2001 critiquing Robert Fisk’s report of his encounter with a group of rural Afghans in December of 2001, a little unhappy at having their country bombed and invaded.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust under assault near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when hundreds — let us be frank and say thousands — of innocent civilians are dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the “War of Civilisation” is burning and maiming the Pashtuns of Kandahar and destroying their homes because “good” must triumph over “evil”?

Fisk provided a vivid description of being on the sharp end of a lynching. Having escaped–mostly by giving as good as good as he was getting and making use of the stunned reaction to make off–he fetches breath and tries to make sense of what has happened to him. Fisk spends a lot of time reporting from various points of the world, and some of them quite troubled, and people don’t generally behave like this. Being the curious creatures we are it is natural on nearly losing your life for a misjudgement to work out what has happened and thus avoid further nasty surprises.

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist — the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world. [...]

And — I realised — there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the “War for Civilisation” just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them “collateral damage”.

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees”.

And of course, that’s the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us — by B-52s, not by them. And I’ll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

Fisk (at least as of 2006) holds more British and international journalism awards than any other journalist, much of it covering wars and conflicts. Fisk understands the consequences (and futility) of war.

Was it ethically exceptionable. Not at all. Is it Fisk’s job to look after the souls of the lynch mob? No. It should go without saying–if you aren’t either a sociopath  or psychopath–that it is not ethical to take part in a lynching, but that is the concern of people being tempted into lynching. (For reasons that will become clear the ethics of the situation have to be spelled out in gruesome detail–please bear with me.) Fisk was not just trying to make sense of his own experience, but also explain its significance to his readers, for we were all implicated in this tragedy. Fisk was attacked by the mob because he represented us and it was important for his piece that we understood the ethical significance of our part in this. In any case was, as Fisk rightly said, the attack on him was fairly trivial in the greater scheme of things. It might not be true to say that the sole cause of being attacked by an individual was the violence we were meting out to his or her community, but it is certainly fair enough to say that it was the sole cause of the mob attacking Fisk, as his piece makes clear.

The attack was clearly related to the violence we were collectively visiting on rural Afghans. It was therefore our business to look at what we were doing to contribute to the violence and suffering of the situation. Fisk was not making a normative judgement in saying that in their situation he would be doing the same (i.e., he ought to have attacked a foreign journalist), but was making a naturalistic (or causal) statement about the consequences of our actions. He was saying that he could understand how he could have gotten sucked up into a lynch mob if he was on the receiving end of what we were doing.

This is what all true philosophy and religion tells us–to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and through that empathetic connection establish a more constructive dynamic with them.

And here we have Sullivan’s blog entry of 9th December 2001, the blog entry that is reputed to have inaugurated the Fisking genre of blogging:

THE PATHOLOGY OF ROBERT FISK: His account of his ordeal at the hands of an Afghan mob – a mob that apparently cried “Infidel!” as they attacked and tried to rob him – is a classic piece of leftist pathology. You have to read it to believe it. Even when people are trying to murder Fisk, he adamantly refuses to see them as morally culpable or even responsible. I’ve heard of self-hatred but this is ridiculous: “They started by shaking hands. We said, ‘Salaam aleikum’ – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face.” That sentence alone deserves to go down as one of the defining quotes of the idiotic left. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be downright hilarious. Who needs Evelyn Waugh when you have this? [...]

THE VICTIM OF THE WORLD: You know the expression: you wouldn’t understand a culture if it actually hit you in the head? Fisk has now officially retired that expression as a metaphor. He goes on: “There were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others…” Notice that phrase – “whose brutality was entirely the product of others.” What can that possibly mean? We’re not talking about extenuating circumstances – things that might help us understand or contextualize the hatred of one people for another. We’re talking about a priori moral absolution. Take this passage: “Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.” No, Mr. Fisk, that man who attacked you was not truly innocent of any crime. You were. He was not the victim of the world. You were the victim of a thieving, violent mob. For those who believe that the left-wing intelligentsia is capable of critical thought or even a modification of their ideology in the face of evidence, this incident is a wonderful example of why it won’t happen. They won’t recognize reality, or abandon their racism, or moderate their spectacular condescension to the inhabitants of the developing world – even when reality, literally, crushingly, punches them in the face.

It is difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at this advice on ‘reality’ from a keyboard commando to one of the most decorated journalists of our time. Firstly on a point of fact, Robert Fisk is no ‘leftist’ (see here or here). ‘His view of journalism is …

… that it must “challenge authority—all authority—especially so when governments and politicians take us to war”, and he quotes with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective … What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power.” Fisk has received widespread praise and criticism for his condemnation of violence against civilians, courageous reporting, and willingness to challenge the statements of governments.’

He might well be hated by the war-mongering, empire-addicted elements of the right because his skilful and widely recognised reporting of the ‘reality’ that they despise so much. Starting with the Northern Irish conflict in the 1970s, and thereafter nearly continuously, reporting the baleful and tragic consequences of trying to impose military solutions on political problems, coming to a deep understanding of the futility and awful suffering consequences of this pathology of empire. Thoughtful people, such as those to be found at antiwar.com or The American Conservative, could offer similar critiques from the right.

The Wikipedia page on Fisking quotes this entry.

[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing, anti-idiotarianism

Quite apart from the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan, not least to the NATO personnel caught up in the maelstrom, this is in any case a stupid way to run an empire, as Stephen Walt’s ‘logical’ and ‘brutally factual’ assessment of Obama’s recent visit to China illustrates.

The follies of the past eight years were the greatest gift the United States could have given Beijing, and Obama’s conduct in Beijing was the inevitable result. And if we keep doing what we’ve been doing (see under: Afghanistan, Middle East, etc.), I wouldn’t expect things to change.

Robert Fisk’s reporting seems to stand the test of time better than Andrew Sullivan’s blogging. This is of course entirely understandable.  I don’t know whether Andrew Sullivan has ever apologised for his attack on Robert Fisk. If he hasn’t he should.

More importantly isn’t it time that the kind of people that take great pride in ‘Fisking’ should perhaps move beyond a somewhat pre-adolescent model of engagement with other people’s points of view. With the rising influence of the blogosphere it is perhaps in everyone’s interest that we aspire to better. Perhaps then people like Robert Fisk might start to take it seriously.

For the sake of this discussion I am assuming that various long-standing philosophical and religious traditions have a kernel of wisdom that is being carried by practitioners who have put them into practice and realised them. I strongly suspect that this kind of knowledge was far more widely spread through the public sphere before the revolutionary ideas of the sixteen and seventeenth centuries concerning the state and the cosmos made their way into various influential speculations on ethics in the eighteenth century (when we all became Enlightened). Allied to this we have the revolutionary changes in society and art that accompanied the industrial revolution (the rise of the novel and all that).

The accumulative effect of all of these developments was to turn people away from self-awareness and trying to achieve well being through non-instrumental self-development. Instead, in line with the social and intellectual revolutions, we see the habitual pursuit of happiness exclusively through instrumental means, this becoming the orthodox understanding.

My point is that it is relatively easy for clever opportunists and cynics to corrode the fabric of collective understanding, with dismal consequences. The conservative movement could be said to be a reaction to this wholesale destruction of values, but the reactionary tendencies of this movement are just as much a modern phenomenon. Some have called it ‘fundamentalism’, but Rowan Williams prefers ‘aggressive religious conservatism’. This reaction is an even more dismaying development for philosophy, for it hollows out religion from within. (This is related to the previous post on moral relativism, and as I have said, I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the teachings of Calvin and what they have been taken to represent by a later more confused age.)

Clearly ‘aggressive religious conservatism’ isn’t the answer. Unlike Alasdair MacIntyre I think it is vain (and thoroughly confused) to look for a resolution in the imposition of a single value system. The world has become too diverse and interconnected for that, and to hope some utopia will appear at the other side of a grand dissolution strikes me as wishful in the extreme.

But I think some kind of religious conservatism has to be taken seriously. Which is to say that each religious tradition will seek to maintain orthodoxy and impose a tax on innovation in order to avoid the teachings becoming destabilised through frivolous innovation.

The best approach, as George Monbiot has just argued in the case of corrosive climate scepticism, is for people in positions of responsibility to take their responsibilities seriously and see that ignorance is dissolved through knowledge. But until more people in positions of power become more acquainted with both knowledge and responsibility i think patience and perseverance will be essential.

I remain open in my conclusion about the extent to which Calvin should be condemned for his part in Sevetus’s execution, quite open to the possibility that it was an inexcusable lapse. As I have made quite clear I hope, I am against capital punishment, and against sanctioning people for expressing their opinions, unless those opinions are expressed with malevolent intention and lead to great harm. After all, Calvin himself was really expressing his opinion to the Genevan authorities when he called for Servetus’s execution, the execution being carried out by others. One way you could understand the structure of my defence of Calvin was that he sincerely believed that in speaking his opinion on Servetus he was trying to prevent what he believed to be Servetus’s higher crime of seeking to corrupt souls and destroying the Church for his own glorification.

Note that I am not at all condemning Servetus here, nor closing out the possibility that Servetus’s execution wasn’t at best a ghastly mistake, at worst a brutal crime. The issue is Calvin and how we arrive at a judgement of his actions. If he is to be condemned then that must be done through joined-up argument, and it isn’t enough to simply condemn him according to our own systems of ethics–that would be merely to repeat the mistake with which Calvin is being accused.

At the centre of the charge of moral relativism I think was the idea that true wisdom is compassionate and non-violent. I agree, but we have to be careful no to get to caught up in our own ideas of what that non-violence looks like. Again, I think that we live in a culture–the modern industrial state–that fetishises violence, and am a pretty militant pacifist, but does that mean that quietism is always everywhere the compassionate and non-violent response? I don’t think so. It isn’t difficult to come up with thought experiments where the most compassionate response to the situation becomes violent in a different context. For example I think it was a shame that the Tibetan state was so corrupt as to disregard the prophesies of the 13th Dalai Lama (the predecessor of the current Dalai Lama)  and fail to prepare adequate defences in anticipation of the Chinese invasion (and I believe this is the position of the current Dalai Lama’s, but I can’t locate the evidence). Given the horrible ongoing Tibetan and Chinese tragedy today this is a not a position that can be easily dismissed.

The underlying point is that all action must be motivated by a desire to relieve suffering, and the temptations to pursue selfish gain or the harming of others must be resisted and defeated. This is an eternal truth, the underlying message of right religion and philosophy (expressed in non-theistic terms) but the way it plays out will vary according to the situation, including the norms and expectations of the actors. To insist on a particular code of behaviour that must be true for every situation is I think is problematic.

Moral relativism becomes a problem when people try to undercut morality itself. So some might mount a defence of Calvin like I have and conclude from a successful defence that ethical behaviour is a mere fairy story as we can’t even agree that burning people for their opinions is wrong. If the intention of the argument is to conclude Calvin (or anybody else whose actions we are considering) mustn’t be acting with the greatest care and precision–especially when they are calling for somebody’s execution–then this is moral relativism for sure. My argument is really an epistemic one–that it is difficult to be certain about the ethics of a situation that we only partially understand.

That said, while we do live in degenerate times where the public understanding to right religion and philosophy are concerned, one of the things I do appreciate is religious pluralism, one of the finer achievements of the modern liberal state. It is nots unique–India, for example, has a history of religious pluralism that can be traced to ancient times–but I think it is an achievement to be grateful for.

The confluence of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the taking down of the Berlin Wall, Obama’s ongoing deliberations on whether or not to escalate in Afghanistan and Remembrance Day, with the passing of the last of the Great War veterans, has made for an unusually rich reflection on the value and/or futility or war.

The  responses to the 11th November commemoration were telling with realists like Stephen Walt opining ‘as Juan Cole notes on his own blog today, the best way to honor our veterans is to make sure they aren’t asked to fight and die to no good purpose‘ and Bryan Appleyard representing the sentimentalists, weeping ‘continuously and uncontrollably’.

Of course some people think war is a thoroughly good thing, a necessary thing even, the most recent neoconservative missive on the subject prompting a tart response from Yglesias:

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars.

It is easy to sneer at the neocons but I really don’t think they would be nearly as influential if they wasn’t a large receptive audience for their views. People may not articulate them so crudely; they may not realise it; but we do have a remarkable appetite for war, as the following well-known table of military expenditure charts makes clear.

Rank	Country	Spending ($ b.)	World Share (%)
—	World Total	1464.0	100
1	United States	607.0	41.5
2	China	84.9a	5.8a
3	France	65.7	4.5
4	United Kingdom	65.3	4.5
5	Russian Federation	58.6a	4.0a
6	Germany	46.8	3.2
7	Japan	46.3	3.2
8	Italy	40.6	2.8
9	Saudi Arabia	38.2	2.6
10	India	30.0	2.1

The NATO countries plus Japan account for 59.7% of world military expenditure. This can’t but reflect the values of the citizens of these post-industrial countries, especially as many of them have crumbling infrastructure badly in need of investment (Kristof today has a good article on the surreal quality of this debate).

To take but one example of the typical intelligent, independent voice consider Appleyard’s own recent missive on the subject.

From where I’m sitting, I don’t think it’s possible, honest or meaningful to have an opinion about Afghanistan. It’s not going well, our people are dying in a dubious cause and the Karzai government is corrupt; on the other hand, it sounds like a good idea to kill Taliban and withdrawal would be a regional catastrophe.

I find it interesting that Bryan doesn’t think it is ‘honest or meaningful’ to express an opinion. I can only say that I am starting to see a remarkable surge of scepticism from informed analysts on the futility of the Afghan campaign, whether considering the Afghanistan, Pakistan or Al Qaeda dimensions (see my earlier post, and Juan Cole on Pakistan). Ritter sums it up best:

Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded.

When I pointed this out I was either told that it was true that there could be no informed opinion on the matter or it produced a vehement defence of staying the course; when this didn’t stand up, later, we had mushroom clouds billowing over our cities. That we are the only ones to have put mushroom clouds over other people’s cities perhaps makes us somewhat paranoid; in any case it seems to be the favourite tool for justifying war (that and avoiding ‘appeasement’ of the latest ‘Hitler’) no doubt because the introduction of a nuclear dimension ends all rational discourse, demanding the projection of the great great cleansing solution to all our problems.

But the neoconservatives are much less interesting than the centrists, as by taking the three-monkeys stance they become the real facilitators of the war party. Indeed Appleyard concluded from the Sun’s recent mauling of Gordon Brown that it ‘does prove my own point about the ability of the media to make any war other than the most explicitly defensive almost impossible to conduct.’

But there are some who think we shouldn’t be conducting any wars that aren’t explicitly defensive, it being enshrined in the Nuremberg Principles. Indeed Robert Fisk’s passion on this point in a recent discussion was every bit as fierce as Ritter’s prose in his recent podcast (in discussion with Dame Ann Leslie and Martin Bell).

Being of this view myself, with the chatter about Obama moving towards a 30,000 troop reinforcement of the Afghan garrison, it is heartening to hear of the latest intervention of ambassador Karl Eikenberry in the debate, insisting that the Karzai government isn’t the reliable partner needed for McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. As Juan Cole reports this may reflect an interesting dynamic inside Obama’s war council:

Eikenberry is a China specialist who can not only speak but interpret Chinese, who has a Stanford MA in international affairs, and who served two tours in Afghanistan under Bush. His appointment as ambassador in Kabul had been a surprise, since the generals are not usually sent in as diplomats, and the US military was already well represented in US government counsels on Afghanistan. But now it appears that Obama cleverly put Eikenberry in as chief diplomat precisely because he is worldly and experienced in the country, and in a position to second-guess the Washington war hawks who always think that a victory is around the corner with just a few more troops.

Obama is said to have rejected all the plans so far presented to him, insofar as none leads to a foreseeable end-game.

Yglesias has a bit of a theme running on how people with an optimistic outlook tend to do better because they are primed to exploit opportunities that come their way. Picking up on a Cowen link to a study showing that depressed people tend to see reality more accurately Matt reiterated this point, but it turns out that the situation is more complicated than this as optimists have a better objective grip on reality than pessimists in other respects.

All of which reinforces my anti-realistic, sceptical and optimistic prejudices. Trying to bottle reality is a mugs game–the trick is live in a reality that maximises strategic well-being. That starts from the one thing we all know, that we all don’t want to be unhappy, and we want to make use of our special endowment–our intelligence–to fulfil those needs.

From this it follows that avoiding surprises will be a useful, and so Cowen’s undogmatic scepticism is a powerful aid. Being a sceptical optimist is doubly useful: optimists occupy a happier reality and they are primed to make good use of the opportunities that come their way.

All of which is by way of preparation for David Brooks column today where he discusses the Fort Hood massacre, spending much of the column expressing his understanding of why so much of the reaction was extremely restrained in their handling of the Islamic dimension of the story, the media placing great emphasis on the fact that Hasan was sick member of the armed services put under great strain rather than an evil Islamic terrorist.

It is worth quoting his conclusion in full.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Here are my observations.

• Folks were (rightly) concerned about a poisonous, hateful narrative taking root. With the catastrophic overreaction to 911 fresh in people’s minds this was wise self-interest at work, and impressive.
• There is plenty of time to determine Hassan’s precise responsibility. What we needed for the moment to avoid really nasty things from happening was an open scepticism of a tempting but dangerous narrative.
• Brooks’ desire to build up the narrative of America at war with Islam is a choice of Brooks and the neoconservatives. Such a narrative will act as causal pressure for more terrorism in the world.
• It is my understanding that the vast majority of Muslims see violent, radical Islam as a total aberration. (I don’t have any links for this, but it is a busy day: if anyone doubts this or has a link, get in touch or leave a comment and I will clarify.)
• This is very positive thing for the ongoing well being of Muslims, Christians and Americans.
• Under this interpretation, whatever the contribution of deranged ideology to Hasan’s actions (and the psychological pressure he was under must surely have been significant), he was sick man.
• Why does Brooks want to dislodge this narrative, unless he is himself stupid, deranged or wants to see more violence being played out between nation states and their radical discontents.

By all means let us take reality and responsibilities seriously, but can we bring a modicum of intelligence to the process.

The plain fact is that the civil authorities in Geneva, with the support of Calvin, (though there looks to have been some friction between the two), held that it was part of their duty to uphold the Moral Law. It was clear to them that his trial showed that Servetus was guilty of breaking that law. Calvin is hardly vindicated by his plea (which fell on deaf ears) that the offender ought not to burn but to be executed. Servetus’ death is the chillingly consistent outcome of the doctrine of religious intolerance coupled with a readiness to impose capital punishment.

Judged by later standards of greater toleration the Servetus affair is monstrous. From our standpoint condemning Calvin is an easy shot. It might be said that the puzzle was not that the authorities acted consistently, but that they held, with Calvin’s complete support, the views they did in the first place. But in this also they were children of their time. Yet to understand Calvin in the setting of his times is not to excuse him, any more than it is to excuse Jefferson or Rousseau. He is convicted when measured against his own standards. He who held that the natural knowledge of God makes us all inexcusable was surely inexcusable himself in upholding the capital punishment of Servetus in the face of the revealed knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.

The rest of this post contains the comment I left at the Guardian, where I try to probe Paul’s argument.

Calvin [was] a man of considerable intellect, and someone whose considered opinion was that Servetus should be executed, so I can’t be easy with this conclusion that Calvin’s part in his execution was so simplistically contrary to his own understanding of scripture.

It sounds suspiciously like a sentimental defence. You say that ‘the natural knowledge of God makes us all inexcusable’. Fine. We, including Calvin, can all agree on this, but if we are to use this as a basis for civil or Church law then clearly nobody can be punished for anything, and that can’t be right. I really don’t think this has any application in temporal matters.

Capital punishment was only thoroughly abolished in the UK in 1998, and it is still carried on in high-profile Christian countries. The kind of stirring that Servetus engaged in could have very severe consequences, such as the Munster rebellion. To Calvin the mass corruption of people’s faith and destruction of the Church that Servetus was trying to accomplish was the highest crime, for it’s consequences went beyond this life to eternal damnation. Calvin would have known that he would be answerable for his own part in Servetus’s execution, and it seems he wished he weren’t put in the position, but nevertheless felt compelled to act. That he tried to prevent Servetus being burned is I think important, as we don’t see modern judicial executions in the same light as hanging, drawing and quartering.

That is the best defence I can mount. If Calvin was really motivated to protect then the honour of Geneva, then to the extent that that motivation played a part, he should be condemned by his own teachings.

For my part I am a pacifist opposed to the death penalty. But I live in a different time with a different understanding of Moral Law, which I take to be a very worldly beast. In essentials, I would like to think there wasn’t such a great divergence between myself and Calvin. (Oh, I am not even a Christian by the way.)