zenpundit.com

BERGER ON DEMOCRATIC FOREIGN POLICY

To be fair, Samuel Berger seems to have moved to the center-right; in fact, I think these positions are well to the right of what a President Kerry would prefer to do if elected. While heavily qualified the article does have elements of realism that will not please the legions of empty-headed, former Dean supporters who are now looking shyly at Ralph Nader.

FURTHER REFLECTION ON ABU GHRAIB

It strikes me that there are some oddities about the war crimes at Abu Ghraib ( under the Geneva Convention, public humiliation of POWs is not allowed) which makes me wonder if the pictures were not in fact deliberately leaked for the purposes of psychological warfare.

First, the prisoners are all hooded, thus providing their captors with a legal technicality to defend against the charge of war crimes. With identities concealed no particular prisoner can claim to have been held up to being a spectacle. It’s arguable of course but it is congruent with a theoretical legal defense and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s hairsplitting answer on the definition of torture -“My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture.” ( hat tip Juan Cole).

Secondly, the shocking pictures, for all their political fall out, remediate a deficit American forces suffer in a narrow military sense – outside of actual combat engagements, we are not much feared because by and large we do not commit the usual litany of atrocities of an occupying army. More or less if you are a citizen of a medium sized dictatorship it is better to be invaded by the United States Marines than say the Wehrmacht, the Red Army, North Vietnamese regulars or even France or Israel. When the Soviets marched through Eastern Europe to Berlin they brought mass rape and large scale pillage in their wake. Consider Iraqi behavior in Kuwait in 1990, Serbia in Bosnia, Russians in Chechnya – you get the idea. With most occupying armies, families hide their valuables, with American troops they demand subsidies and riot. Even ” tough ” American occupation policies will pale compared to the extreme violence that governments in the region of the Mideast mete out on a daily basis.

The pictures released are ones specifically calculated to spread fear in a traditional Arab society, particularly among those most likely to consider taking up arms against the Americans, young Sunni Arab males influenced by Islamist values. After Abu Ghraib, while enraged initially, a new calculation enters the head of the prospective Iraqi insurgent. ” What if they capture me ? ” It is one thing in such a society to find a glorious death in combat and quite another to appear naked on CNN or al Jazeera, bag on head while female American soldiers jeer and point. The whole affair seems too precisely calculated in a cultural sense for it to be pure chance, normally soldiers who are out of control are far more brutal in terms of physical punishment or torture.

If this pure speculation is even partially accurate it would reveal an occupational force that is compartmentalizing under the stress of the mission and detaching from effective command and control or civilian oversight.

GOOD ADVICE

Nobel prize winner tells the West ” Don’t lend to tyrants “.

HATE-AMERICA SYNDROME, PART II

Ted Rall. Being against attacking the Taliban is a pretty good yardstick to measure the difference between reasoned critic of the invasion of Iraq and a wingnut. Throw in mockery of a veteran killed in action fighting Islamist terrorists and you have an example of a Leftist who may have secretly felt a rush of triumphant excitement when the towers collapsed on 9-11 – perhaps followed by disapppointment when one of the planes crashed in the woods instead of hitting the White House or killing a few thousand more fellow citizens.

Yes, Liberals, these people do exist, they’re on your side and they are pretty damn influential in the Democratic Party ( though some of them may decamp for Nader) – they’re the reason your candidate seems intellectually paralyzed on the issue of Iraq. They’re the primary reason Bush can lurch from disaster to disaster and still be winning the race – voters don’t want anyone with the views of a Ted Rall having the least iota of influence in the middle of a war. When a major party candidate is elected president, that party’s nuts get at least a seat at the table. Ted Rall and the ubiqitous Micheal Moore are examples of the extremist baggage that Kerry has weighing him down in the public mind. Right now, they compose a scarier group than the long -familiar GOP extremists the Democrats have been demonizing since 1992. Kerry either needs to distance himself effectively from the Bush is Hitler crowd or they will drag him down and, after he loses, castigate him as a second Dukakis.

BIBLIOMANIA

This weekend I calmly walked into Border’s with Mrs. Zenpundit with the intention of buying a new road atlas and I left with copies of Zen & the Way of the Sword and Islam and the West…only after forcing myself to put down the Richard Clarke memoir and a book on ” great vehicle ” Buddhism. This is ridiculous ! I’m still reading the Burleigh book and I have at least ten other books in my ” read pile” gathering dust on my nightstand !

As my reading time decreases, my purchases increase. Now I know how Jefferson felt though after surveying the boxes of books piled up in my basement I think his collection was smaller.