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THE RETARDED MORAL CALCULUS OF RICHARD DURBIN [ UPDATED]

My senior Senator will never be regarded by history as another Daniel Webster or Arthur Vandenberg but even for Dick Durbin it is not every day that he manages to insult American veterans, Holocaust survivors and victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide. Quite a rhetorical trifecta !

The other day, from the Senate floor, in the midst of an overheated attack on the Bush administration’s parameters for interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, Durbin let fly with this ahistorical gem:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners”

Now, reasonable people can disagree about whether or not al Qaida detainees should be entitled to P.O.W. status under the Geneva Convention – those who think they should, like Senator Durbin, don’t have a legal leg to stand on – but the argument can be made. Likewise, the Bush administration has invited criticism of their Guantanamo policy by keeping detainees in legal limbo instead of moving forward with military tribunals. It is perfectly legitimate to argue that the value of what tough interrogation techniques yield pales in terms the damage caused to America’s image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world. But the al Qaida terrorist detainees are not the moral equivalent of terrified Jews being herded to Auschwitz and the American guards at Guantanamo are not the SS.

That kind of analogy, that Senator Durbin fervently believes, can only be described as morally grotesque as well as profoundly ignorant. A U.S. Senator should have more sense.

Mr. Durbin has degraded the suffering of those who went through hell on Earth to survive Genocide by putting their experiences on par with the interrogation discomforts of mass-murderers like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It is the latter who is in the same moral ballpark with Heinrich Himmler or Pol Pot, not some Marine Guard at Gitmo or President Bush.

If somebody in the USG happens to be reading this blog, please forward this post to Senator Durbin’s office with the suggestion that he take a break from his partisan duties and visit the nearby United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for a few hours to find out what the victims of Nazism really went through.

Hopefully the good Senator might then think twice in the future about the nature of his historical analogies.

UPDATE I: Jeff at Caerdroia weighs in on Durbin ( Jeff is a former, temporary, Chicagoan)

UPDATE II: Idiotic commentary at DailyKos on same ( Hat tip Jeff)

UPDATE III: Senator Durbin starts his backtracking

UPDATE IV: The Captain’s Quarters blasts Durbin for attempting to spin:

“This, of course, is the classic example of the non-apology apology. Note that he doesn’t retract a word of what he said. He says that he regrets if others misunderstood his “true feelings”, not that what he said was wrong and historically inept. Basically, this is the translation one is meant to hear:

I’m sorry you were too stupid to understand me.

If this is the best that Durbin can do after comparing the men and women of our armed forces to Nazis and Stalin’s goons, as well as comparing Islamofascist terrorists to Japanese-American victims of WWII detention centers, then he’s a bigger idiot than I thought.”

Agreed.

PRESIDENT BUSH AND VIETNAM

No, this is not a post about the Texas Air National Guard or the how the Vietnam War continues to haunt the national political psyche but of democracy and our national interests.

Bruce Kesler, a columnist for the Augusta-Free Press alerted me to the underreported fact that Phan Van Khai, the Prime Minister of Vietnam, will be visiting the United States and meeting with President Bush– a key step in an increasingly warm relationship between Washington and Hanoi. The Prime Minister does not come empty-handed but instead brings with him a jet deal for Boeing that will net the corporation a cool half billion dollars

It is easy to see why Vietnam would want to pursue closer ties with its former foe, the United States. Despite a rising trade with America worth $ 6 billion, Vietnam is only a stone’s throw from becoming a mendicant nation, hobbled by a socialist economy and the costs of oppressing their own people and Vietnam’s two, even poorer, Indochinese satellites. The Soviet-made equipment of the Vietnamese military is outdated and growing older even as Hanoi nervously watches China’s rising wealth and armed might. Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, Ho Chi Minh’s Leninist revolution is looking more like the senile Communism of Konstantin Chernenko.

What is harder to see is what Vietnam has to offer the Bush administration, whose good graces it needs to win in order to get into the WTO and for a strategic hedge against Chinese hegemony. Granted, Vietnam has nice beaches, a cheap and docile work force and a potentially good naval base but if really we need a neo-Stalinist dictatorship for that, well, Cuba is about 11,900 miles closer.

Freedom House rates the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as one of the world’s worst regimes – up there with such cannibalistic luminaries as North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Burma,Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe. Foreign Policy magazine has just classified Vietnam as a ” borderline” failed state ( print article is not yet online). The U.S. Department of State details a human rights record for Vietnam that looks positive only in comparison with democidal regimes like North Korea or the Sudan. Human Rights Watch reports on significant persecution of the Montagnards , a mountain tribe once allied with the United States and the repression of religious believers of all stripes is exceeded only by that directed toward political dissent. Vietnam has little to sell the United States and its rulers are little better than an odious cabal of ideological gangsters who stay in power by the same methods used by Saddam Hussein.

Am I arguing for a policy of non-intercourse ? No, I’m arguing that the United States has the strongest possible hand to attach a human rights price tag to the goodies of connectivity that Hanoi desperately needs. President Bush should raise his voice on democracy and liberty with at least as much emphasis to Van Khai as he did to Vladmir Putin. After all, we actually need decent relations with Russia to further American security but Vietnam is so strategically unimportant that if it slid into the South China Sea it might be a good month before the American media even noticed.

The cookies given out to Vietnam by the administration and the U.S. Congress should be meaningful and should be given promptly – after Vietnam demonstrates concessions. To use a Kissingerian term, there should be ” linkage” between rewards and behavior. We don’t need them, they need us and the squealing of Fortune 500 American corporations whose lobbyists will be ( or are) clogging the halls of Congress in opposition will be a good sign that U.S. policy is on the right moral track.

Right now, there are men and women in camps and clammy cells in Hanoi who have committed no crime as we reckon it and who are – like the Zeks of the former Soviet Gulag once were – without any hope. President Bush needs to speak for them by telling Vietnam’s rulers that their admission price to the circle of civilized nations is walking away from the practices of barbarism.

RECOMMENDED READING

For the computer literate and webmaster types out there, Stuart Berman has had his IT security piece ” Death of a Firewall” published in Network Magazine. Stu offers advice on securing your internal networks in an increasingly wireless world. Congrats on being published Stu !

Dan of tdaxp is at peace in a Sea of Friction and brings our discussion to a harmonious end.

Simon World and Pundita have been playing the China card, starting with Pundita’s post ” Ducking Reality” and moving through several others that Simon examines, much to the dismay of some leftist with cliches named Tom. Pundita ignores Tom’s gibberish and goes on to connect China and the question of democracy from a system theory perspective.

Bruce Kesler continues his critical examination of the MSM bias in his Augusta Free Press op-ed piece ” Liberal ? Conservative ? How about journalism standards ?”

The insight and creativity stimulating possibilities of cross-disciplinary learning are explained in a link-rich post by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide at their Neurolearning Blog.

NuSapiens speculates that modern societies give Sociopaths a Darwinian advantage.

FINAL NOTE: CKR and I will post our First Rebuttals on History and Spreading Democracy on Friday.

HISTORY AND SPREADING DEMOCRACY: A DEBATE PART II

This post represents Part II of my initial post in the debate with CKR of Whirledview. Her first post can be found here. Now to continue the debate:

Part II: History and Contemporary Foreign Policy

To recap from the introduction, the Bush administration is redefining and reinvigorating the policy of Democracy promotion in the GWOT and while their reliance on history as a guide to policy leaves much to be desired, they are also well ahead of previous administrations in that regard. History could be be used a great deal more than it is in the American national security decision making process but that would require a considerable shift in the general philosophy of personnel selection that have prevailed in recent decades.

Much has been written about the influence of certain scholars on the Bush administration, notably that of Bernard Lewis, Donald Kagan and the late Leo Strauss. The extent of their influence on Bush administration policy has often been greatly exaggerated by the Left – not unlike conservatives once did with economists John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith – but their influence was, in my view, quite real in helping to frame a worldview in which administration figures dealt with strategic policy questions. Lewis, one of the world’s premier Arabist scholars and the bete noire of Edward Said, was brought in to brief key administration figures prior to the Iraq War.

That admittedly represents an unprecedented amount of influence for historians* compared to recent administrations in forming foreign policy but in the final analysis, still not very much influence and not nearly enough at the operational level when the rubber hit the road in Iraq. None of the scholars actually held official positions in the Bush administration ( Strauss, of course, is dead) and those they deemed to have most influenced, like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were second tier or lower level policy makers – Perle’s position was part-time and only advisory. At the top tier, only Condi Rice can make some claim to historical training, though her academic specialty is Area Studies for the former USSR, a field that makes her closer to being a political scientist by methdological outlook than a historian.

The occupation of Iraq went astray primarily because field commanders and CPA administrators did not have a linguistic, cultural or historical grasp of either the Iraqi state or Arab Muslims. A criticism that Colonel Thomas X. Hammes makes as a primary call to reform the training of the officer corps in his The Sling and the Stone, arguing that history and languages must become the bedrock of academic preparation for commanders. In he field in Iraq, in response to the insurgency Colonel H.R. McMaster began an Arabic language and culture training course for his troops engaged in counterinsurgency and civil affairs operations. This is remediation though and not proper planning using readily available historical knowledge.

Nor is this at all unusual for American administrations. You can reach the top tier of the State Department, CIA, NSC, or Pentagon simply by an ad hoc, learn as you go, approach to regions of the world that your desk or command have responsibility for overseeing. During WWII, the United States had few experts on Japanese language and culture outside of Joseph Grew, who had to fight to make his views heard in official Washington. It was somewhat better on the German side but not much – the OSS psychological profile of Adolf Hitler owed far more to Freud than it did to any body of experts on German history and culture.

When we faced the Cold War, George Kennan’s Long Telegram had an enormous impact partly because much of the bureaucracy was simply ignorant of all things Russian and Soviet and had no answers with which to contest Kennan’s analysis. I need not even expound on the lack of informed views regarding Vietnam that prevailed from Harry Truman to Gerald Ford. America makes foreign policy in a historical vacuum, the execution of the Iraq War has merely continued that tradition.

Historians, as a group, share some of the blame. Absorbtion in the esoterica of rad-crit political fetishes, an adversarial posture toward American foreign policy by large segments of the OAH and AHA, fascination with incomprehensible jargon and a a professional aversion to generalist training have caused historians to vanish from the table of public policy. The profession is in serious danger of irrelevancy at a time when the public demand for informed historical expertise is at its highest point in decades.

Clearly things must change if policy making is to improve. Foreign Service and Military officers alike need to have a deep grounding in linguistic and historical training. No, not all of them – we need engineers, scientists, economists and other solid professions at the table as well – but the lack of historical perspective makes policy makers far more prone to serious misjudgments. Universities need to retreat from academic ghetto mentalities and begin to again educate horizontal thinking students of history and not excessively narrow niche specialists who can speak intelligibly only on subjects without any broad application.

To begin to think historically, America must begin some systemic reforms in the national security and educational communities. The problem isn’t our outcomes but the nature of the pipeline itself.

* Leo Strauss was not a historian but a political philosopher much concerned with the interpretation of classic philosophical and historical texts. Paul Wolfowitz was one of his students.

HISTORY AND SPREADING DEMOCRACY: A DEBATE

The Daily Demarche issued a challenge recently for conservative bloggers to engage their liberal counterparts on the great question of advancing democracy. The first to do so were Marc Schulman of The American Future and Eric Martin of Total Information Awareness. Their debate set a high standard in terms of eloquence, reasoning and civility that all future participants should aspire to match.

CKR of Whirledview has graciously agreed to discuss the following question:

“How the use of history has shaped or should shape the role which the United States should play in the spread of global democracy to oppressed or less developed nations.”

CKR’s post can be found here.

Editorial Note to the Reader: Circumstances of a technical nature have forced me to post this essay in two parts but each part represents for the purposes of this debate, only a single post and a continuous thread of argument. Part II will be up shortly and I may possibly re-edit/re-post to combine them into a single smooth entry for archival purposes once CKR has digested them and finished her response.

With that, let the debate begin:

History and Promoting Global Democracy

If we examine how the use of history has shaped or should shape the role which the United States should play in the spread of global democracy to oppressed or less developed nations, we should look first to America’s legacy in that regard and then to how Bush administration policy falls within that tradition. While the road to spreading democracy has been an uneven one for American policy makers, filled with detours, bumps and the occasional dead-end, it is also a long road representing arguably one of the best aspects of American foreign policy.

The Bush administration is redefining and reinvigorating that policy in the GWOT and while their reliance on history as a guide to policy leaves much to be desired, they are also well ahead of previous administrations in that regard. History could be be used a great deal more than it is in the American national security decision making process but that would require a considerable shift in the general philosophy of personnel selection that have prevailed in recent decades.

Part I. Lessons in Spreading Democracy:

Initially, the Founding Fathers, cognizant of the weaknesses and potential internal division of the young American Republic, sought a role of studied neutrality in world affairs. The United States would spread democracy not by force of arms but by becoming an example for the rest of the world to follow. Neither in the case of war with the Barbary states or in the republican revolutions of Santo Domingo and in South America did Washington take an active hand in spreading democracy, though words of encouragement and protection were eventually offered in the form of the Monroe Doctrine to the Southern republics, this was primarily a paper exercise.

Practically speaking, spreading democracy was a policy born not of ideology but of the necessity of war. Prior to the Iraq War, the United States government made its greatest efforts to spread democratic governance with the conquered American South during Reconstruction and Germany and Japan in the twentieth century.

The first attempt at democratization through conquest and occupation by the United States Army was in the Deep South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The period of Reconstruction has been thoroughly mythologized in the popular mind by Southern Lost Cause reactionaries and academic Marxists. The resulting composite view tends to be a cartoonish depiction of rapacious Northern capitalists brutalizing Southerners in a fetid orgy of political corruption with little or no thought to the fate of the former slaves. In reality, Radical Republican leaders like Thaddeus Stevens sought far-reaching democratic reforms in the South to integrate Freedmen as full citizens. If they erred it was not in treating the former Confederate states as ” conquered provinces” but in being unduly gentle with recalcitrant ex-rebel terrorists.

In Louisiana, for example the Military Reconstruction Act, which barred disloyal ex-Confederate planters from office, resulted in a state legislature with a black majority that had remarkable achievements to its credit.. Led by P.B.S. Pinchback, a wealthy African-American businessman, the state legislature passed a new constitution, established public school systems and the integration of public facilities. Had the North stayed the course of Reconstruction for several generations, the history of race relations in America might have been markedly different. However, failure of will led Northern leaders to allow the undermining of Reconstruction governments by a lack of response to White League terrorism. There were over 700 cases of assassination and political murder in 1868 in Louisiana alone . The de facto abandonment of individual Republican officeholders and voters in the South to campaign of intimidation and violence smoothed the path for the de jure end of Reconstruction in 1877.

President Hayes removed the last Union troops from the Southern States as part of the Compromise of 1877 that gave him the presidency. This freed ex-Confederate Democrats to reestablish their one-party regional authoritarianism based on white supremacy and backed by the threat of mob violence that would target anyone, white or black, who challenged the new status quo.. Moving quickly to establish legal racial segregation the Democratic Party prevented the emergence of real democracy in the South for almost eighty years, incidentally condemning the region to economic backwardness as well.

Turning toward Germany and Japan, democracy is the child of two world wars. In reaction to Wilson’s Fourteen Points and fearing foreign occupation at the end of World War I, German Social Democrats supported by the Army jettisoned the authoritarian political system of the Wilhelmine empire. The Weimar Republic they created was one of the most liberal democracies in Europe, more so than several of the victors of W.W. I. But Weimar was also extremely fragile, containing large numbers of voters indifferent or hostile to democratic values. Nevertheless, based on the electoral strength of the Social Democrats, a free press and a general war weariness among the German populace, a solid democracy might have taken root had Wilson been able to sustain the policy of American engagement in Europe.

Democracy failed in Weimar for a number of reasons, not least the attitude of the Germans themselves but foreign affairs played a very significant role. The actions of the British and the French undercut and discredited democratic leaders in Germany and associated democracy with defeat and humiliation in segments of the German public. Burdensome reparations payments, the war-guilt clause, the reoccupation of the Ruhr, French encouragement of Bavarian separatism all chipped away at the stature of the national government in Berlin and provided recruits for the extremist Communist and Nazi parties. It is no accident that Weimar Germany’s most successful period coincided with the implementation of the Dawes Plan, which stabilized the European economy and helped settle the balance of payments problem. Perhaps had America been a steady counterbalance to punitive French policies, Germany might have been integrated into a democratic Europe decades earlier, saving us from World War II entirely. Weimar leaders might have had the will and popular support to face down Brown shirt and Communist armies of street toughs warring in the streets during the Depression.

In reconstructing Europe and Japan after the war the Roosevelt and Truman administrations acted decisively to avoid past mistakes. Economic integration and freer trade began with Cordell Hull’s tariff reduction policies and the Atlantic Charter agreement, later followed by Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the Marshall Plan and political support for Jean Monnet’s European Coal and Steel Community. Soviet plans for ” deindustrialization ” of Germany pushed directly by Stalin or indirectly by the “Morgenthau Plan” of Soviet agent Harry Dexter White, were rejected by President Truman.

Nor was there much romanticism about Allied occupation authorities being required to implement democracy instantly in Germany, Italy and Japan. Fascist totalitarian parties were prohibited outright in all three states and war crimes trials punished Nazi and Japanese leaders followed by Denazification proceeding, however unevenly implemented, for smaller fry. American leaders excluded the Soviets completely from any meaningful role in Italy or Japan, hampering NKVD support for local Communist cadres and the US secretly funded broad, centrist democratic parties to strentghen the electoral alternative to Stalin’s robotic followers. In Japan, SCAP essentially rewrote Japan’s Constitution when the Japanese elite proved incapapable and implemented wide-ranging economic reforms to break up Zaibatsu cartels.

While not entirely ” fair ” to local Communists in the abstract sense, American policy makers realistically took into account that Stalin’s followers were not committed to building democracies but to undermining them. American occupation policies set limits upon local politics until, by 1955, democratic values were strong enough among German and Japanese voters to weather extremist challenges. Germany, Italy and Japan proved to be successful test cases in spreading democracy by bayonet primarily because the investment in resources and political will was equal to the challenge. As one participant in SCAP recently wrote about Iraq:

“In short, regime change, if it is to be more than a meaningless rallying cry, is an extremely complicated process and not for the faint-hearted. Even a domestically inspired revolution, which is a different kind of regime change, is not simple. Those who undertake it as foreign occupiers must be aware of unanticipated consequences, major gaps in knowledge and the likelihood that their efforts might end up being in vain, regardless of the high-minded aspirations with which they began. Moreover, changes in American and its coalition partners’ domestic politics and the international or regional environment can be expected to influence adversely initial expectations and goals. Caution is crucial.”

Spreading democracy is not only possible, it is from the example of Germany and Japan, highly desirable but the requirements to succeed are tough. Corners cannot be cut.

End Part I.