Comments on: Captured dictators

By: Dan the Man

Dan the Man — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 06:17:19 +0000

>Crown Prince Abdullah is not some sort of absolute ruler. Uh, who cares? He could simply propose making an alliance with George W Bush and tell anyone who works for his government that if they don’t do as he says and continue giving money to Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda sympathizing groups, or groups promoting Al-Qaeda’s type of religion then he’ll have the US government, the FBI, and the US military after them sending them to Guantanamo Bay. Pretty simple if you just did a little thinking for, oh, 5 seconds right?

By: Dill

Dill — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 02:26:27 +0000

Shorter tomd: I get your point. Now try to get mine. Criticism loses validity and therefore cache with the voter when it has to slither through a tunnel of whining petulance disguised as moral superiority. Did that work for you as a kid? I understand the irritation within the Democratic Party at the kid/adult/grown-up debate, but consider this: for some reason, and my personal opinion is that it might be complicated but I withhold giving you that degree of intellectual evolution without further evidence, the Democratic Party is subject not simply to the abuse and ignomy of being an opposition party but it is suffering from something else – and I am not sure what it is because the focus that could bring back the Party as a robust and viable voice within the domestic landscape is very clear to me. I am not going to repeat them here because I have already abused this site with lengthy postings – but think in terms of economics, if your hands don’t start shaking and you don’t break out into a cold sweat, that is. End sarcasm. Begin Thinking.

By: John

John — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 23:39:56 +0000

Crown Prince Abdullah is the effective head of the Saudi Arabian government. He could stop the Saudi government and people working for the government from giving money to Wahabbism and hence create new recruits for Al-Qaeda. He justs chooses not to. Crown Prince Abdullah is not some sort of absolute ruler. There are constraints on his power, the extent and exact nature of which would probably have to be unclear to any outsider. But certainly, Saudi Arabia is essentially an oligarchy, with the various members of the royal family jointly setting policy, or separately setting policy in their own fiefdoms. The extent to which the Crown Prince is personally able to control the activities of his brothers and nephews is probably quite limited. (Of course, it's possible that the Crown Prince could stop whatever support there is to Al Qaeda, and does not, but assertion is not argument, and there's little reason to think this is the case.)

By: Dill

Dill — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:28:04 +0000

RE: John Wilhoit’s comments on Republican totalitarianism. I would ask that you reconsider your position. My apologies for the length of this post, but it seems to me that emotions are being spun and facts are being sacrificed – to the detriment of all. The United States is not threatened by totalitarian forces from within. This country is experiencing yet another round of shifting public opinion as the ideological dialectic seeks a balanced perspective, which demonstrates yet again the rather astonishing power and flexibility of the institutions of democratic governance bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers. By the end of the 1970’s the American sense of strength and self respect was at a peacetime low. Domestically, Vietnam left gaping wounds that were physical, psychological, institutional, and cultural. The war was a prolonged, wrenching, divisive, and bitter defeat. Economically, inflation threatened to spiral out of control, hitting 12% when Reagan took office in 1980. American businesses were downsizing and restructuring to better compete with the rising Japanese economic power. Internationally the country was being assaulted in embassies and cruise ships. Politically, the country had just emerged from a two-decade long expansion of federal regulatory programs in a what has been labeled the Third Wave of progressive capitalist reform that was largely driven by consumer advocacy groups as new players on the political landscape. The prevailing thought (and there was considerable evidence to support the position that emerged from the FDA alone) was that capitalist markets are not inherently structured to protect the consumer from potentially harmful business practices. In fact, at that time, the inherent conflict between value, morality, and quality of life (so-called ’non-material’) issues versus the pure profit-seeking objectives that drove the economic markets was considered indisputable. Hegel’s Owl of Minerva flew in with the election of Reagan. The violence of the 60’s, the difficult transitions of the Civil Rights movement, the decade of assassinations, the economic weaknesses, the vulnerability to ME resource manipulation, the physical assaults on Americans overseas, and the insecurities of American economic competitiveness all conspired to the rise of New (Evangelical) Right political thought. But this is where history diverges from reality in the usual complex interplay. The New Right believed that America’s public stress fractures were the result of losing the centuries old debate between those who believed in discovering our reality through experience the gathering of empirical evidence as opposed to those who believed that knowledge was an inherent form of value that was divinely inspired and accessible only through God. That was one schism Enter the Libertarian concept of free market economies not subject to the regulatory burden imposed by centralized political bureaucracies. Voila! This explained America’s loss of stature and strength. Too much regulation and too much reliance on rational empiricism to the exclusion of divine faith. The truly interesting part of this particular Hegelian cycle lies on the other side of the aisle with the Democrats who were experiencing philosophical convulsions of their own. The emergence of genocidal communists and fascist states during WWII very clearly demonstrated that Left ‘utopian’ thought for socialized societies was gravely dysfunctional. The replacement thinking has been subsumed under the historical label of ‘post-modernism’ and is generally credited to the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who provided the theoretical basis for the rise of ‘power politics’ among a dispersed group of special interests, each of whom derived political authority from the unique ‘relative’ constraints of their socio-political environments. In other words, the bourgeois class struggle of Marxism was replaced by the power struggle among special interest groups – what today is called Identity Politics. The problem with Identity Politics is the inability to build a unified political voice from the fragmented groups. There is no way to construct a ‘meta-narrative’ that reflects a common interest and therefore, as a political power, Identity Politics lacks cohesion and commonality of purpose. There was no such weakness among Republican thinkers and, IMO, this largely explains the astonishing rise of conservative thought, in general, and New Right thought, in particular. There was a political void screaming to be filled. Three final points. The Democrats are split not only philosophically among the traditional electoral base of labor and ethnic minority groups, but are now split politically between Clinton supporters and Dean supporters. There is some attempt to align this political split with the philosophical split, but it is not at all clear to me that the two divisions are correlated. In fact, I suspect it is not all clear to operatives within the party. Doesn’t matter. Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they no longer speak with a single coherent voice and that they are not capable of effectively resolving internal power struggles. Both of these failures play large on the public stage and I very much that any amount of money from George Soros or anyone else will cure what ails this party at this time – unless money can buy discipline and thought. Secondly, the Republicans have surprisingly and ironically sponsored the development of what I think is an impressive amount of very defensible scholarship to support their political issues. This is in spite of the New Right position in defense of divine knowledge at the expense of rational empiricism. My personal opinion is that the so-called New Right is not as powerful as the alarmists might think simply because a commitment to reason and rationality is not as easy to dismiss as the more extreme among us might wish. I believe the more rational members of the Republican Party have re-established a very solid empirical foundation for public policy and decision-making that is in stark contrast to the faith-based epistemology of their far right brethren. And finally, the rather astonishing failures of corporate governance, coupled with the exposure of deep levels of corruption within the trading and mutual fund markets, suggests to me that the strength of so-called ‘faith-based’ initiatives within the economic sector is rather shallow, if not non-existent. The dynamic energy of business will not tolerate the constraints of any pseudo-philosophical commitment to ‘divine’ direction. It is a consistent and universal truism in history that extremism contains the seeds of its own demise. We are constantly in a state of rebalancing ourselves. In the meantime, the Democrats will attempt to make peace between the Clinton-Dean people in an exercise that will be of little consequence to the American people. None of this is even close to any form of totalitarianism. This is an active demonstration of democracy – American style – in action. When the Democrats accuse the Bush administration of foolish jingoism on the world stage by taking cheap shots about the blood that is on everyone’s hands, I can only thank God (privately of course) that this administration had the intelligence and the courage to attempt to clean up an ugly cesspool of a situation – one that threatened the security of American citizens and the sovereignty of the American State. To use America’s imperfect past as an excuse for inaction in the face of preserving a dangerous status quo is to my mind an ultimate folly. It is true – moral arguments tend to try the patience of anyone who is old enough to drive, but practical arguments about security and quality of life under institutions that overtly value and defend freedom are received with enthusiasm by people who are old enough to remember.

By: TomD

TomD — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:03:14 +0000

Shorter dill: Democrats are an opposition party. I don’t trust the opposition party because they spend all their time knocking the administration and no time making decisions about the future of the country. I trust the Republican party because they are in power and make decisions. Hey, they may not always be the right decisions, but it shows they are Capable Of Making Decisions. Therefore the Republicans should continue to control all branches of government indefinitely until the Democrats have grown up sufficiently so as to never criticise them. In the real world, opposition parties adapt to being in government and making decisions pretty quickly.

By: Dill

Dill — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 04:44:14 +0000

A critical observation like that made by Atrios is technically correct, but where does it leave us at the end of the day – or the end of the war? This question goes directly to the heart of my disillusionment with Democratic thought. There is no doubt in my mind that the moral high ground over this war was viciously sought by both Democrats and Republicans. But it seems to me that the Democrats had the easier path because, given the lack of innocence in the modern world, there was no course of action that would have been immune to charges of moral deficiency. The Republican administration chose the more difficult path in deciding to actively do something in spite of the fact that this country lacks a history of perfect behavior in the global community (which itself often does, but shouldn’t, negate the commitment, strength, sacrifice, and endurance during WWII that helped to save an entire planet from who knows how many wasted generations languishing under the Left ‘utopia‘ of communism.) I am one of those who believe the chosen option was ’bold’ and it was obviously soundly criticized. I hesitate to speculate why this is, but the modern Democrat is moving toward a politics of rhetoric that is very distinct from the traditional embrace of activism. The endless volley of vituperative criticism leveled at the Bush administration is but one example of this rhetoric. It is enough to make one question the ability of the Democratic Party to engage in anything but rhetoric, which is an important concern when citizen security and state sovereignty are threatened. This is not bombast. This is an important issue when a group of people are charged with having the judgment and the wisdom to make crucial decisions on behalf of the country. I have serious doubts about the ability of Democrats to engage in such decision-making without languishing forever in a debate about morally superior alternatives, not to mention the vulnerable intellectual positions to be derived from accommodation of relative values over absolute beliefs. Democrats will have to do much more than nibble at the periphery of difficult issues if they ever hope to participate in political leadership.

By: Atrios

Atrios — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 01:55:40 +0000

well, I’m a bit late to this thread but for the record I was thinking of Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan. The “who is the badder baddy” calculus is always problematic, and SA and Eritrea in particular don’t have one specific mustachioed figurehead to pin everything on, but the human rights records of those countries are abysmal. Was Saddam “worse?” Perhaps, but the point I was trying to make wasn’t that saddam ain’t so bad, it’s that the whole “moral clarity” argument is rather specious when not only are we not toppling every bad guy (a poor argument), but we pointlessly sign them on to a silly “coalition of the willing” just so we can claim a bunch of countries are behind us. So, we have ethnic cleansers and people boilers who have contributed essentially nothing on a list to make us “look good.” Rather odd.

By: anti

anti — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:38:05 +0000

Sure Saddam was evil and it’s wonderful to see him captured, but it’s hardly logical to say, as so many do, that because Saddam was evil therefore the USA is virtuous. Bombing, sanctions and the most draconian war reparations the world has ever seen combined to increase child and maternal mortality in Iraq to a point where an estimated 500,000 extra children died. All courtesy of the USA. Check out harpers.org if you want to read about it. And sure, the US had no problems with Saddam using chemical weapons against the Kurds who were joining Iran in the fight against Iraq. Any more than it had any problems with the extensive killing of Mayan villagers by the Guatemalan military, and so on with various unpleasant regimes with which it was expedient for the US to be allied. The US is just another ruthless self-interested great power, no worse than any other ruthless great power. It’s the claim to moral suoperiority and overwhelming goodness that’s really irritating.

By: CGB Spender

CGB Spender — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 21:03:34 +0000

I suppose the US government’s experiments in gassing its own people (as well as injecting plutonium or researching mind control on unwilling subjects) during the Cold War won’t count since it was done by largely faceless bureaucrats who have never been brought to account. Too banal for us red-meat Americans, and besides it happened a long time ago so who cares? And nobody mention the American Indian genocide please, even if biological warfare was used, since they weren’t/aren’t citizens so they don’t count either.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:11:41 +0000

Pakistan is a pretty tricky situation, considering the country possesses nuclear weapons and still engages in a long-running conflict with India. Given that the US turned a blind eye towards nuclear weapons acquisition until they didn’t need ISI in Afghanistan anymore, before they whipped out the Pressler Amendment; I feel less than charitable about this. Uzbekistan could be on the list. Ahem, could be ?! My point is that it is a very good thing that we are coddling fewer dictators now under the Bush administration than at any point in recent American history. Hoo-ray! Celebrations are a bit premature here I think; from what I can determine the US policy towards regions where it has traditionally backed strongmen – the Middle East and Latin America, has not changed all that much. In so far as democratisation has proceeded in these places, I am unaware that it has been the direct result of Bush II admin’s policy; the sole possible exceptions are Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither of which look all that promising at the moment. Of course, why should this matter, is beyond me. Nations are meant to look after their own interests first and everything else second; promoting democracy is a good soundbite but you have to insane to base a substantial part of your foreign policy on directly creating democratic regimes in other states through force.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 18:11:05 +0000

The good news is that the USA coddles fewer dictators now, and to a lesser degree, than at any point in time since WWII. Sure, we may still coddle Saudi Arabia and Egypt by giving them money. But if anything, the Bush administration has distanced itself from the leaders of both of those nations. No more troops in Saudi Arabia. A lot less public pillow talk. Who else is there? Uzbekistan could be on the list. Maybe some of the other small ex-Soviet states. Not Azerbaijan. Pakistan is a pretty tricky situation, considering the country possesses nuclear weapons and still engages in a long-running conflict with India. It’s dicey. My point is that it is a very good thing that we are coddling fewer dictators now under the Bush administration than at any point in recent American history. Hoo-ray!

By: DEE

DEE — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:32:25 +0000

ok. now that saddam has been captured the troops are able to come back home. but what about bidladen? that’s the only question i have!

By: TomD

TomD — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:20:47 +0000

If you’re going to take a “number-of-people-killed” metric for Being a Bad Man, then Field Marshal Montgomery, Truman and Kissinger come pretty high up. Arguing about numbers of deaths doesn’t make any sense here. A More Bad Man than Saddam may have a few, or one, or zero, gruesome murders to his name. This is actually a deep question in moral philosophy: are Bad People Bad only because, and insofar as, they do Bad Things, or do they have an intrinsic Badness that goes beyond and exists independently of their actions? So, any supposedly objective statement about individuals who do Bad Things, “X is more Bad than Y”, turns out to be rather vague and meaningless. It’s pointless to spend time and effort arguing as if such statements had an exact meaning.

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:19:40 +0000

I think that ‘son of a bitch’ line was actually uttered by FDR about Somosa (sp?); I guess George Snr could have been quoting him… As for the Jalaba attacks, while I agree that the reason they keep getting dragged up is almost wholly for their emotive effect, it’s worth bearing in mind that back in 1988 the US government claimed that Iran was actually responsible. They have since claimed that that was a mistake (i.e. a lie), but it’s curious that Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the 1980s, came out this year and said that he still believed that Iran had been to blame for this.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 07:40:34 +0000

You know the “fact” that Saddam gassed his own people is just that – thrown around as a fact. But – I think I distinctly remember this “fact” being in dispute by the CIA among others. I don’t know if this (gassing his own people) has ever been proven beyond a doubt. If so I please let me know. Interesting note to today was that when this was brought up to Hussein by Chalabi et al, he denied it and said it was the work of Iran. I am only arguing the point of the fact here – this is in no way meant to exonerate him for anything, I would just like to know what the real story is. Samantha Power’s book “A Problem From Hell” which looks at case studies of several 20th century genocides and reactions to it has a good survey of the detail on this. I think Dilip Hiro in “Iraq: the Eye of the Storm” has a good analysis of the Halabja incident; to summarise things, while the bulk of evidence at the time supported the fact that as part of the Anfal programme against the Kurdish population of the north, chemical gas was being used; since Iraq was deemed to be a crucial ally in keeping Iran in check; the American response was first to deny initial reports and then to insist that it was being perpetrated by the Iranians only reluctantly to admit the truth officially a year or so after the fact. There was a concerted lobbying attempt on Capitol Hill headed up by the long-time supporter of the Kurds Peter Gailbraith and the Pelm-Helms Bill would have introduced sanctions against Iraq by activating the Genocide Convention; which was torpedoed in Congress. Indicative of how hard it is to take action, even when there is clear evidence that an atrocity is being committed. The confusion over the Halabja incident has occurred because in that particular case the chemical gas attack was targeted against Iranian forces and Kurdish paramilitaries who were thought to have occupied the area, but who had in reality evacuated the bulk of their forces from the town unknown to the Iraqi forces who went ahead with the chemical assault. I think there were at least 200 confirmed episodes of the use of gas, many of them at military targets but not all; in anycase the Iraqi army showed a complete and utter disregard for any Kurdish civilians that were caught in such attacks and some aerial tabun and mustard gas bombardments were used to depopulate select villages/towns to deprive them of offering any shelter to enemy peshmerga and Iranian troops. The main reason that gassing examples are used is just for visceral effect and to provoke analogies with the Nazi genocides in my opinion; no such references are really needed as the bulk of civilian Kurds killed in the Anfal programme were from the rural population and were deemed less vulnerable to gassing owing to their dispersed settlement. They were simply rounded up and shot (another classic genocidal policy; as it should be remembered that Nazis along with mass gassing favoured mass shooting as the next instrument of policy). It was somewhat after this that I believe George Bush the elder said of SH “he might be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch”. Either way, I don’t think there is any doubt that SH’s policy at the time basically involved a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish civilian population. I should also add that I don’t think that SH ever really thought of the Kurds as “his people” at all or even really as proper Iraqis. Machtpolitk dominated the day; as he was more than willing to co-operate with the Kurdish nationalists in the KDP or the PUK when it suited them and him. This doesn’t say much about the current leadership of the Kurdish nationalists either but I suppose nobody is perfect.