World Politics

If we’re looking for good news from the Islamic world, as most of us are, can I suggest that the best place to look just now is right next door (to Australia, that is) in Indonesia[1]. The Indonesian government has just signed a peace agreement with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). There’s plenty more to be done, and such agreements have failed before, but the chances this time look better than ever, as GAM has finally abandoned its demand for independence and the central government seems willing, for the first time, to concede real autonomy.
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Chris’s post on responsibility got me started on what I plan to be the final instalment of my attempts to analyse the ethical justification for war. It’s not quite Holbovian in scale, but quite long enough. Comments much appreciated.
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It is always a mistake to pick fights with people when you are about to be away from a computer and so will be unable to take part in further iterations of the argument. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the position I find myself in with respect to “a post from Norman Geras and Eve Garrard”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/bertrams_quibbl.html responding to “my attribution to them”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/ of the view that only the immediate perpetrators of bad deeds can be blamed for those deeds. They deny that they hold the view I pinned on them, and say that I should have seen that if I’d read more carefully. I’m happy to receive the correction.

Now comes the “but” bit ….

Nevertheless, my belief that they hold a view like that was not based only on that single post but on many others, especially concerning Iraq. In particular, Norman has often argued against the view that Bush and Blair should be held responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq, stressing, rather, that the immediate perpetrators of (most of) that carnage, the Iraqi “resistance” should be blamed and that Bush and Blair should not be. Norman and Eve’s latest post quotes an interesting earlier paragraph in this respect, which counts — as they insist — against my attribution.

bq. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it.

There is, I think, doublethink going on here. Norman wants to tell us that the Iraq war was justified because of the many bad things Saddam did and would continue to do to his people if he remained in power. Critics of the war (like me) want to say that we should also take account of the bad consequences of overthrowing Saddam, including the carnage caused by the “resistance”, the many many thousands of excess dead (see the Lancet report …), etc. Norman and Eve’s restrictive clause enables them to argue that, even if things are actually worse, their worseness can’t be blamed on the initiators of the war, because their actions were not in themselves wrong (because justified by stopping Saddam) and don’t serve to justify the Iraqi “resistance” (agreed, they don’t). In other words, Norman helps himself to an essentially consequentialist justification for the Iraq war, but, faced with bad consequences, uses a non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility to filter them out of the consequentialist calculus. At least, that’s what seems to me to be going on.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of the garbage that appears on TechCentralStation. Nevertheless, the shameless gall of some of their writers continues to astonish. One of their latest offerings is “My Grandfather and the Gulag”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/062405.html by Ariel Cohen, which – surprise, surprise – is an attack on Amnesty and Senator Durbin for the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison. Cohen’s article can stand as an exemplar of a whole genre of Amnesty-bashing that has been flourishing recently. Since the whole point of the piece is to insist on the virtues of truth and accuracy and to rubbish Amnesty and Durbin for the alleged betrayal of those standards, one might expect Cohen to exhibit at least a minimal level of concern for the correctness of his own claims. But such expectations would be misplaced.

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Around a million dollars donated in the wake of the Tsunami is being “stolen by the government of Sri Lanka”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4103054.stm , reports the BBC:

bq. British charity Oxfam has had to pay the Sri Lankan government $1m in import duty for vehicles used in tsunami reconstruction work.

bq. Paperwork had kept the 25 four-wheel drive vehicles idle in the capital, Colombo, for a month.

bq. The Sri Lankan government told the BBC News website the aid had been duty-free until the end of April but was now needed to prevent “market distortions”.

In “the discussion below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/14/if-youre-a-libertarian-how-come-youre-so-mean/ about charitable giving, foreign aid and so on, I mentioned the figure of 1 per cent of GDP or of first-world person’s income as being enough to make a real difference to third-world poverty. I got that figure from a footnote referencing the Liam Murphy paper, somewhere in Thomas Pogge’s excellent “World Poverty and Human Rights”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745629954/junius-20 . Whether that’s actually the right figure I don’t know. But anyway, today I came across the new “Pledgebank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ site. As “Chris Lightfoot”:http://ex-parrot.com/%7Echris/wwwitter/20050613-me_help_you_help_them.html writes:

bq. PledgeBank is designed to solve what I’m told are called `collective action problems’ — things that you want to do, but can only get done if enough other people will help. Why go out on a limb and say you’ll do something difficult or expensive or embarrassing if you don’t know whether enough other people will turn up to make it worthwhile? Anyway, PledgeBank is designed to help you get around that problem by letting people sign up to say they’ll take part, and telling you when enough people have done so for your plan to succeed.

One of the “pledges is from Nicola”:http://www.pledgebank.com/justonepercent and it has this content:

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

To make the link to third-world poverty, the charity would have to be an appropriate one (such as Oxfam, perhaps), but that’s up to individual pledgers.

From “yesterday’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1506976,00.html :

bq. Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.

bq. The American company is helping censors remove “freedom” and “democracy” from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

bq. The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of “human rights”, are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.

bq. Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: “This topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them.”

At Samizdata the other day, “Natalie Solent wrote”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007640.html :

bq. In Milton and Rose Friedman’s “Free to Choose”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156334607/junius-20 it says:

bq.

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.

bq. I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?

Later in comments to the same post she adds:

bq. They could do both: go to Edinburgh and give their spare money away. That’s all their money above what is required for subsistence, of course, because by their own account the Third World is poor because they are rich and money transfer is the way to correct that situation.

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Harry’s piece on Christopher Hitchens prompted me to collect some thoughts about him. I briefly reviewed Letters to a Young Contrarian a few years ago (along with Lilla’s “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics) and found plenty both to like (the gadfly’s unwillingness to accept evasions and easy answers) and to dislike (the tendency to vendetta, epitomised by his campaign against Clinton).

That was when he was still on the Left. Having signed up with Bush, Hitchens has found his talent for vendetta in high demand, but the Bushies aren’t too keen on hard truths. So we get pieces like this one on the Bush Administration’s backing for the Uzbekistan dictator Karimov, notable for the observation

The United States did not invent or impose the Karimov government: It “merely” accepted its offer of strategic and tactical help in the matter of Afghanistan

This phraseology is, or ought to be, familiar – it’s virtually identical to rhetoric defending or downplaying the Reagan Administration’s embrace (metaphorical and, in Rumsfeld’s case, literal) of Saddam during the 1980s, when his foreign wars and internal oppression killed vast numbers of people (Google “US did not create Saddam” or “Did not install Saddam” for examples)[1].
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The NYT has survivors’ accounts of the massacre in Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, on last night’s ABC News[1], I saw the commander of the US base in Uzbekistan interviewed. He said something like “The host country military are doing a wonderful job protecting the base and we have had no trouble from the disturbances”. That’s the same host country military that was murdering hundreds of its own people a few days earlier. I can’t find a link to this on Google news, so I’d be grateful to anyone who can point me to a transcript.

Bush’s friendly relations with the Uzbek dictator Karimov have been unshaken by this, and any stated opposition to Karimov’s use of torture and murder is meaningless: it’s an open secret that a good deal of it is being done on behalf of the Administration, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition.

The blogospheric right has mostly been either silent or supportive, along with much of the pro-war left. But some cracks are emerging. Here’s a piece by Stephen Schwartz and William Kristol from the Weekly Standard. And on the pro-war left, there are some good pieces from Eric the Unread and Harry’s Place.

fn1. That’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American network of the same acronym, but I assume they got the clip from one of the big international networks.

A couple of Australian legal academics have caused a stir by publicising an article they’ve written (so far unpublished), advocating the legalisation of torture (details and links here). Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke present a rehash of arguments put forward by Alan Dershowitz, centred on our old and much-refuted friend, the ticking bomb scenario. Their main contribution is to bite the bullet where Dershowitz was not, advocating the torture of innocent people who are suspected of having useful information.

The really startling thing about all this is that, until a few months ago, Bagaric, the senior author, was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, part of the apparatus used by the Howard government to implement its highly restrictive policies on refugees. In this context, he had to judge numerous cases in which refugees claimed to be fleeing torture, but never thought it relevant to recuse himself on the basis that he was on the side of the torturers.

The blogospheric reaction has been predictable (at least if you share my priors). Although Bagaric was previously regarded as a mild lefty (he’s advocated higher taxes, for example), anti-war bloggers were uniformly horrified by his and Clarke’s views. By contrast, with less than a handful of exceptions, the pro-war side of the sphere either supported Bagaric and Clarke, defended their right to speak while avoiding the substantive issues, or kept on blogging about Newsweek.

This is a bit disappointing, but it provides a useful lesson. Next time you read one of these guys talking about Saddam and his crimes, remember it’s just a factional brawl within the pro-torture party. If Saddam had stuck to fighting wars against Iran, and torturing Iraqis, instead of invading Kuwait, he’d still be “an SOB, but our SOB”, just like Karimov in Uzbekistan.

From the APSA:

“The American Political Science Association, through action by its Council and its Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Freedoms, supports the views expressed in the May 3, 2005 statement by the AAUP against academic boycotts. We join in condemning the resolutions of the AUT that damage academic freedom and we call for their repeal.”

I am waiting for the American Sociological Association to follow with a similar statement. According to Jeff Weintraub, the ASA Council has taken the matter under consideration, but no outcome so far.

UPDATE: The Middle East Studies Association joins in: “We strongly urge the Association to withdraw or rescind this resolution to boycott these universities and blacklist their faculty at the very earliest opportunity.”

It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to guess that there’s an indirect link between this “NYT story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/15chaplain.html?hp&ex=1116129600&en=00e6129405ca2b50&ei=5094&partner=homepage on evangelizing Christians making life uncomfortable for non-believers in the armed forces, and the “riots in Afghanistan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051300301.html that followed a _Newsweek_ report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down the toilet by Guantanamo interrogators. Other services than the Air Force have a spotty track record in the area of Christian-Muslim sensitivities; to the best of my knowledge, “General Boykin”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/16/attack/main578471.shtml was never disciplined for the flagrantly offensive comments that he made in 2003.

This is important stuff; as Robert Kaplan “said”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200307/kaplan in the _Atlantic_ (sub required) a couple of years ago, the US armed forces are what administer the American imperium, such as it is. Kaplan claimed that this was a good thing, pointing to the positive role that army officers could play, and quoting Winston Churchill’s dictum that the Americans were ‘worthy successors’ to the British Empire. However, the inheritance may run in different directions than those that Kaplan highlighted. What’s happening in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the rebellion of 1858 in India, where false rumours that the British were issuing cartridges smeared with the body fat of cows and pigs were lent credibility by the efforts of Company officers from Britain to evangelize among their troops. There’s no evidence whatsoever that fundamentalist Christians were responsible for any decision to flush Korans down the toilet. Indeed, I suspect that they weren’t; if the _Newsweek_ “story”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7693014/site/newsweek/ bears out, this is more likely to be a general cultural problem in the military than something that can be specifically attributed to a sub-group of officers. But still, an organization’s culture is in part a product of the actions that are tacitly encouraged or discouraged by its leaders. A military establishment in which extremists who believe that Allah is a “false idol” can not only survive, but prosper and reach high military rank, and in which non-Christians can experience systematic bullying and intimidation, is likely to have problems when it not only has to deal with “idol worshippers,” but has to take their beliefs seriously. Certainly, I can’t imagine that interrogators in the US military would ever have flushed a Bible down the toilet to shock a Christian prisoner into cooperation, regardless of whether this was likely to have worked or not.

Update: _Newsweek_ is now “saying”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051500493.html that it erred in its report.