I like how Obama's mind works. I've said the same thing for years. The vast majority of Americas, across the country, are reasonable people. We may not agree on everything, but overall we can agree a lot more often and come together to accomplish goals without various hardliner ideologues, culture warriors, and pyromaniacs on various sides inflaming issues.

No more hippies, no more hicks.

We have real issues to solve and we can't keep playing out these tired cultural ID games. And that's just what they are: identity GAMES and ego trips, when we have so many important real problems to solve.

I find the consistent problem with ideologies on both sides is intellectual laziness. A preference for easy and clinched answers one's peers would cheer, rather than the courage and intellectual honesty to look at issues again with fresh eyes.

To me, one of the most inspiring examples of people coming together is the emerging solidarity between reasonable conservationists in the scientific community, who are non-ideological and willing to reach out to others for common purpose, and members of the Religious community, Christian denominations and others but primarily Christian, who embrace their responsibility to Shepard the planet. They're coming together around a shared reverence of the majesty and mystery of nature as well as an understanding of complex ecosystems, interdependence, and the possibilities of discoveries benefiting man based in species which may be unknown or obscure today.

Posted at June 30, 2008 5:07 PM in response to Obama's Patriotism Speech Stresses Life Story, Criticizes MoveOn

Apparently his "job" is trolling TPMC.

Posted at June 30, 2008 4:43 PM in response to Obama's Patriotism Speech Stresses Life Story, Criticizes MoveOn

I can feel pity for them as they're clearly very damaged human beings. But "more or less normal" and objecting to even calling them bad apples? Come on.

Channeling Truman Capote?

If they're so swell, invite them over for dinner or to babysit your kids.

Posted at June 29, 2008 2:59 PM in response to Morning After -- a few afterthoughts

btw, another way to put it:

Our gov't just did to our military what they've been doing to 3rd world countries and their police and paramilitaries for many decades.

The original plan was probably to install Chalabi and puppet him to commit these atrocities as we've done with so many other police state proxies, including Saddam Hussein. Does anyone doubt for a second Chalabi wouldn't have run a brutal police state and brutally put down revolt, imprisoned insurgents, and tortured them to make examples of them? Just the same as Hussein or dozens of other strong men we've backed over the decades to secure oil and play ME regions against each other?

When Chalabi failed, and when Iraqi troops refused to "stand up" to be our gov't puppets again, the job shifted to US troops.

***

The continued rise in war crimes concurrent with the decline in morale and erosion of our military is inevitable, and will only increase, so long as we pursue imperialistic policies forcing our troops into unsolvable moral dilemmas and abusing their service.

Just as it was inevitable British troops would eventually be forced into machine gunning independence activists in India, during the 1930's.

Imperialism seems to be the one job we're finding increasingly difficult to outsource.

Posted at June 27, 2008 9:27 PM in response to Elements of Hope

Robert Stone,

Good post. Glad we're (at long last) getting to real issues, late Friday night.

As the Bush-Cheney thing seems not to know or care, ... You don't have to be Clausewitz to work it out.

That's being rather generous actually.

Facts worth considering:

1) we know the Bush Administration was actively pursuing every means possible to circumvent the law and practice torture. Yoo doctrine, Guantanamo, Extraordinary Rendition to torturing nations, etc.

2) we know from Vietnam and other wars exactly what happens in dehumanizing situations, the predictable breakdown of morale, the complete dehumanization of the enemy, etc. Some fraction of the population can always be counted on to act criminally given carte blanche, and even encouraged to do so.

3) we know a dehumanizing environment was knowingly created at Abu Ghraib, such as the placement in a combat zone, the lack of oversight, the breakdown of the CoC and CIA "coaching" of MPs etc.

4) we know the methods of the CIA have for many decades depended heavily on deception and provocation of third parties and proxies towards violence, often illegal, to achieve their goals.

Given we know this Admin wanted to torture and avoid culpability for war crimes and has done so in many ways, set up a "dysfunctional" system to encourage a dehumanizing environment historically prone to encouraging war crimes, placed CIA operatives who then encouraged torture and war crimes, and ultimately a great deal of torture and war crimes were committed, it seems blatantly clear it was a deliberate and carefully orchestrated chaos.

Military and civilian leadership counted on the existence of criminally minded psychopaths like Graner and England to do their bidding and created an environment to exploit it.

The outcome was known as a person unleashing a starved pack of abused dogs into a caged environment with captive victims knows the certain outcome.

Posted at June 27, 2008 9:12 PM in response to Elements of Hope

Rory Stewart --

Thanks for making the only intelligent post on the subject so far. You seem to be the only contributor to have abandoned the false dilemma presented by Karr and Gourevitch i.e. the either/or prosecution of leadership and rank and file, and the gender politics and class politics being dragged into this by them.

And yes, as you point out so perceptively:

It looks to me - from a distance - as though the real challenges are two-fold: to clear out the clutter that muddles our sense of right and wrong and to identify who to hold responsible. I completely understand why you take the focus away from junior individuals like England or Graner in order to blame people higher up the chain. But the risk, of course, is that the 'higher-ups' are hard to identify or accuse with enough specificity - which shifts the blame back onto a more abstract system. This can in some sense let everyone off the hook both at the top and the bottom: rather than making both senior and junior alike share the shame of the atrocities.

Exactly.

On the one hand we could clearly say: the whole thing from top to bottom was wrong, and a failure to prosecute any part of the chain is just that: a failure of morality and accountability. That puts the emphasis entirely on the need to continue prosecuting those up the chain.

Karr and Gourevitch are just muddying the waters with sophistry, identity politics, misplaced sympathies, and overall sloppy thinking. Which is a sure way to get nowhere and let everybody off the hook.

Posted at June 27, 2008 7:35 PM in response to Why is it So Easy to Accept Torture?

The MI colonel who ran the prison, Thomas Pappas, and his deputy Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, were on the block frequently, as were Colonels and Captains of the Military Police -- as well as military lawyers and medics. And they saw many of the conditions that you see in the picture and did not raise a fuss.

Which is exactly why they should have been, and if possible still should be: prosecuted in full.

I understand your worry about letting everyone off the hook by letting the little guys go while we pursue the big guys who may well succeed in being untouchable -- but that does not make a very good argument for the injustice of locking up the scapegoats because you can and it's better to have somebody behind bars than nobody.

That's obviously a false dilemma and kind of PC pandering to set up a dramatic morality tale where it doesn't belong.

Sorry, but you're hanging with an intellectually lazy crowd if after years on this book you're still trapped in that logical fallacy.

1) The soldiers who most enthusiastically became sadists, such as Graner and England for example, should be prosecuted. The public, domestically and internationally, is better off for their incarceration and for the message it sends in support of the rule of law, and against other proto-nazis.

2) The command structure, military and civilian, must also be prosecuted for the deliberate breakdown of discipline, in full. Ignoring the Geneva conventions, and facilitating policies that are clearly unconscionable and ultimately against the national interest, the Geneva Convention, their oaths to uphold the military code and US laws and treaties, and common human decency. Completely unjustifiable acts.

There is no dilemma there. Prosecutors should have approached this as they would any organized crime: Start with the little fish, and work upwards.

By failing on the second point it's a stain on our national conscience. Prosecuting only the lower ranking soldiers and scapegoating them entirely, is also a stain on the conscience.

But in no way would it be ethically improved to have failed to prosecute psychos like Graner and England. It's absurd to apologize for them and only muddies the water.

Posted at June 27, 2008 7:24 PM in response to Why is it So Easy to Accept Torture?

This Book Club was ruined early on by the shift towards drama and pop-psychology, particularly by Mary Karr and Jeffery Goldberg who shifted the discussion about gender politics and the Israel/Palestine conflict, inevitably leading to superficial navel gazing rather than substantive discussion of the facts of Abu Ghraib.

As a result the Book Club has dramatized the minutia, but failed larger issues, including chain of command and their accountability in creating this situation.

***

What wasn't discussed:

The civilian and military leadership made a number of policy decisions, ranging from an embrace of torture, extraordinary rendition, placing the prisoners in an active combat zone in Hussein's old gulag, a complete failure of supervision, and a seemingly deliberate break down of chain of command and accountability as CIA interrogators were encouraging torture to "soften up" detainees.

Soldiers who became sadists in this environment are still accountable under the principles of Nuremberg, unless we wish to exonerate them all, under the premise no reasonable person would not torture in that situation.

***

Instead of discussing those real issue, this week has been wasted in a fluff-fest of Dr Phil and Dr Ruth psychobabble. Whether Lynndie England should be exonerated as a "sweet country girl" or not. Whether Israel's war crimes are better or worse than ours.

This is better than the MSM? How?

Because there's even more navel gazing and pop-psychology? Because the identity politics are a slightly higher grade? Are these pundits significantly better than Dr Phil? Looks the same to me.

Posted at June 27, 2008 7:03 PM in response to Last Words

This Book Club was ruined early on by the shift towards drama and pop-psychology, particiularly by Mary Karr and Jeffery Goldberg who shifted the discussion about gender politcs and the Israel/Palestine conflict, inevitably leading to superficial navel gazing rather than substantive discussion of the facts of Abu Ghraib.

As a result the Book Club has dramatized the minutia, but failed larger issues, including chain of command and their accountability in creating this situation.

***

What wasn't discussed:

The civilian and military leadership made a number of policy decisions, ranging from an embrace of torture, extraordinary rendition, placing the prisoners in an active combat zone in Hussein's old gulag, a complete failure of supervision, and a seemingly deliberate break down of chain of command and accountability as CIA interrogators were encouraging torture to "soften up" detainees.

Soldiers who became sadists in this environment are still accountable under the principles of Nuremberg, unless we wish to exonerate them all, under the premise no reasonable person would not torture in that situation.

***

Instead of discussing those real issue, this week has been wasted in a fluff-fest of Dr Phil and Dr Ruth psychobabble. Whether Lynndie England should be exonerated as a "sweet country girl" or not. Whether Israel's war crimes are better or worse than ours.

This is better than the MSM? How?

Because there's even more navel gazing and pop-psychology? Because the identity politics are a slightly higher grade? Are these writers significantly better than Dr Phil? Looks the same to me.

Posted at June 27, 2008 7:02 PM in response to Last Words

Philip has made clear in his writing here this week, too, that he believes it's a social travesty that Lynndie England was jailed for three years for smiling and posing and falling for the wrong man

Totally. Ridiculous.

If anything, the sentences all around were too light, and there was a complete failure to prosecute the brass and civilian leadership which created this situation. But that in no way lessens the crimes of those who were prosecuted.

Accountability is not mutually exclusive, and framing the discussion as such, is absurd.

The problem throughout this bookclub conversation: too much drama and agenda driven narratives, too little (almost nonexistent) discussion of the objective facts or larger picture, including the chain of command, extraordinary rendition, CIA participation, etc.

Unsurprisingly, those who make a living representing gender/sexuality identity politics feel the need to apologize for Lynndie England, portraying her as a "sweet country girl" and other such nonsense.

This bookclub has been a dramatic distraction and fluff-fest. Dr Ruth and Dr Phil could have hosted a discussion on Abu Ghraib, and produced much the same result.

***

On Lynndie England:

She was Court Marshalled for a number of serious war crimes. Her sentance was proportionally 1/3 of those guilty of even more serious crimes, such as her boyfriend and father of her child, Charles Graner.

England wasn't supposed to be in the detainment area, being administrative. Humiliating photographing or participating in photos is a war crime. She was a conspiratorial accomplice having been aware of these acts on many occasions and witness to other sadistic acts. She failed to report these crimes up the chain of command, in part due to an environment in which the immediate CoC was compliant.

However, all of these are serious crimes under the precedents of Nuremberg.

While there has certainly been a failure to prosecute war crimes committed by commanders and civilian leadership, that in no way exonerates the low ranking soldiers who willingly engaged in sadistic war crimes, once enabled by by commanders.

Posted at June 27, 2008 6:23 PM in response to Torture, national culpability, and literary criticism