Crazy, People

The Brits have just the right attitude; or at least a big part of it: Stay Calm, Carry On.

Inflating amateur local violence, however globally inspired, into a world-wide threat is not good. The real global threats are enough to fill the mind.

What are the chances the current administration will take any part of this position? Individuals in government will, and bless them. They will not include the VP.

Oh, wait. My bad... Maybe we will be told to "keep shopping."

Learnin'

I'm reading what I like to call, in one breath, "David Halberstam's history of American diplomacy in the 90's Bush, Clinton, And The Generals." For someone who grew up in Cambridge in the 80's (where it was fairly common knowledge that Reagan was hooorrible) but was never truly engaged in political events until fairly recently, it's important for me to catch up things with a balanced viewing of American power. This book seems to be that. Next, I'll take a deep breath and find a history of the 80's and the Gip.

One thing Halberstam considers, and people are considering now, is the tension between foreign-poicy realists and idealists. Reagan was the great hero, of course, for certain idealists who espoused capitalism and Christianity and American Exceptionalism. James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger are central figures in these pages of history. Now, Baker and Scowcroft are back in the news as part of Dubya's Iraq Rescue Squad™. They are "realists."

Maureen Dowd, in the Times today, wrote about this, too:

"The Idealists who loved Ronald Reagan’s evocation of Thomas Paine — 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again' — are right that Americans yearn for a moral foreign policy. It was sickening in 1989 to see Brent Scowcroft — another realist back in fashion — offering a cozy supper toast to Chinese leaders only six months after Tiananmen Square, and getting [Bush 41] to lecture Ukrainians not to break the iron grip of Moscow...

"Bush junior cast himself as the Reagan heir. But as President Reagan showed in Lebanon, when he pulled out troops after 241 servicemen were blown up, and in Reykjavik negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear arms, he was incredibly flexible — an effective contrast with his inflexible rhetoric. He pursued openings and even radical diplomacy. If the Gipper was wood, the Decider is stone.

"Voters rejected W.’s black-and-white, good-and-evil, incompetent foreign policy last week. The president got the message that some shades of gray were desirable and brought in the family fixer with the bright green ties, who is perfectly positioned to come up with a solution that will fly in Washington and flop in Baghdad.

"As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, morality without realism is naïvité or worse, and realism without morality is cynicism or worse. Morality should open your eyes, not close them."

Onion

Advanced Geo-Politics

Best of the best.

Let's Define Our Terms, Gentlemen.

Pretty pictures.

Fblog Of War

So there's this blog, by law professor Ann Althouse, and I chirped up after Bush's 9/11 address to the nation. If you go to her post and reader comments, and type "shimmy" into your FIND function (rosetta-f), you can get each of mine and the responses. Anyway, I was a little dissatisfied with my presentation, but perhaps part of that comes from the somewhat hostile environment. Anyways, I'm reprinting what I just wrote tonight, because I do like it:


I'd like to say a bit more about law-enforcement vs. war. I think we all agree that part of civil law enforcement is a certain amount of "failure." Not ideal, it's just reality. Politically, I'm not convinced declaring war on bin Laden's mafia was ever a good idea. I mean, who looks strong there? Mightn't radical fairly-local small-timers race to provoke us and join that list?

Once 9/11 happened, folks were ready to accept war. And apparently lots of it. War can work, sure. But I've never been convinced that basically declaring a generation-long war is the best way to neutralize the radical movement, or prevent an attack much worse than 9/11. (It could work, sure.)

Perhaps I'm taking the Bushies' war-rhetoric too literally, or selectively. Certainly I'm not trying to anger anyone with pacifism.

Neither am I nit-picking simply because things aren't going well, or going "as well as we were told they would." That's transient stuff, and somewhat unknowable by me. What I do know is my own level opinion of the Bush administration's background, temperament, approach, and competence. I'm far from infallible in these assessments, but not to act on my own assessments would be negligence and abdication of citizenhood.

I saw some value in the Afghanistan invasion, because not to show strength like that would have possibly invited another attack. Perhaps a larger one. (We also could have done other somehow-forceful and surprising things, I'm sure.) Once Bush started talking about a generation long war, and it's not a stretch to think he means straight-up war, I began to really, really worry. Some bombs, some trucks, a boat, and some box-cutters got America to declare a generation-long war against a vague, amorphous, regenerative, and vaguely phantom enemy. Fantastic. That's kind of out-of-control stuff.

There's no way to know exactly what will come from war. I feel like, having done what we "had to do" in Afghanistan, we are now actively inviting another, bigger attack on us. Probably we'll avoid that.

I'm not fully ready to take that risk, that war-path, but it's not up to me, much. I believe in civil law enforcement because, while it is not fully safe, it is generally safer than war, on balance. The risk/benefit analysis, to me, plays out better than the one for war. Your opinion may differ. Bless you. Luckily, none of us are in charge!

There are many argume--, er, discussion-points I'd love to touch on from this. For one thing, the notion of law-enforcement really needs to be twinned with pretty brilliant positive political action, which I believe this country can, in fact, produce. Call me a patriot. Sadly, the Bushies seem to be incapable of delivering this most valuable element. So perhaps once we were stuck with Bush+Osama we were simply stuck with the start of a generation-long war.

[I'll leave out the closing cuss-word] that.

Extreme Courage Under Fire

From today's NYTimes:

[Rep. Duncan Hunter [R], who heads the House Armed Services Committee] presented the military lawyers with various scenarios in which it might be necessary to withhold evidence from the accused if it would expose classified information. But the service's top lawyers said other alternatives must be explored -- or the case dropped.

''I believe the accused should see that evidence,'' said Maj. Gen. Scott Black, the Army's Judge Advocate General.

Black and the other lawyers said such an allowance was a fundamental right in other court systems and would meet requirements under the Geneva Conventions.

But Hunter suggested that such a requirement could hamper prosecutions.

''Some of these acts of complicity in terrorist acts are very small pieces . . . and you don't have a lot of evidence,'' he said. The chairman repeated a scenario where the only piece of evidence would expose the identity of a secret agent and asked whether it would make sense to drop the case entirely.

''You get to the end of the trail, then yes sir, you do,'' Black responded.



That is awesomeness. Feel free to cheer in your chair. Go ahead, do it. Even just a little. It feels good to huzzah the best of America.

(And, under this same heading, here's something for the broadbanders out there.)