Who I’m Versus

by JL Wall

(Yes, I’m stealing William Brafford’s introductory motif from The League.)

A lot has happened in the last week/newscycle – mostly torture memos, I suppose. But even on Northwestern’s campus, a story that would otherwise have been major news got pushed aside (here, by the most ridiculous student-government elections ever – long story): that is, American journalist (and Northwestern alumna) Roxana Saberi was sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran for “espionage.” The story, of course, hasn’t been ignored. But the part of the blogosphere that I frequent has been fixated (with good cause) on the torture memos, to the extent that her sentencing has merited only a little attention (at most).

But she got a good deal of attention before this past week, with varied movements for her release and Nobel Prize laureates petitioning on her behalf. Yet, there is a question worth asking, and an anonymous commenter raises it here:

And if it turns out that she is a spy and Iran is completely justified?
As far as we all know, this could be the truth of the situation.

Given that the suddenness of the charges’ transformation into espionage, her trial (one day), and sentencing (the entire process, after being held on totally unrelated charges for three months, took two weeks) makes her father’s statements that she was coerced into confessing seem all the more likely, I doubt that’s the truth. But let’s run with it. Let’s say she was a spy. This Iranian prison and her treatment is still part of what I’m versus.

Regardless of guilt or innocence, she’s a political prisoner in Iran. And, despite Ahmadinajad’s best open-collared posturing, nothing’s going to make that a safe or pleasant experience. Iranian political prisoners exist as individual human beings only at the mercy of the state, and history has shown that this is a state with a short supply of mercy.

She’s being held in Evin Prison, compared to a “torture chamber” by its former residents, and Amnesty International has noted a “risk of torture or other ill-treatment” for those held there. Iran’s efforts to respond to this reputation resulted in a creepy demonstration of a prison where, essentially, the prisoners lead better and happier lives than if they had never been arrested. But according to the Iranian government, there are no political prisoners there. Only part of the women’s ward was allowed to be viewed, and if a prisoner started to complain to reporters, they were taken away quickly. And reporters were specifically barred from visiting the foreign-nationals who piqued their interest – you know, the political prisoners.

But we do have detailsof the stay one Western journalist who was arrested in Iran and “detained” in Evin, Zahra Kazemi:

Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died in Iranian custody on July 11, 2003, almost three weeks after she was arrested for taking pictures outside a prison during a student protest in Tehran.

Two days later, Iran’s official news agency reported that Kazemi had died in hospital, after suffering a stroke while she was being interrogated. On July 16, 2003, the story changed. Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran’s vice-president, conceded that Kazemi died as a result of being beaten.

[...]

The case stayed under the radar screens of most Canadians until March 31, 2005, and the stunning revelations of Shahram Azam, a former staff physician in Iran’s Defence Ministry. He said he examined Kazemi in hospital, four days after her arrest.

Azam said Kazemi showed obvious signs of torture, including:
• Evidence of a very brutal rape.
• A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a broken nose.
• Severe abdominal bruising, swelling behind the head and a bruised shoulder.
• Deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs.

Iran refused to return the body to her family for burial in Canada.

So if Roxana Saberi is a spy? If she is guilty, despite the kangaroo proceedings, despite all we know about Iranian “justice”? I still think outrage is the appropriate response. Because she’s a fellow American-citizen being held by these people in that pit of a prison. Because she’s a fellow human being being held by these people in that pit of a prison. Because I’ve seen the faces of her former professors sink into despair when one of them, still not used to the idea of her in prison, mentions her as an example of someone with a post-graduation attitude and vision we should emulate.

Because, when you look at the reports out of Evin, and out of Iran’s judiciary – that’s who I’m versus. And because I’m versus that, I have to be versus this.   And anyone who says you can be against one and not the other is lying.

Filed under: foreign affairs, torture

Leaders Needed

Glenn Greenwald’s widely-cited post from over the weekend on Jim Webb’s courageous push for prison reform is a must-read. I especially liked this bit:

Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making [that says that taking bad but popular positions is necessary if one is to avoid political risk] is –  just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold’s singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold’s subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush’s assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin.  Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy.  Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian [sic] consensus.  Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

In this context, the unpopular stances Greenwald has in mind concern the drug war, sentencing guidelines, prison conditions, and the horrid condition of a country where blacks are sentenced to prison on drug charges at over five times the rate of whites despite not using drugs any more frequently, but it’s not hard to think of others that fit the bill:

1. The specific question of whether a country with a criminal justice system in the state of ours can really be trusted to administer the death penalty responsibly.
2. The dangers inherent in the legislative branch’s unconstitutional, near-complete abdication of its roles in declaring war, making and passing laws, and so forth.
3. The questions of why, since college is demonstrably not for everyone, we insist on making it a precondition for a productive adulthood, and of how we can extend higher educational opportunities to those with the capacity really to benefit from them while helping others transition into family life and the workplace.
4. The need to rethink our open-ended and essentially conditionless support of the Israeli government, with all its aims and policies, no matter the damage this does to our image in the Middle East and the rest of the world.
5. The importance of a serious national dialogue about overconsumption, excessive indebtedness, and the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility – at home, in business, and in government alike.
6. The need for serious, far-sighted, and no doubt inconvenient (for many) entitlement reform, and the corresponding task of paying down our national debt.
7. The tremendous dangers, both foreign and domestic, inherent in our commitment to maintaining a massive national security apparatus with a near-trillion dollar budget the shrinking of which is a political impossibility.
8. The questions of whether international terrorism might be better opposed by abandoning or at least severely altering the present rubric of the Global War on Terror, and more generally whether the recent history of U.S. military engagement might suggest the need for a serious retrenchment of our far-overstretched armed forces and a recommitment to using American power to serve the national interest first and foremost.

That’s just off the top of my head – what have I missed, and where do you put the odds of finding “actual leaders” who are willing to take these and similar issues up?

Filed under: civil liberties, economics, education, foreign affairs, government/law, politics, torture, war

American Entitlement

Alex Massie has a splendid post on how American liberals, lately of the “Stop trying to force the Europeans to obey America’s orders” school of thought (and thank goodness for that!) when it came to foreign policy, are … well … less enthused about other countries’ free-mindedness when it comes to the financial crisis:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe  counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What if the Americans are right, however? Well, maybe they are. But what if they’re wrong? Is it really necessary for every country to adopt identical responses to the current difficulties? How likely is it that there can be a global one-size-fits-all answer? Might there not be some sense in sharing eggs between different baskets? That is, different approaches and regional variation might work better than ex cathedra pronouncements from some of the very people who helped get us all into this mess in the first place. Perhaps not, but the costs of the Americans bullying everyone into following a policy that they themselves admit they have no idea of knowing will work seem, potentially, anyway, to be quite high if they are wrong. And, at least putatively, possibly higher than the benefits that might accrue if the Americans (and Gordon Brown) are right.

Filed under: economics, foreign affairs, government/law, war

Goodbye, Morning

Via Lee, I see that the TPMCafe Book Club is running a symposium on The Limits of Power.

Filed under: foreign affairs, government/law

Triumphalism Is Dead

Andrew Bacevich offers the eulogy.

Filed under: foreign affairs

Andrew Bacevich on Afghanistan

He’s quoted in Helene Cooper’s helpful analysis of “Obama’s War” in this Sunday’s New York Times:

Before sending in more American troops, argues Andrew Bacevich, an international relations professor at Boston University, Mr. Obama should figure out if he is going to change an underlying American policy that has shrunk from putting pressure on Mr. Karzai.

“It seems there’s a rush to send in more reinforcements absent the careful analysis that’s most needed here,” said Mr. Bacevich, author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”

“There’s clearly a consensus that things are heading in the wrong direction,” Mr. Bacevich said. “What’s not clear to me is why sending 30,000 more troops is the essential step to changing that. My understanding of the larger objective of the allied enterprise in Afghanistan is to bring into existence something that looks like a modern cohesive Afghan state. Well, it could be that that’s an unrealistic objective. It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down a rat hole.”

By the way, if you haven’t yet read The Limits of Power I’d strongly suggest that you do so soon.

Elsewhere: Bacevich with Bill Moyers; Bacevich on NPR; Bacevich on Bloggingheads; Larison on Bacevich.

UPDATE: Here and here are the portions of that Bloggingheads diavlog that focus specifically on Afghanistan.

Filed under: foreign affairs

War Crimes?

I am, frankly, somewhat exhausted by the topic and not especially inclined to get into a debate about the niceties of international law, but this George Bisharat op-ed from today’s Wall Street Journal is well worth linking:

Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts.

The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an "armed attack" from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them — as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable — to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting.

It goes on. I should also note that Bisharat raises serious questions about the possible criminality of some of Israel’s in bello actions, a topic which has recently come up for conversation at the UN:

The death toll in the shelling of a family compound in Gaza rose to 30, the United Nations said in a report issued on Friday, as relief workers continued to comb through wreckage they had been denied access to for days after the attack.

The episode has ignited intense international criticism of the Israeli military for its failure to allow relief workers to reach the scene in a timely manner. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, also pointed to the deaths in the family compound as cause for an independent investigation into possible war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza.

"Incidents such as this must be investigated because they display elements of what could constitute war crimes," she told Reuters.

Initial reports on Monday said 11 members of the extended Samouni family had been killed and 26 wounded, according to witnesses and hospital officials, with five children aged 4 and under among the dead.

The new report, by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was based on eyewitness accounts. It did not give a figure for the number wounded.

Whole thing here. I am busy working on a column and so am not going to get into an argument about this subject, but others may add their thoughts as they see fit.

ADDENDUM: Let me stress my conviction that Hamas is (obviously) committing war crimes, too.

Filed under: foreign affairs, morality, war

(How) Is Hamas Rational?

There is a whole lot of good stuff on tomorrow’s (today’s?) main page, but this piece by Chris Dierkes, on what he calls the “Islamo-nationalist” ideology behind Hamas and the particular sorts of challenges that it poses for Israel, is especially excellent:

The problem is a prior one: the Israeli Army is built for conventional state war and is fighting a war against stateless nationalist guerrillas. The history of counterinsurgency in the post-WWII world has not been kind to the major conventional power: consider the US in Vietnam and Iraq; The British in Aden, Kenya, and India; The French in Algeria and Indochina; and The Soviets in Afghanistan, to name just a few.

There is a method to the madness of Hamas that comports with this reality. Hamas seeks to fight in the only way it can win, given the military, economic, and political disparity between the two countries. Whatever else one thinks, Hamas is rational enough — in its means, if not its goals — to fight in the way that maximizes both its advantages and Israel’s disadvantages simultaneously. So the more Hamas militants and/or Gaza civilians are killed (up to an extreme point, of course), the more Hamas achieves tactical, asymmetric success against Israel — leading to a victory for Hamas that further delegitimizes Fatah and moderate Arab regimes like Egypt’s.

As [Israeli military historian Martin van] Creveld has it, when the strong fight the weak, the strong become weakened. At any rate, the longer Israel’s ground forces embed in Gaza’s urban terrain, the more likely this result becomes.

Thus there is no possible way that Israel can destroy Hamas’ capacity for violence entirely. Not in an age of a global mass black market in weaponry — with the cost of arms decreasing, urbanization increasing, and instantaneous communication networks growing thicker and more accessible. To be sure, Israel can certainly do a good deal of damage to Hamas’ existing networks and infrastructure. But history warns that time is on Hamas’ side if this is how the game is to be played.

That’s just part of it! Read the whole thing, as they say.

ADDENDUM: Also re: the Gaza mess, Noah Millman is very much a must-read, as ever.

ADDENDUM II: Mark has a similar take on how best to understand Hamas.

Filed under: foreign affairs, war

The Complex

Amen to this:

For many conservatives, cutting government spending means targeting “waste, inefficiencies and pork, but not defense.” It’s as if even trimming one dollar from DoD would violate the GOP mantra of supporting  the military. Being “strong on defense” doesn’t mean writing blank checks to the Pentagon. It means using American power judiciously and spending only what is needed to protect the United States from attack.  Any dollar spent above and beyond that is wasted.  During the Barbary Wars, some members of Congress didn’t even want to build a standing navy fearing that it might threaten America’s newly won freedom.  Many believed a navy was a waste of money.  We have a come a long way since then.

It’s absurd that the single largest recipient of Federal discretionary spending is immune from scrutiny when it comes to the budget. If we’re going to try and cut funding for HHS or eliminate the Department of Education, why not take an axe to the Pentagon? This is just another sad case of political interests outweighing practical concerns.

Filed under: foreign affairs, government/law, war

Andrew Stuttaford is Making Sense

He writes:

We shouldn’t be in any doubt of the fact that the civilian dead of Gaza will be used as a recruiting device by Jihadists across the Islamic world, and we shouldn’t be in any doubt that America will be blamed almost as much as Israel for their deaths. You might argue (and I’d agree with you) that Hamas bears much of the responsibility for the lives that have been lost, but you can be absolutely sure that this is an argument that will be neither heard nor even made in, say, the madrassas of Pakistan or Indonesia, two countries that are also of critical importance to the security of the United States.

There are those who take some hope from the relatively lukewarm support that Hamas has so far received from much of the ‘official’ Arab world in the course of the current fighting. That lack of enthusiasm apparently flows from distrust of Iran as well as anxiety over what Hamas’ electoral success might signal for the legitimacy and staying power of the authoritarian regimes that now run most of the region. Nevertheless we shouldn’t fool ourselves. Popular, as opposed to elite, opinion in the region appears to be broadly supportive of Hamas, a support that will grow the longer the current fighting drags on. In the end, if the region’s rulers feel that they have to go along (however insincerely) with that sentiment, they will do so (feebly or maybe not so feebly), something that must imply a still greater distancing from the United States.

Later on, he quotes an editorial from the Economist:

As with Hizbullah, Hamas’s “resistance” to Israel has made it popular and delivered it to power. It is most unlikely to bend the knee. Like Hizbullah, it will probably prefer to keep on firing no matter how hard it is hit, daring Israel to send its ground forces into a messy street fight in Gaza’s congested cities and refugee camps.

And that, as Stuttaford notes, is exactly what has happened.

Filed under: foreign affairs, war