Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Reasons for Peace

About 20 years ago, when I was more involved than I am today with the problems of Central America, I put together a short list of 10 reasons to oppose U.S. intervention there. Recently I tried to reconstruct that effort and come up with a general list of arguments generally against armed conflict. Of course, the weight given to each argument can vary vastly with the particulars of a given situation. There are certainly occasions where armed struggle is a justifiable response to an oppressive regime, and for every unjustified aggressor there is a defender who can find justification in his defensive posture. That said, even the good guys in a war tend to underestimate at the outset the degree to which they are choosing a dark path for others who are innocent or neutral. Here's a revised version of the list, subject to further revision.

Presumption
1. It is war, not opposition to war, that requires justification. In public opinion, political science, anthropology, religion, and law, peace is assumed superior and normal and not requiring of justification, whereas war, by definition entailing organized campaigns of mutual destruction, is always undesirable of itself. (This argument holds most strongly against aggressive war, preemptive or preventive war, or any escalation in hostilities among parties at war; it holds least against the defenders who use force merely to survive or rescue, repel invasion, or liberate themselves from forceful captivity.)

Multiplier Effects
2. The party to a war who decides to initiate or escalate the conflict may anticipate that its action will be met tit for tat if its enemy has the power to do so, and a powerful enemy may respond tenfold or hundredfold. Because the enemy's response is a predictable consequence of the other side's decision, that side bears some degree of responsibility for it. (This is a difficult moral issue -- if a cause is righteous, one should not necessarily be held hostage by the fact that an opponent is prepared to resort to atrocities; nevertheless, what is said here is correct -- the initiator must bear some responsibility for even a disproportionate reaction, if it was foreseeable.)

3. Furthermore, this response may not be merely mutual, but may involve embroiling multiple parties on multiple sides in an expanding conflict.

4. At very least, the eruption of a conflict in one place makes leaders everywhere wary of the prospect of being attacked, leading them to focus on security and defense. (The exception to the rule is when a bully who is already feared gets bogged down fighting a challenger; then the whole world feels they have a period of relative security while the aggressor is preoccupied.)

5. At the end of a successful war the victor may garner a reward. When this happens it teaches the universal lesson that war pays.

6. Because wars are won by the strong, rather than the just, the outcomes tend to favor the strong, but be unjust. While victory by the strong tends to engender some stability, perpetuated injustice also creates a constant pressure to revive the conflict. The issues that led to the war may go unresolved. In many cases, the victor demands unfair reparations and humiliates the defeated, which especially tends toward revival of the conflict. The classic example is World War II.

7. The duration and expense of war is almost always underestimated by the aggressor; in cases where there have been historical exceptions to this, successful aggressors have frequently grown overconfident, been contained and rolled back.

8. A common outcome that extends the effects of war beyond original predictions is extended occupation.

9. The move to war generally elevates the status of the military. Military technology advances rapidly as new weapons are field tested, and needs are identified. Conversely, diplomatic skills and abilities atrophy. War is accompanied more often than we like to acknowledge by unshared sacrifice and profiteering, the ultimate result of which is the relative strengthening of those parts of society most willing to invest in the suffering of others.


Death and Injury
10. War kills. Loss of life is not only a loss to the individual, but to all who are bound to him or her by social connections, family, or affinity of varying degrees of intimacy. To the extent that war kills those of working age, it depletes the social investiment in rearing and training productive members of society. To the extent the victims have special gifts, there is the additional loss of their anticipated future creative production. Losses of life due to war are usually underestimated or undervalued and often deliberately concealed. In recent wars we've seen loss of civilian life on the opposing side minimized, loss of life by opposing forces either exaggerated or ignored, and, most strikingly, loss of friendly forces downplayed or concealed. Lowballing KIA tallies of U.S. forces has been noted in Vietnam, Panama, and the first Gulf War. In situations approaching genocide, birth rates also typically plummet, meaning further loss of potential life.

11. Alongside death run injury and sickness. It has been noted that in recent decades medical advances have sharply upset the ratio of dead to wounded, yielding many more maimed and dismembered survivors. Exposure to foreign climate and pathogens, shortages or contamination of rations, airborne smoke, and toxic munitions such as depleted uranium shells, the side effects of preventive measures, and chemical agents used for defoliation and illmnination have led to post-war syndromes affecting large numbers of veterans. Chemical agents, along with mines and unexploded ordinance, also pose a long-lasting problem for local populations.

12. Mental illness, including PTSS, affects a substantial portion of veterans. There is also the problem of secondary victimization: unlike natural forces of destruction, organized violence takes a psychological and spiritual toll on the aggressor, which alienates him from nonmilitary companions and family. Maladaption of veterans is one reason war is associated with increased rates of divorce and violent crime. The effect on soldiers is increased when they are placed in an environment where war crimes are being committed. The secondary effects there are profound -- many mothers would rather their children die or suffer torture than become torturers themselves.

Economic, environmental, and cultural losses.
13. Property destruction is of course vast. The scale of economic loss is enourmous and seldom appropriately measured. A billion dollar reconstruction contract is treated as an economic plus while infact its necessity is always a greater negative.

14. Environmental destruction, sometimes severe and long term. Oil fires set in the first Gulf War produced pollution and climate changes in China.

15. Loss of artifacts of historical, cultural and artistic significance, not including great artists who are killed. (A small recoupment of this loss comes from the inspirational effect of destruction -- without tragedy and atrocity we would not have Picasso's Guernica.)

16. Other economic costs, including production, maintenance and testing of weapons stockpiles between wars, pay to soldiers, fuel costs, research and development costs, opportunity cost, and the multiplier effect of lost yield on investment. (Although it's common to point to serendipitous discoveries emerging from military R&D, such research generally does not require war; war is seen perversely as a necessary goad to investment for those unwilling to support research for its peaceful benefits.)

17. There has been a long-demonstrated pattern of association between military presence and sexual ills -- harassment and domestic violence, forced prostitution, rape, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. This is not referring to the use of rape as a criminal tool of war, which is another matter of concern, but simply noting that with the male dominance of the military and its culture of fetishized violence, sexual abuses tend to accompany the military, whether it is AIDS in Honduras and the Philippines epicentered on US bases there, or the abuses at Tailhook.


Political degradation.
18. War is often conducted illegally. The U.S. has a long and terrible record of war crimes, and as a general matter of policy uses controversial weapons and standards of engagement. Troops perform "body checks" -- killing the wounded rather than taking them prisoner, classify journalists, broadcast centers, civilians, emergency medical vehicles, and other targets as legitimate, engage in torture and assassination campaigns, and massacres. Its current doctrine of engaging in unprovoked wars of aggression is clearly unlawful. War itself is always unlawful ab initio for one side (though in a domestic insurrection, the original crime may be only municipal). The occupation of Iraq is illegal, the imposition of Iraqi leaders and laws and the sponsorship of Constitutional referenda were all illegal.

19. War is accompanied by, and used to justify, domestic oppression.

20. War is accompanied by propaganda. Its first casualty is truth.

21. War is accompanied by campaigns of dehumanization and organized promotion of hatred of the "enemy."

22. It usually operates on either forced conscription, economic draft, or lies.

23. There is a substantial pattern of nations or groups at war tolerating or encouraging the cultivation of illegal narcotics in order to help fund clandestineor overt operations, or as a quid pro quo for the military support of local druglords.

24. Because anything goes in a state of war, allies are made who are as bad or worse than the enemies.


Unjust ends.
25. Because they are politically so useful, wars may seek to wag the dog, i.e., raise the standing of strongmen, dictators and commanders in chief, at the expense of democratic government.

26. By nature, wars seek to impose one will over another’s sovereignty. What is desired by that will is almost always in the "national interest" (really the interest of the segment of society controlling the state) of the aggressor nation, and not in the interest of the land attacked. Positive purposes are used as pretexts, but the conduct of the war generally undermines these pretexts. The most common goals of US wars are to maintain effective control of foreign resources and to punish independent development that might be emulated by neighboring states.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Draft Excerpt Series No. 1

I've decided to post bits and pieces of books I'm writing as I write them. These are copyright me, now, but I probably don't need to say that since no one ever visits this site anyway.

In spite of the motto that the Ten Commandments are just that -- Commandments, as opposed to suggestions or helpful hits, like the kind you would follow to get candle wax out of shag carpet, there is a strong case to be made that the Commandments were meant to be broken. Some of the arguments that support this claim are:

1. They are widely labeled as something less than law, and seem to have a dual status, not so much that they clearly are not commandments, as something more subtle and schitzophrenic. The Ten (wink, wink, nudge nudge, don't tell Yahweh but I've got my fingers crossed) Commandments. This is true in the Bible and continues to the present day.

2. They are not enforceable; and in fact not even keepable. I mean, you can covet all you like. You can't help it and nobody's going to know. Just don't be obvious about it. Being obvious, well, that would just wreck everything.

3. They come with a judicial rule which appears designed to help hide noncompliance.

4. Their vagueness makes it possible to get around them.

5. Their punishment is too draconian to expect normal people to execute it. There is a long tradition of doctrines to aid their nonenforcement.

6. To fulfill their function of propitiating the wrath of a distant deity, they did not need to punish crime which was not exposed.

7. The entire context and subsequent story suggests that compliance was the exception and not the rule. These were people inculcated for generations to present the pretense of obedience.

Lots more to say, but gotta go.

Two new Democratic Party memes

Watching Tom Vilsack (Democratic governor of Iowa) on Tavis Smiley last night, I recognized a trope I had last heard from John Kerry on Meet the Press. The idea, and I will paraphrase, though if I had more energy I would link to the transcripts, is that Iraq is a mess and the Iraqis aren't doing their job to fix it, have not yet opted for peace, and need to be pressured by Americans who are sacrificing for them while they ungratefully decline to solve their own problems.

Vomit.

The U.S. occupies Iraq. Iraq has no central government. Virtually all of the plagues visiting Iraq to day were inaugurated on the heels of an American-made war. Also arriving in the soldiers' dufflebags were most of the Iraqi exile "leaders" who are dickering for the scraps of political power falling from the mouth of the U.S. proconsul. The U.S., in violation of international law, sponsored a new, godawful constitution and a raft of unjust laws. Its project for most of the occupation has been to arm and train the sectarian battalions that are only nominally distinct from the militias engaged in the growing civil war. Legally and morally, the U.S. is responsible for all of it, not just its guilty acts but its guilty omissions, loosing mere anarchy in the cradle of Western Civilization.

Blaming "the Iraqis" for allegedly not wanting peace and normalcy is about as cynical and grotesque as anything Don Rumsfeld has come up with. Let me call here for Vilsack, Kerry, and all their fellow-thinkers to resign today.

The second meme, this one courtesy of Nancy Pelosi and some other Congressional Democrat I heard today on NPR, is that we should all blame the Republicans in Congress who rubber stamped the last energy bill, and/or the "oil men" in the White House and VP's residence, for the pox of high gas prices on all our houses. It's not that I disagree with the claim that it's no coincidence gas prices have reached historical heights under a big oil president. But I think high gas prices themselves should not be demonized. Windfalls to the price-gouging suppliers who've posted record profits, yes. Hardships upon poor homeowners struggling to heat their homes during the most recent bizarre late-April cold snap, yes. People forced to commute long distances because the regional planners, developers and megamall proprietors opted for policies that undermine neighborhoods and promote sprawl, yes. Let's tax the oil execs and help the commuters and the poor homesteads in the temperate zone.

But high gas prices? All in all, a good thing. We need to encourage conservation, help arrest global warming, encourage better planning, better vehicles, smarter consumption. I won't cry for the guy whose monster pickup, Hummer, or SUV can't make it to the end of his driveway on a gallon of gas.

The Gousha & Hagerty Show

An update to the last post, which I should have made Sunday night. That night Mike Gousha had a lengthy interview with Milwaukee Police Chief Nan Hagerty. More discussion about the credibility of the police department and their integrity. Gousha went the entire interview without mentioning any of the episodes of police misinformation carried unquestioningly by his news reports. It should be noted that a public meeting at city hall had just been held and that members of the public had independently raised the same issues as my last post. They noted that the entire community, and the African American community in particular, had been libeled in the police misinformation about the two missing boys. If Gousha were the journalist he pretends to be and not just a pretty face, he might have asked:

Who came up with the idea of announcing publicly that the police had solid information that someone knew the whereabouts of the boys?

What people in the police department knew that was a lie?

Is there any procedure for review the appropriateness of incorporating particular misinformation into the department's public statements?

Was that process folowed here?

Who if anyone signed off on the lies?

Were the appropriate deciders aware of the lie, or were they misled by lower-level officers?

If the lies were signed off on, what is the official justification of the Department for lying?

Did the department consider the fact that lying could injure public trust in the department in the future?

Did it consider that its statements denigrated a particular community with already strained relations with the police?

If the lies were against policy, has anyone been disciplined?

If so, who, and what is the nature of the discipline?

Has the department reevaluated its approach in light of the intensity of trust issues after the Jude verdict?

The official line from the MPD is that it's just a handful of lower level officers who are untrustworthy and the top of the department is credible. How can this be reconciled with what appears to be an institutional pattern of official lying by the department?

But, of course, this was a suck-up no-heat interview with Channel 4 continuing in its predictable role as a shill for the department. Surprise, surprise!

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More against the local news

Last night Channel 4 had another one of its reports by John Mercure pushing for a new law restricting where sex offenders can live. It began with Mercure stating how outraged he was as a father of two, and went to interviews in which he asked residents loaded questions about "perverts" living nearby, soliciting their support for a proposed law. He interviewed one legislator who supported the law, and no one opposed to it. He noted that one agency of state government had claimed the law would be expensive and difficult to enforce, but still has not bothered to tell viewers that the cost of the proposal runs upwards of $60 million, or that several very careful research studies have failed to show that such a proposal would have any beneficial effect. You can agree or disagree with Mercure, but it's offensive to present this kind of strident, one-sided, know-nothing editorial as objective journalism.

On a separate front, please note that Milwaukee was the center of national attention because of the disappearance of two boys, Purvis Virginia Parker and Quadrevion ("Dre") Henning, who finally showed up drowned in a park lagoon with no evidence of foul play. This news station had almost daily reports for more than three weeks (often the lead story despite the absence of any real news), helping to drum up a massive popular response with people distributing fliers with the names and faces of the missing kids, billboards, fundraisers, statements by public officials, etc. For weeks, the station reported over and over as a fact that police were certain that someone in the community had knowledge relating to the disappearance of the boys but had failed to come forward. This claim was tied to a police campaign to oppose the allegedly widespread mentality of "no snitching" -- the police want people to report on each other. The implication was that the two boys were victims of foul play which was known to third parties who were covering up the crime. This was portrayed as a certainty.

Mentioned briefly but without any sort of comment or reaction, the Police Department admitted that they were "just grasping" when they claimed to know that someone in the community had information. In other words: (1) They lied; (2) They lied brazenly; (3) They libeled the entire community; (4) They especially libelled the black community; (5) They promoted their own agenda; (6) They let a massive set of actions grow out of their misinformation; (7) They admittedly had no reason to think their lie would have any practical benefit in finding the boys, whom they almost certainly understood were almost certainly dead.

What's interesting to me is that, as previously blogged here, the Police not long ago made a series of erroneous public statements based on anti-black stereotypes that two other black kids were fleeing an abusive mother who had 13 kids (implied: probably for the welfare). The local news bought into it, reported it as fact without any investigation, and later revealed that they had been lied to. Without any comment, apparent anger or disappointment, any calls for change, any reflection on how they'd been used to libel a community.

It's even more interesting that the lead story in this night's news report had been the issue of the credibility of the police department following the not-guilty verdict received by three Milwaukee police officers accused of taking part in the savage beating of a man of color, Frank Jude. Numerous other officers were at the scene but no one would share any information incriminating their brother officers, leading to a transparent obstruction of justice for Jude, and massive community protests. Despite the fact that the news department was leading with a story on the police-public credibility gap, here was the news that the department had lied about the two missing boys, promoting their own agenda and libeling the community in the process, and the news staff was either too dim-witted or too complicit to make the obvious connection. The head of the police department, and ordinary police officers not involved with the Jude case, were treated as heroically fighting off the effects of a few bad apples, but if this is the case, why do the police appear to be insitutionally, at the highest levels, appear to be spreading misinformation about cases involving the black community over and over again?

Is Channel 4 brain-dead (some evidence for this), or are they intentionally not remarking on the routine racist misinformation spread by the MPD because they understand they are complicit in that scandal by never disclaiming or doublechecking the department's dubious claims?