If you're a Democrat, stop watching West Wing, start demanding results
I haven't been a TV watcher lately, but last Wednesday I watched an episode of "West Wing." For the excruciating details, visit "MTZ"'s post ("Best Wing") on the subject; unfortunately, he's right on both details and criticism:

In last night's episode, President Bartlett struts around the Wing beating all his staff simultaneously in chess while singlehandedly defusing a frightening military escalation between Taiwan and China. [...]

In the next episode, I forecast, Bartlett will prove Goldbach's Conjecture while reconfiguring most of central Africa along tribal lines and convincing the dictators there to come live in Brentwood.

The whole episode was an embarrassing, contrived riff on how "smart" a President "should" be. Speaking to my fellow Democrats for a moment, if you buy into that analysis of Gore 2000 or anybody 2004 vs. Bush, you're wasting your time. And you don't need to.

Between them, George Herbert Walker Bush and the American people proved that no military victory and poll standings are so huge that you can't lose an election three years later. And I'd think that +/- 'recovering Democrat' MTZ would agree (although I'm positive he wouldn't put it quite this way) that anything "Poppy" can do, "Junior" can do worse. For one thing, he doesn't actually even have a full-fledged victory yet. But then, come to think of it, "Poppy" never did either.

The trouble for "Junior" may be that this time, Americans actually care; most of us, I'd venture to guess, want Bin Laden's god-damned head on a stick far more than we ever wanted or will want M-1 tanks in Baghdad. Given Dubya's understandable inexperience with mandates, I've been patiently waiting for him to recognize this one, but I may be disappointed.

I'll "reach across the aisle" to MTZ and say he's obviously right: being President is not about "smart." But in the months and years ahead, it may be about "focused" and "finish the job." We'll see how well Dubya does with that; his bio still invites a little skepticism. But I wish him well, it's in my family's and my country's interest that he succeed. I wish Tom Daschle well, too, in holding the Bush dynasty's feet to the fire to destroy Al Qaeda and its leadership before they traipse off in search of other wars to never finish. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:55:00 PM -- |    

 

Passport, please
Matthew Hoffman reviews the case of Tali-boy John Walker Lindh in The New Republic, and finds it wanting. Mr. Hoffman, an attorney, identifies "three principles that could justify America's prosecution of crimes committed outside the United States": "territoriality" (the crime is intended to have a substantial effect within the U.S), "nationality" (punishment of U.S. citizens for crimes committed abroad), and "passive personality" (crimes against U.S. citizens abroad, regardless of the perpetrator's nationality). Mr. Hoffman believes none of the three apply to Mr. Lindh, and recommends that a different statute be applied that simply strips Tali-boy of his citizenship (a suggestion also made earlier by blogger Reid "Photodude" Stott).

But read how Hoffman dismissed the "nationality" basis for prosecution:

But it's unlikely this principle applies to Lindh, since the evidence suggests he voluntarily and intentionally renounced his American citizenship. Not only did Lindh join a foreign army and swear allegiance to jihad, he also reportedly referred to George W. Bush as "your new President ... I'm glad he's not mine," in an e-mail to his parents. In another message, he wrote, "I don't really want to see America again."

The point, though, is that whatever Lindh's frame of mind was about his U.S. citizenship, he had not formally renounced it (as far as I am aware): he retained his passport (or at least the rights to that passport). While he apparently turned down Bin Laden's offer to enroll him in a terrorist squad once, there was no guarantee he would turn it down another time. And if or when he arrived in the U.S. to carry out an attack, and presented his passport, no customs agent would have known about his membership in a Taliban regiment or his e-mail correspondence with his parents.

Whatever the strength of Hoffman's other arguments (and I think they are arguable as well) the "nationality" principle applies. I continue to hope Mr. Lindh spends a long, long time in Federal prison.

=====
Edit, 10:30pm: quote "three principles" directly, to clarify that (according to Hoffman) any one suffices, rather than that all "should govern ... prosecution" as originally written. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:39:00 PM -- |    

 
Adopt-A-Minefield
You don't have to believe in banning mines forever to support clearing them out of the places they're not wanted by anyone any more. Supporting minefield clearance is possibly the single best thing you could do for Afghanistan this evening, if that's been bothering you lately.

Steve Den Beste wrote a pretty hard-nosed analysis of this issue a while back, concluding that landmines unfortunately have their place in warfare, which is supposed to be a mean and nasty business if you have to do it at all. He also points out that the proposed treaty against landmines only addresses anti-personnel mines, leaving the more powerful anti-vehicle ones -- judged by "design intent" -- quite legal. For a point of view supporting the treaty, click here.

To skip the debate and just donate some bucks so some kids won't get their legs blown off, click here.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:44:00 PM -- |    

 

Nice work, Looking Glass
An excellent post by Charles Dodgson, who throws a few well-aimed barbs at radical libertarian blind spots when it comes to "market forces," and illustrates with a nice takedown of a Samizdatista ("Johnny Student") for callow views on slavery, the Civil War, and the Confederacy. (However, a style point deduction for the Southern accent parody.)

Also by way of illustration, Dodgson also relays a sickening account of the sex slave trade in tribal area Pakistan. Doubtless no libertarians I know of approve of such abuses, nor does their creed. But it's still fair game to wonder how, and by whom, libertarians want slavery and other crimes by the powerful against the (relatively) powerless actually prevented in practice.

Nice work, Mr. Murtaugh
On Monday, Charles Murtaugh responded with the same objection (among others) that I had to Glenn Reynolds' Fox News article on reproductive cloning. He goes on to state his version of some of Eve Tushnet's and Leon Kass' more psychological/family-ethical concerns. For my part, I think it might be a bit of tough row to hoe to be a healthy child clone, but I'm more concerned with the ones who turn out to be congenitally damaged. But Murtaugh's, Tushnet's, and (horrors) even Leon Kass' points in this regard deserve to be considered. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:18:00 PM -- |    

 

Once again... heeeere's Josef Joffe!
My favorite German columnist weighs in on the topic of the hour -- the Europe-America divide over Iraq -- in his latest Die Zeit article Atlantic dyspepsia.*

Each side owes the other the most important answers. How, please, will Bush topple the arch-enemy, without setting the region or at least the oil fields aflame? Without allies inside Iraq, (almost) without them outside Iraq as well? Bombs alone won't do; without a Northern Alliance, without Russian military aid for its troops the Taliban might still be in power. What comes after the fall? Still more world policing by the "hyperpower," while the EU and the UN can take care of cleanup?

The Europeans owe other answers. They bet on the UN, on the return of weapons inspectors -- just the hopes that Saddam has been dashing derisively since 1998. Doesn't the iron fist of the military need to be beneath the velvet glove of diplomacy, to give some emphasis to political gestures? That's how it was in Bosnia, that's how it was in Kosovo, that's how it was in Afghanistan. It's especially those who don't want war, who must credibly show they're ready for one.

That last part actually puts Joffe more in the "game theory", "just bluffing" school than I am, but my point is that there is (slightly) more political overlap between Europe and the U.S., even now, than, say, Andrew Sullivan and Victor Davis Hanson might lead you to believe.

Your weekly Newsrack helping of contrarian thoughts on Iraq
Which leads me to that weekly or so event: thoughts on Iraq. For those of you scoring at home: I think (1) the U.S. could easily topple Saddam by ourselves; (2) any burning oil fields would be put out all over again. (3) I share Joffe's concern about still more world policing, and the cleanup or even reparations question -- unlike Afghanistan -- is serious: why would anyone else would want to fix a country we attacked? Yet it would have to be repaired, or we'd have a much worse problem than mud-hut Afghanistan to worry about for the next 50 years. (4) Returning weapons inspectors would probably get the run-around all over again too, unless they have a couple or ten U.S Army regiments behind them, or a dead Saddam and Republican Guard in front of them. And (5) -- if Hussein has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), I can't think why he wouldn't use them on us or on Israel when cornered in some Battle of Baghdad endgame.

My position remains that war #1 has still not been won, and that if we're indeed dead set on war #2, we need to think about what comes after, and whether we can live with the likely consequences. Instead, "debate" has come to where normally sober people like Gregg Easterbrook are apparently so entranced by the hardware of it all they can hardly think of anything else. Easterbrook ends his New Republic piece ("Smart bomb") thusly:

On September 11 we learned there is a moral obligation to act in advance against those who plan to do mass murder.

That looks good on paper, but unfortunately none of us are any more psychic today than we were on September 10, and even possession of WMD is not evidence of planning to use them (...I hope; after all, we have a fair amount of the stuff ourselves). I do know who did 9/11, and I am 100% for smashing Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and anyone who gets in the way.

It's a good idea for the United States to promote, not tear down, the notion that starting wars isn't right unless the world (that is, the U.N. Security Council), agrees it's in self-defense. Someday, rather than run an empire, we'll want to count on world cooperation and a system of foreign relations. It's not a good idea for us to blow up the one we have -- terrorists and rogue states will do even better amid world disorder than they're doing now.

That's why, unlike Matt Welch, I support sanctions against Iraq: the alternative is a war that could destroy the international frameworks built since World War II. While, as Matt puts it, sanctions are "the first attempt to disarm a country against its will", they are at least not an armed and shooting pre-emptive attempt to do so. You can estimate how many Iraqis are dying until you're blue in the face: the point remains that it's Hussein who's killing them, by not honoring the conditions of a cease-fire and attendant U.N. resolutions he agreed to, and by putting his palaces and weapons programs ahead of his people. Unless you see Saddam's regime as some kind of immutable force of nature incapable of choice, the Iraqi government bears responsibility for everything that's happened to Iraqis for the last 20 years.

I would rather see us focus on destroying the loose rats than corner and kill a trapped one (and possibly provoke the bites we seek to avoid). If Hussein wishes us ill, he's done nothing effective about it since the Gulf War, pace Laura Mylroie; if he has WMD, so far what he's shown is that he won't use them willy-nilly (on us).* If he doesn't, then a big cause for going after him vanishes.

It's true, as Steve Den Beste has pointed out, that leaves a 3rd scenario, in which he's working as hard as he can to get something he may want to hurt us with. But we lived with that with the Soviet Union for 50 years. Why not try containing a far smaller country? We just might be able to pull it off, our track record isn't half bad.

=====
*Not positive about dyspepsia, but I think it's right. The German word is "Aufwallungen", lit. "upwellings".
Update 2/28: important proviso -- "(on us)" -- added above. As is well known, Hussein attacked Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war with chemical weapons. The attack on Kurdish civilians is, of course, the principal reason Hussein should be loathed and feared in this respect, but it does not prove his willingness to attack Americans in the same way. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:54:00 PM -- |    

 

Here is New York
Lots of other people have pointed out the online photo gallery about 9/11, Here Is New York. Two kinds of photograph get to me the most. One kind is photographs of the onlookers, e.g. 0178, 0187. The other is of the WTC before 9/11, e.g., any of them. I liked the World Trade Center, I wish I'd visited it. It added to the skyline, it was unforgettable, unmistakable, immense, and beautiful in a spare sort of way. I liked the simplicity and starkness that others disliked; it was a contrast and a kind of quiet, superb answer to the wonderful riot of other styles all around it.

There is a very nice article, The Day Time Stopped, by Marianne Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the power of the 9/11 photos, I forget where I first saw it, likely Jeff Jarvis or Reid "Photodude" Scott. Random excerpts:

Every major historical event since the beginning of photography has bequeathed an iconic image -- in the 20th century, the picture of the little boy with his hands up in the Warsaw ghetto, or of prisoners in striped uniforms, for the Holocaust; the picture of the naked girl running down the road after a napalm attack for the Vietnam war; the picture of birds in an oil spill for the Persian Gulf war.

What will be the icons for September 11? What elements determine this process of reduction and iconization? ...

To me, the definitive picture was a New York Times photograph by Angel Franco (via an excellent "Digital Journalist" site): an African-American woman, the disaster reflected in her glasses, a fist clutched to her mouth, a tear rolling down her cheek, another woman behind her unable to watch. (Yes, Hirsch mentions the firefighters/flag photo, but I'm off that topic, go read for yourself). And I'll never forget or forgive this or this or this.*

Hirsch also mentions those helpless, hopeless photo-memorials that sprang up all over the city:

For weeks, the faces on the posters were the only smiling faces in the city. The smiles were traces of another time -- a vacation on the beach or a boat, a barbecue on the patio, a wedding, a moment of familial intimacy. These are images of people looking toward a future they were never to have.

And some of them had kids. If you buy a photo from the "Here is New York" exhibit, the net proceeds will go to the Children's Aid Society WTC Relief Fund.

=====
* Warning. pause over the links to see if you want to follow them. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:08:00 PM -- |    

 

Decent comments in Der Spiegel on Daniel Pearl
It was nice to read Spiegel reporter Claus Christian Malzahn's decent essay On the death of Daniel Pearl: comments by a reporter. Mr. Malzahn, who has reported from Pakistan himself, doesn't abuse the occasion for political theories about America, but just writes as a reporter. Excerpts:

[Pearl's] interviewees in Karachi didn't want to make any statements, but instead wanted revenge for the lost war in Afghanistan. The American reporter was an easy victim: they didn't even need to kidnap him, Pearl came to the appointment with a notepad and a ballpoint pen. He had asked for the conversation, because he wanted to illuminate the background of an attempted plane hijacking. He was close to a good story -- too close. [...]

Daniel Pearl's very pregnant wife, who is expecting their child in May, said in a CNN interview that her husband understood his work as dialogue. He had been a very open man, his friends confirm. "If you invited him to dinner, you had to buy for ten," remembers a London colleague. Once Pearl even brought people along to a party who he had just met at an underground station.

The killers in Karachi apparently killed a pretty nice guy. Pearl is my age. I didn't know him, but his death has shocked me.

Not a ringing call to arms, nor is that always needed or called for. A good man in a good profession died for no good reason. It helps to know others mourn him, too, "even" in Europe. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:31:00 AM -- |    

 

Visa expiration dates
Via the Washington Post, Mary Beth Sheridan's article "Visa Tracking Limited by Lack of Personnel":

With great fanfare, the Bush administration has pledged to fortify the nation's anti-terrorism protections by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new computer systems to keep tabs on millions of foreign students and visitors.
But even if that complex effort succeeds, immigration officials and experts say there is a gaping hole in the strategy: Because of a shortage of investigators, there are few people to chase foreigners flagged by the computers for overstaying their visas or dropping out of school. [...]

"How do you cope with the identification and questioning and perhaps apprehension of a couple hundred thousand people when you don't have the resources trained or in place to do it? That's the void. You've got a nice car but no engine," said Tom Fischer, a retired INS district director whose Atlanta office oversaw a test of the student tracking system. [...]

More drastic measures to detect illegal immigrants haven't won much support. Proposals for a national identity card, for example, have raised concerns about civil liberties. And INS officials are reluctant to deputize local police to arrest visa violators because of the complexity of immigration law and concerns about racial and ethnic profiling.

INS investigators discovered the difficulty of finding foreign student dropouts in an operation in San Diego in December. They sought the records of local universities and found about 50 apparent visa violators from countries linked to terrorism, officials said. When they went looking for the students, they located only 10, one of whom had his papers in order. Other students weren't home, had moved or transferred.

According to the article, a number of the 9/11 hijackers could theoretically have been detained and expelled for visa violations. Hani Hanjour, one of the Pentagon plane pilots, arrived on a student visa and never showed up to class; two other hijackers had lapsed visitor visas. So the problem is real. It seems to me we can either:

issue fewer visas to countries we're concerned about, so the remaining visas are easier to track.

share lapsed visa information with state and local police, and deputize those police to go after visa violators after all; if truly necessary, simplify visa violation rules so "complex immigration law" isn't a concern.

decide this kind of thing is too boring, or too hard, and either count on other countries to do this kind of work for you before the bad guys get here, or count on wars against terrorists and the nations who harbor them.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:49:00 PM -- |    

 

Vanity plate



Click the plate to make your own. (Via German-Californian blogger Andreas Schäfer, "Fragmente aus Kalifornien"). If we don't have fun on the Internet after 9/11, the terrorists have won. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:02:00 PM -- |    

 

Your weekend Newsrack roundup

While others might see it as a kind of pocket veto, I prefer to put it down to "stunned silence" from Instapundit that my 2/21/02 rebuttal on reproductive cloning has not yet met with a reply. A post today, however, relegates concern about reproductive cloning to the "chattering classes." I've heard that one before, actually (re my 1/20/02 post). The point, incidentally, seems belied by the polls Reynolds acknowledges (the Fox one unscientific, but not the Time one): lots of outside-the-beltway types do seem concerned about the issue. Their reasons don't totally match my own, but I'll take it on faith, so to speak, that plenty of God-fearing Americans believe God is not in favor of human experimentation, just as they take it on faith -- perhaps unwisely -- that their society won't allow it.

Eve Tushnet e-mailed some nice comments about the same posting, and also mentioned her own essay ("Love in the Time of Cloning") on the subject. That essay may have predated any of mine, and takes the same position (see her essay's third point). As Ms. Tushnet's title implies, she approaches the topic from a different direction than I do. But we arrive at the same conclusion, for the same reason. We'll just keep chattering about it, I suppose.

All this is arguably "biting the hand that feeds," but so what. I agree with Mr. Reynolds on many issues, and disagree on many others such as this one. The "Instapundit" effect (or maybe the "bottom of Instapundit's link list" effect) continues unabated. I'm too cheap or lazy to switch to a stats engine that would tell me whether some of you folks are returning, but I sincerely hope so. Thanks for visiting! The idea here is to generate some civil discussions; please feel free to leave your comments!

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ("Electrolite") commented on the same "Best of the Web" article that got my goat a couple of days ago, citing some of my comments but adding his own well-crafted scorn to the cause:

... I'll take even the flakiest student antiwar protestor over this kind of braying declaration that might makes right.

Gary Farber ("Amygdala") continues to scan every interesting magazine or newspaper article days and weeks before I do. He mentions Joe Klein's thought-provoking piece on Iran in one of the latest New Yorkers (on which more myself sometime this week, I hope), comments on the "anti-Semitism, redefined" (and whitewashed?) piece by Peter Beaumont in the Guardian, and many others. He also agrees with Chris Patten (EU Foreign Affairs Plenipotentiary, or something like that) that Patten doesn't "get it" about 9/11, with words more succinct than my own -- and how could they not be -- on the same general topic a couple of days ago. Patten offers a skilfully blunted apology by "admitting" that Europeans don't get how the attack shattered our "sense of invulnerability." As Farber notes, it wasn't that so much, it was all those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people incinerated, or crushed, or compelled to jump to their deaths that sort of upset us, blank you very much, Chris. I'm not altogether on the same page with Gary on issues like Iraq, but he's always well-informed, thoughtful and well-spoken.

Disappointing drop-off in German hits. May have to rev up another German blogger episode, but that takes a lot of research in search of a point. My hope for German readers isn't for its own sake, it's to try to generate some transatlantic exchanges on and relationships about these issues. The "We're not in the same boat" magnum opus below failed in that respect, it may well have been too long, too vague, and ultimately too critical to make for enjoyable reading, especially by Germans. Left out "too wrong" there, I suppose, I'm open to comments, though.

Before my work crunch hit, I was indebted to Jim "Unqualified Offerings" Henley for some nice comments about the various Palestinian issue posts; I never got around to saying so. Thanks, Jim. Jim's point was that while Arafat should have made a counteroffer at Camp David, Barak had probably already promised more than he could deliver. (For a review of the Camp David impasse, see this New York Review of Books article, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," by negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, as well as the response by Dennis Ross.)

=====
Update: Ouch; note to self: must follow all Electrolite links in future. Hey, this was a weekend roundup; get a life, Weekly Standard.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:37:00 PM -- |