America the one-eyed

I've been surgically attached to Belmont again this morning, reading two new posts that purport to be about the role of Central Asia in the global conflict, present and future. I say "purport to be" because the comment threads, particularly in the second post, quickly became philosophical rather than strategic. Fascinating stuff, some of which calls to mind the scene from The Princess Bride, Greatest Movie of All Time^TM, in which Vezzini, Buttercup hostage at his side, is lecturing Westley about fights to stay out of:

The first [universal adage] is to stay out of land wars in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! [And then he drops dead.]

I have re-created the quote. All who know the movie, please cut slack.

So my first thought is that if, as Wretchard at Belmont suggests, we're poised to enter that realm of military folly known as "land war in Asia," I certainly hope he's right that our now-demonstrated ability to project force far from the sea and from permanent bases will be as effective as the steppe horses were for the Mongols - NOT that I advocate attacking China, of COURSE. Good gravy. But the point is, that's one big swath of land there, Central Asia, and more than one army has wandered around in it for a long time, getting progressively hungrier and colder before reaching its goal. If our fortunes take us there, we'd better have our supply lines locked down and defended...

And my second thought is related. Some Belmont commenters, examining the prospect for our chasing down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan or wherever his fortunes have taken or will take him - but probably northward if, as many believe, he's currently harboring in northwestern Pakistan and we have any success in convincing Musharraf that we're going to come after bin Laden no matter how concerned he, Musharraf, is about Pakistan's border integrity - brought up the question of why we're not trying to get Russia or (less probably) China involved in the forward effort. After all, the reasoning goes, all the 'stans were once in the Soviet sphere and Moscow retains at least illusions that they are Russia's turf; why not use that to our advantage?

The title of this post is intended to convey my belief and understanding that we are not licensed drivers of the engine of history, a tortured metaphor if ever there was one. We, like every other civilization and people before us, are doing the best we can to choose a course that is good for us. The difference between what we're doing and what other, less visionary (if I may use the term) nations are doing is, I think, that we're attempting to see at least the medium term. It's been pointed out in various spots and with various emphases that the War on Terror is in fact in some respects a war for oil - or, more cogently, a war for Our Way of Life, since OWoL runs on oil (and gas, and coal, pace my husband in the energy biz). Oil matters. Oil on the open market matters a lot - nowhere have we "conquered" an oil-producing nation and arrogated its oil resources for ourselves; we always buy, and in practice we prefer the market model for pricing. Giant oil fields in the hands of militant Wahhabists - that's not a scenario we should want to promote, either from an OWoL standpoint or from a human rights standpoint. Central Asia has promise as an oil-producing region - some say as productive a region as the Middle East is today, though I haven't looked that up anywhere. So. Do we want that region under the control of bin Laden's spiritual brethren (by whom I do not mean Muslims, but rather militant Wahhabists, Islamofascists, or choose your euphemism for Muslims who believe that their mission in life is the return of the Caliphate by whatever means necessary)? Clearly not.

But almost as clearly, we don't want those lands under the control of a Russia that apparently still entertains notions of "democracy" radically different from ours. (Recall that the Soviet Union always tried to convince the world that it was a "democracy" too - just a remarkably unified one.) Nor do we want China, with few pretensions to post-Soviet reform, in control. While we're allied with both, in general, in the GWOT, our interests do not align perfectly, to say the least. So in the medium term, at least, it behooves us to prepare to project our power into the vastness of Central Asia, not to subjugate it but to provide its people with an alternative to Chinese central control and Russian pseudo-empire. If we succeed in promoting real democracy in the 'stans, how much the better for us?

This is where I get puzzled: where are the Russians and Chinese? Why aren't they taking advantage of either the wide-openness of the region or our current "distraction" in Iraq? If we must get involved in Central Asia, even if "only" to the extent of supporting democratic reform movements (as we're already doing, which in itself represents a pretty significant departure from the past century or so), we stand to create a region of allies where we've never had them before. If Russia and China have had the use of their eyes over the past twenty years or so, perhaps they've noticed that Soviet-style socialism is gone the way of the dodo and Chinese-style socialism has survived only by hybridizing heavily with capitalism; why would they ignore these facts of recent history and, respectively, warn the US to stay out of the 'stans because they're "traditionally" part of Moscow's sphere of influence, or apparently ignore them altogether? See this map and ask yourself why China isn't in the news all the time concerning Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Certainly there are ethnic considerations - but I say again, these countries appear to be "up for grabs" in the alliance sweepstakes, in an area of important strategic value right now and potentially even more important economic value in the future - especially with China's oil consumption growing like the weeds I can't keep ahead of in the back yard. Yet - nothing. In the country of the blind, we do appear to be king.

Do I cheer or weep?

Victor Davis Hanson is kind of an odd duck. A Californian, a farmer, a Hoover fellow, an expert in military history - I look to him from time to time when I need a historical perspective on war (for instance, when I've seen too many "War is not the answer" bumper stickers in one day). He's often breathtakingly brilliant, I think. But I was dismayed by an article of his I just read.

Called "The Same Old, Same Old," the article concerns the circumstances that made the London bombings possible: in particular the feelgood political correctness that declares any suggestion of a gigantic common link between the London bombings, the Egyptian bombing last weekend, Madrid last year, 9/11, the USS Cole, the Marine barracks in Lebanon back in the '80s, and so on, and so forth, ad in-bloody-finitum - a violent and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam - racist and unacceptable. We are so afraid to be insensitive to the cultural imperatives of others, Hanson says, that we shelter the asp in our bosom, trumpeting free speech as young Muslims in London (and not just London) are taught to hate the system that feeds, clothes, shelters, and permits them to hate it.

That's not the part I'm dismayed about. All that is common knowledge among those paying attention. Look, I've got no beef with Islam; as I might say about Christianity if I knew as little about Christ as I know about Mohammed, any religion that can retain the belief of a billion people can't be all bad. (Yes, I know some call Islam the "one-way religion"; I have no personal knowledge of how easy, difficult, or acceptable it is to become an apostate Muslim, so I can't comment.) I have a huge problem with the fact that the Muslim "mainstream" is not more vehement in its denunciations... and this is the part of Hanson's article that I hated. He says this:

...a madrassa that indoctrinates directionless youth, or an imam who shouts hatred to his audience, must always simultaneously when called upon “condemn” terrorism, and then seek victimhood when the rare scrutiny of an outraged public nears.

And even more to my dismay:

Bin Laden has so far only made one mistake: He took down the entire World Trade Center rather than the top floors, and had the misfortune of having George Bush as president. Thus he lost Afghanistan and ended up with democratic reform from Iraq and Lebanon to the Gulf and Egypt. Train bombings in Madrid and bus explosions in London, like the carnage in Iraq, are preferable, since they are enough to terrify and demoralize the Westerner but not quite enough to knock sense into him that only military resistance and victory will save his civilization.

In other words, the goal of terror attacks (brace yourselves, this is self-evident but I forgot it) is terror, not necessarily the infliction of mass casualties and certainly not military supremacy. Hanson suggests that the scale of terror attacks since 9/11 has been deliberate - deliberately small: just enough to sap our will for this fight, without being enough to galvanize our resolve. So far they've failed, because of Bush, Blair, and Howard and the stubborn will of the Anglosphere (not being culturalist here; can anyone believe that if we went home to sulk within our own borders, Romania would fight on?). What happens in 2008?

On the good side, it's not clear on which side the terrorists have been erring: have the attacks been too small to sap our will effectively, or too large such that they have bolstered our cojones? And, too, I confess to a sense that even Hanson can overestimate our opponents: are they - and by "they" I mean the midlevel people who must be in charge of planning and executing attacks such as the London bombings - as subtle as all that? Or would they in fact aim for the most blood, the most torn metal, the most horror they could gin up?

In any event, their second try in London is clearly a loss for them, a win for us. In no way was London "terrorized" by the second, failed bombing attempts. I've heard a few commenters suggest that the failure will act in the terrorists' favor in that they'll garner grossly misplaced sympathy on their account - but really, people. And, too, I've heard some commenters make the point that we tend to ascribe to our enemy almost supernatural powers - their numbers grow magically and geometrically, like the undead fighters in Alexander's Black Cauldron (LOVE those books), while we can't always make our recruitment numbers (but our reinstatement numbers are exceeding goals) even with increasing enlistment bonuses, etc.

All right then. I've cheered myself up to some extent. Kids crying to go to the pool - off I go to brave the chlorine, the ultraviolet, the Lyme disease...

On eating and having cake

I've been over at Belmont Club, one of my favorite strategy/foreign affairs blogs, and Wretchard, its erudite and almost anonymous (he just revealed his Secret Identity a few weeks ago) author, had interesting things to say about the presence or absence of a global terror network. It appears that in January 2005, the BBC ran a series called The Power of Nightmares. (I'd give you the link, but I'd rather you followed the Belmont Club "presence or absence" link in the previous sentence, which will point you to the BBC if you want to go there. Reason: Wretchard is infinitely smarter than the Beeb and it's in the comments to his blog that my point resides.) The premise: that there is no global terror network, but that the illusion of one, created or at least used by politicians to cement their positions, scares us just as much as a real one would. The problem: the London bombings, which are increasingly acknowledged to be linked to al Qaeda (not least because people claiming responsibility for the first set of bombings stated that they are a branch of al Qaeda).

There's been a lot of talk from some quarters, including the Kerry camp in the runup to the November 2004 elections, that if Bush had "kept his eye on the ball" (as if that was the problem) and captured bin Laden rather than getting "distracted" by Iraq, we wouldn't now be in the mess those quarters claim we're in. (Side note: this view of how to capture bin Laden reminds me a lot of an old joke about how to perform a do-it-yourself kidney transplant: "First, remove the diseased kidney..." I'm no doubt grossly misstating it, but the point the joke and I are trying to make is that simply glossing over the so-difficult-it-could-be-considered-miraculous-if-successful does not constitute a complete instruction. Thusly: "All Bush had to do was keep his eye on the ball and he would have captured bin Laden.") Anyway. The implication, sometimes the bald statement, was that capturing bin Laden would bring an end to Islamist terror against the West. If that were the case, my goodness, sounds like a global terror network to me...

Nobody messes with our mom...

And may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.

The stakes in Iraq

This entry, dear reader(s), is part of an ongoing discussion at a favorite blog check-in of mine, Tom Maguire's JustOneMinute (found here). The topic of discussion was nominally that the Gray Lady was finally realizing that, willy-nilly, we are in Iraq - time to focus on how to win there, and on what constitutes victory; TM's specific entry is here. I was - I won't say "chasing a rabbit," because in my oh-so-humble opinion the point I raised is absolutely critical - but I was skating dangerously close to an attempted blog-hijack, I think - posting comments that were getting sufficiently off-topic as to annoy both host and fellow commenters.

My point was that Republicans and/or conservatives and/or generalized hawks are highly motivated to keep trying to convince those on the other side of the necessity and positive significance of the war in Iraq not just because we're contentious, but more importantly because Bush cannot be reelected. We face the prospect of a Democratic or otherwise dovish White House in the next Presidential term, and if we lose the political will to stay in Iraq until our presence is no longer needed to create or maintain security for the new democratic government there, we stand to lose much more than face. I laid out several results of an Iraq cut-and-run, which are not an exhaustive list but are what I immediately thought of:

If we leave Iraq before it's ready to stand on its own, surrounded by non-democracies and pseudo-democracies and itself a novice at self-determination, we:
1. Squander our hard-won credibility - for once in the past fifty or so years, we've so far done what we said we'd do;
2. Condemn one or more ethic minorities in Iraq to the tender mercies of whatever faction manages to grab power there;
3. Orphan democratic movements throughout the region;
4. Lose out on a big chunk of energy portfolio diversification and put ourselves again in the Saudis' hands;
5. Lose an incredibly valuable intel/translator/interlocutor source and an actual Arab ally;
6. and have to do it all again one day.

One commenter who disagrees with me put it this way:

1. Squander our hard-won credibility - for once in the past fifty or so years, we've so far done what we said we'd do;

I didn’t know we said we would invade a country for what non-state actors were doing to us in Africa, Aden and NYC. “If you hit me again Jamie, I’m going to punch out Cecil!”
We picked out Saddam to overthrow for the acts of others? How does punching out the wrong man strengthen our credibility against the perpetrators? The only way it does is to link terrorists to Saddam, which is why it’s the current R talking point.

2. Condemn one or more ethic minorities in Iraq to the tender mercies of whatever faction manages to grab power there;

This is our job? They have been fighting each other longer than this country has existed. I really don’t think we will “solve” it , or even contain it, unless we maintain a military presence indefinitely. They will have to work it out themselves.

3. Orphan democratic movements throughout the region;

We have adopted them? We are supporting fifth columnists in every Arab country? How would we feel of foreign powers were funding “movements” in this country? Remember the Chinese political fundraising ruckus?

4. Lose out on a big chunk of energy portfolio diversification and put ourselves again in the Saudis' hands;

So you agree it was the oil. We’re the strongest – we’re taking it – right? Law of the jungle. Nasty, brutish and short.

5. Lose an incredibly valuable intel/translator/interlocutor source and an actual Arab ally;

How is a perceived puppet valuable to us in a conflict with our opponents? We’re winning hearts and minds by imposing western values? If “liberals” are traitors for mentioning the word NAZI, how will some Islamic demagogue paint a “free” Iraq?

6. and have to do it all again one day.

Absolutely correct. We will have to do it once a generation – forever.

And below is my reply:

"We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America" and "Over the years, Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than 90 terrorist attacks in 20 countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans. Iraq has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger. And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace." (both from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html) "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing." (from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html) Our quid-pro-quo was clear; we followed through exactly as we said we would. For more on the ever-popular "Why Iraq? And if Iraq, why not North Korea?" please see den Beste, for example, at http://denbeste.nu/essays/strategic_overview.shtml, for all the good it'll do. Warning: it will give you what you think is ammo for the "Bush lied!" thing; he points out that WMDs were not a primary rationale against Iraq, though their threat was certainly viewed as real.

This nation never said "We will pursue the planners and any surviving perpetrators of the attacks on 9/11 to the ends of the earth - but only those people" because, as many have noted, the criminal-indictment model had already proven itself a big flop. As much as you personally, and many who share your views, would like to believe that our only legitimate action would have been a la the prior WTC garage bombing, the policy of our nation from September 2001 onward was to take the fight to terrorists and their supporters (necessary, since terrorists don't have to squat in one spot and wait, but nations do), at our option rather than solely in response to their actions, wherever we found them.

Onward. Re: failing to follow through on our promise to the various ethnic minorities of Iraq - yes, these people have been fighting one another for hundreds of years, and we're standing in the way of continued ethnic violence. Having stepped in, staying in during this tenuous time is indubitably our responsibility. Before we were in Iraq, Saddam was able to oppress and kill his populace at his own whim; one of the costs of regime change in a post-realpolitik world is that we don't allow the next-strongest strongman to take over that task. It's to our nation's shame, but to the doom of a lot of Iraqis, that we failed to follow through on our implied commitment to them back after GWI. Similarly, our armed support of a democratic Iraq has emboldened democratic movements throughout the Middle East. It's not exactly like finding a baby on your doorstep, who becomes your responsibility willy-nilly, but more like (ohboy, here goes) Syndrome in The Incredibles: inspired by Mr. Incredible, Syndrome wanted desperately to become his youthful ward and sidekick; rebuffed, he made revenge his life's work, which is where the analogy fails utterly, since although I could see a movement that could feel itself abandoned becoming both powerful and vengeful against the US, I think its home government's oppressing it out of existence is the more likely outcome.

Re: oil. We aren't taking the oil. We are buying the oil. We buy oil where oil is. If Iraq is producing oil that's available on the open market, we don't have to buy as much Saudi oil, and we are less "beholden" to the Saudis and hence more able to pursue hard diplomacy concerning their support of Wahabbiism and terrorists. Portfolio diversification is not only a weapon in the WOT but sound policy in any case, unless you want to put all our nation's eggs in one basket as we did during the '70s energy "crisis." Look. There's no commercial alternative energy source available or even on the horizon; oil is the world's fuel. Would you rather be majority-dependent on Saudi Arabia, or Mexico, or Russia, or would you rather have a stake in each of these markets and have less concern about natural or artificial shortages in one?

Re: Iraq as puppet, I defer to Will (thanks, Will)[Interjection for bewildered blog-readers: Will is another commenter, who stated that other Arab nations' perception of us or of Iraq is less important than the Iraqi people's perception of their own government; if the people of Iraq can see their government acting in their interests and not at our behest, in time even electing leaders on a platform of "Americans out!," their perception that their government is in fact independent, not a puppet of the United States, is in the long run the only one that matters.]. But as to translators, surely you agree that a whole nation full of Arabic-speakers could be useful; as to intel, surely you realize that it's easier in general to infiltrate an enemy organization if you're a native speaker, and that Ba'athist elements in Iraq who may be turned could have interesting information for us (you may not realize or want to admit that, since it implies a connection between Saddam and Islamic terror, but there you go); as to interlocutors, OK, perhaps initially - but nonetheless, as an "infidel" woman, I can't even shake hands with an observant Muslim, and Condoleezza Rice is in that position as well. Even an Iraqi "puppet" diplomat would have more instant ability to defuse cultural prejudices than Sec. Rice would, and negotiation works a lot better when the weaker or aggrieved party at least doesn't feel as if it must jettison its principles, such as they are, from the get-go.

As to your "we'll have to do this once a generation - forever," you lost me there. Is the world's history entirely bereft of ethnicities who learned to live in civility, if not harmony? Or do you contend that Arabs just aren't up to it? (Yup, bait. But how else should I take the statement?) Shoot, even fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews are able to live side-by-side practically everywhere, not always without tension but almost always without violence, and we all know that even in recent history some Christian sects (and one Gospel was written/translated in such a way as to emphasize this misunderstanding) blamed Jews for Jesus's death - is there a more, you should excuse the expression, fundamental rift than that? What is necessary is in essence forty years of wandering in the desert, a tactic those aware of Judeo-Christian tradition will recognize as God's own way of dealing with culturally ingrained but harmful ideas.

We won't be necessary as a security force in Iraq for much longer. "Much longer" is not to be understood as months, however, but as years. It may well be longer than the remainder of Bush's term, but I am confident that it won't be as long as Saddam's reign. Possibly this period could have been shortened by different or more precipitate action immediately after the fall of Baghdad - but we'll never know, and we have what we have. It's time to stand still on the spot you choose: do you want to win, for ourselves, for Iraq, for the Middle East, or do you want to lose, so Bush looks bad or for the sake of your own ideology? (These "you's" are impersonal ones, not aimed at my commenter-opponent.) (It is of course possible that you would want to win for the sake of making the other side look bad, but because winning will have mostly good effects and losing will have mostly bad ones regardless of motive - I don't see that there's another way to view the outcomes - feel free to feed your desire to gloat, pro-winning types.)

I'm interested to hear comments concerning alternative views of what the result of "Iraq: Out in '09" would be. Please convince me, if you can: like all good Americans, I don't want to lose one more American soldier, one more contractor, one more innocent Iraqi, without good reason.

Side note that isn't really "side": yesterday my oldest informed me that soldiers on the battlefield might be able to talk encouragingly to their enemies, and convince them that peace is better than war. I stopped in my tracks: time for what is sometimes called a "come-to-Jesus" in Texas and points east o' there. He's a young kid, still, so I went against my nature and tried to keep it simple, but in essence here it is: peace is obviously better than war in a neutral sense, but there are some things worth fighting for, and when one of those things is in jeopardy you must fight or die, either individually or as a nation. Or, I presume, as a civilization or a species. Furthermore, your enemy will not always be amenable to encouraging words, and - again with a The Incredibles reference - will not hold back because your intentions are good. The way in which this is not a side discussion ought to be obvious: giving Iraqis the hope of and the ability to start and nurture a government of, by, and for their own people is a good reason to stay there until they can manage it alone.

Our neighbors to the north

This article from the Ottawa Citizen is instructive:

"If you are at the public trough, if you are collecting taxpayers' money, you should be following taxpayers' laws. And that means adhering to the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms]," says Kevin Bourassa, who in 2001 married Joe Varnell in one of Canada's first gay weddings, and is behind www.equalmarriage.ca.

...in an article titled "Gay advocates fight churches' charity status -
Institutions fear losing tax breaks if they oppose same-sex unions; Rightly so, gay-rights group says."

Over at Jane Galt's place, earlier this spring, we had a long and interesting discussion about gay marriage - or, more accurately, about the unforeseen consequences of changing major social structures such as marriage, with illustrative examples from divorce law in the early 20th century and the concept of "bastardy" somewhat later. The comment thread eventually wound down into my favorite potential logical fallacy - the slippery slope - countered by "That's a logical fallacy!" Thusly:

Gay-marriage opponent: If you can redefine marriage by taking gender out, why not number of participants? Why not age of participants?

Gay-marriage advocate: That's ridiculous!

Gay-marriage opponent: Why? Tell me what would prevent it, once the meaning of "marriage" is on the table.

Gay-marriage advocate: Now you're just being obtuse.

Gay-marriage opponent: Seriously, what would prevent it? While we're talking about social change, what about churches that refuse to marry gay couples?

Gay-marriage advocate: What about them?

Gay-marriage opponent: How long would it be before a church is accused by the ACLU of hate crime for discriminating against gay people?

Gay-marriage advocate: That's ridiculous!

And so on. I will say it again:

The "fallacy" part of the slippery-slope fallacy is not that the undesired end of the slope is possible, but that it is inevitable. And where we have contemporaneous evidence from a culture much like our own that the undesired end of the slope is approaching, "possibility" is not a high hurdle.

This issue is one I struggle with. Marriage has been a powerful shaper of my life. Not having to take extraordinary measures to be able to see my husband in the hospital, not having to adopt one another's children, being free from compulsion to testify against my husband - all right, so far I haven't had much specific use for many of the automatic rights of marriage, but it's nice to know they're there. And I have no animus against committed gay couples, or against gay people who want to find a life partner. (I do have some animus against "players" of whatever gender or orientation. Not my idea of how a person who wants to be good behaves.) So. What to do, when a group, through (I believe) no fault of their own, is unable to take advantage of benefits I enjoy, through no virtue of mine?

This isn't a case of conflicting rights, as the abortion debate is, or as slavery was once purported to be by some. If gay people were to marry, it wouldn't abrogate the right of straight people to marry. But - again let me direct you to the esteemed Jane - we are speaking of the unintended consequences of such a sweeping change. As Megan McArdle (a.k.a. Jane Galt, and no relation, by the way) points out, it's at the margins that the effects of change may be most readily observed. In this case, while the marriage of gay people would not affect my willingness to live in the state of matrimony, there are marginal cases whom it would affect (if I recall, one such case turned up in the comment thread to either the post above-referenced or in the follow-up post she wrote - a minister and wife who have stated their intent to divorce if gay people are allowed to contract legal marriage, because in their minds such a legal right would dilute the meaning of their own marriage). Marriage is good for society; it acts as a stabilizer, provides better for children, on average, than single parenthood or two-parent parenthood in which there is no legal bond between parents, and makes people happier, again on average, than single life. Where marriage falls into decline, other important social structures may as well: while my understanding of the data from Scandinavia and the Netherlands is that it's more correlative than causative, even the removal of all "marriage advantages" from marriage by the introduction of formal civil unions for opposite-sex couples accompanies a drop in both marriage rates and birthrates. So my answer is this:

Ahem. First let me say that, in contrast to the claims of some gay-marriage activists, the lack of a legal right on the books to gay marriage is not equivalent to slavery, and I believe that the epic indignity of slavery is lessened by the comparison. Now. My answer is that, with apologies to same-sex couples who want to commit to one another in perpetuity and desire the advantages that legal marriage conveys on that commitment, I think this is one of those times when we might act in haste and repent at leisure. Therefore, I believe we ought to act ever so slowly, taking careful note of the effects on more precipitate societies around us. If same-sex marriage is an overall good, it'll become clear (or at least clearer) in a generation; twenty years is not too long for society to hesitate when an institution that predates every society now in existence is in question.

Petit poulet

So my husband calls me from his commute today - something that has never happened in the history of his having a cellphone, except for once when he was almost at work and realized he'd left his computer at home. He listens to NPR in the car, and wanted to give me the four-one-one about Climate Change In Our Time. Apparently the bets are being hedged:

Q: Could global warming really slow down the Gulf Stream and cool Europe, or maybe even start a new ice age?

Unfortunately I'm not finding the actual Marketplace piece he was listening to, but the story linked above is the same one: global warming, even 1-2 degrees, could (a similar BBC article said "would") melt the Greenland icecap, diluting the salinity of the waters of the northern Atlantic and slowing or changing the course of the major source of Europe's relatively warm climate (as compared to other places at the same latitude). The results could devastate, among other things, the vineyards of France, and presumably change the range of the rain in Spain.

Well, darn it.

All right. I was trained as a geologist, many a year ago. It didn't take long to learn the fundamental lesson that the Earth is not a hunk of rock that can be held in stasis. Climate change is the norm; the fact that someone is around and able to watch it happen is the most significant difference between this time and, say, the Wisconsinan glaciation of some 20,000 years ago (when, surely, there were people around, but their interest was personal and far from academic). All the agitation of all the "concerned" groups in the United States and elsewhere will not halt the process.

Finally, "concerned" groups appear to have realized that "ordinary" people are on to this fact, and they've changed the nomenclature: no longer is the big bugaboo "The Coming Ice Age" (because many people reasonably believe that we're in an interglacial period anyway, and there will be another ice age no matter what we do) or "Global Warming" (because, first, the evidence is less than compelling in spots, and second, eternally, climate change is the norm) but "Abrupt Climate Change." Abrupt climate change, human-caused, to which the marvelous feedback loop of Mother Gaia will be unable to respond, and disaster will follow.

No, sorry. Disaster will not follow. The Earth, Mother Gaia if you will, has survived and thrived through absolutely no free oxygen but lots and lots of volcanogenic carbon dioxide, through abundant free oxygen (one of the more corrosive gases around, witness rust and tarnished silver), through meteor strikes, through the drift and smash of continental plates into and away from one another such that, at one point, the average summer temperatures in the center of the massive supercontinent known as Pangaea were perhaps twenty degrees hotter than the American interior desert today, through ice ages that buried Great Britain under a mile of glacier (it's still rebounding - measurably), through two-day catastrophic floods draining 3000-square-mile, 2000-foot-deep lakes that carved drainage systems amazing to shutterbugs today, and above all through that terrible scourge life in every available niche. She is as vital now as she was when the biggest land critter was a centipede.

Don't get me wrong: when the polar ice caps melt - again - Manhattan, if it still exists, will be Atlantis, and Orange County will bloom like the rose. I'm not saying that human life will not be affected. But let's frame this debate appropriately: it's not the Earth that's in danger. It's Western civilization's current condition, and only that. Stop Climate Change - as well try to stop an earthquake. The Sahara Desert used to be a garden; can we delude ourselves that its hardscrabble residents today would not welcome more rainfall? Niagara and Angel Falls are ephemeral; the Great Salt Lake is ephemeral; the Nile is ephemeral; the Himalayas are ephemeral. We may not be as ephemeral as all that, we may be able to cheat the fate of most other species through careful application of our intelligence to the problem of our survival under constantly changing conditions, but so far our entire timerange as a genus, not even a species, is only a fifth of that of the apatosaurus. (Ask your kids.)

It's hard for me to get too worked up about "Abrupt Climate Change!"; as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, forest fires, floods continue to wipe our little creations off the map no matter what disaster preparedness and resource management we bring to bear, I wonder just how much effect we humans actually have on the robust and stunningly adaptive system we call the Earth. A major component of my belief in God comes from the presence of our massive oceans - the majority of our home planet, filled with a substance almost unmatched as a heat sink, and with unicellular life that kindly photosynthesizes for our benefit no matter how much forestland we convert to agriculture. It's as if God provided us with "baby gates" to keep us from killing ourselves until such time as we learn to do dangerous things safely.

As such, I hesitate to support, much less encourage, any precipitate action on our part to monkey with the system. Efforts at forest management in this country led to a tangle of underbrush that burned faster, hotter, and more destructively than any natural fire, when it finally and inevitably burned. Efforts to contain the Mississippi in straight concrete banks did nothing noteworthy to stop her cycle of flooding. Efforts to move wild animals too often lead to human tragedy, the animals' failure to thrive in their new environment, or the proliferation of other species just as undesirable - think of rabbits in Australia, or, in the plant kingdom, the nightmare of kudzu in the American South.

I don't claim that we can do no wrong. We have the ability to create persistent toxins; we have been and presumably are being an agent of extinction (but remember that extinction is first and foremost a natural process - many creatures and environmental conditions have brought about extinctions); there is some evidence that it's possible for us to trigger earthquakes under some specific circumstances. What I do advocate is caution, especially of our tendency to hubris. We are only human. We are not the protectors of Mother Earth but just one set of her tenants - arguably the most creative, but not even close to knowledgeable or prescient enough to "save" her from herself.

Activism

Says here that activism is "a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue." Recent examples:

• Perorations against judicial activism from the Right, using terms such as "legislating from the bench" - while I agree in general, I do wish the Supes hadn't ruled the way they did in this case. It's not that I support legalizing marijuana, either growing or use, since I think we have as much as we can handle with alcohol, tobacco, and addictions to legally prescribed drugs - just that it seems to my non-lawyerly ears an overreaching of the Commerce Clause.
  
• Barbara Walters's expression of discomfort at the sight of a mother's breastfeeding her baby in the next airplane seat over sparks a nurse-in by breastfeeding moms. I sympathize with Ms. Walters, but as a breastfeeding mom I sympathize more with the mother trying to keep her baby quiet and well cared for in the confines of an airplane cabin, even in first class. Would Ms. Walters have preferred loud squalling from the seat next to her? Oh, wait - possibly she does not know that some babies refuse the bottle, or she believes that any such refusal is "temporary" and able to be overcome, which I suppose is true in the strictest sense - the most recalcitrant baby will presumably take a bottle if it is starving.
  
• Amnesty International's un-frickin'-believable equation of Gitmo and gulags brings human rights activism to a perigee. Not to mention their refusal to admit that the comparison is not just ludicrous on its face but weakens their entire mission.
  
• Here, with angry tears, the suggestion that the proposed "International Freedom Center," to be located on the site of the fallen World Trade Center, will call out to "great leaders, thinkers and activists'" to visit and hold forth on just how we go about seeking and interpreting freedom in this confusing world of ours. Of all places on earth, that one must be one of the least confused. Let them find another forum for their ideological explorations.
  

What am I going on about?

Sigh... It's this: activism is a luxury. It's a hobby. Not every time, not to everyone, but it's possible today to be an "activist" by refusing to go to McDonald's for a year (as a friend of ours did) or by giving money to that incurably silly Dr. Dean or by only buying organic produce (in blissful ignorance, I maintain, of the terrible cost to the world if everyone followed your lead).

I'm having word problems, in other words. I believe that one of the most human activities in which a human being can engage is to be serious about an important subject (and, I suppose, one of the greatest freedoms with which our system endows us is to be serious about a frivolous subject) - but to call oneself an "activist" is too facile, too noncommittal, and begs the question, "What action?" There's a great divide between not allowing your children to watch television and spiking trees... I abhor the word as much as I abhor the word "lifestyle." I never want to "have a lifestyle." I want, always, to live.

Similarly, I want to act, rather than to "be an activist." At present, the main way in which I want to act is to inform myself and to do my best to formulate my thoughts in writing such that others can learn some small thing from my interpretation of events... chalk that up to small dependents; my time outside these walls will come.

Sith blogging

It has to be done. Apologies in advance.

Episode IV and Episode III are not quite bookends in my life, but they're not far off. I was eleven when Star Wars came out, back before it was a franchise; my son is eight now, and saw Revenge of the Sith with me tonight. I told him afterward how much I wanted to be eight, or eleven, again, so that I could see this "episode" with the same easy suspension of disbelief that I'd been able to conjure up for the first/fourth "episode." (Obviously I didn't tell him the last clause of that sentence.)

Some random thoughts first:

• It's surprising how many worlds in that galaxy far, far away can sustain abundant life without so much as an acre of arable land.
  
• Hayden Christensen's eyebrows must have won him the role of Anakin. The eyebrows go a long way toward the whole "journey to the Dark Side" thing. And he's cute too, which helps in the tragedian sense.
  
• Padme must have had a line on some incredible skin care products; not only has she not aged a day since she first met Anakin back when he was, what, seven years old [Update: nine] - but even when confronted with the knowledge that her beloved husband has embraced Evil, her lip gloss is noteworthily perfect.
  
• Pregnant women long ago and far, far away obviously carried their unborn children either in a space warp of some kind or in checked luggage, based on Padme's delivery of twins the size of two-month-olds after having had such a tiny belly just the previous day that, from a distance, I thought the continuity people had messed up and forgotten to fit her with a belly at all. She was mighty light on her feet at that point, too.
  
• If I were a Jedi, I think I would have led the charge to change the uniform. Flowing robes look cool but would undoubtedly twist around your lightsaber arm or flop over your face at the wrong moment in a pitched acrobatic battle.
  
• But they do look cool, and on just about everyone. I want a cloak just like Obi-Wan's and Anakin's. The fabric, sadly, doesn't seem to hold up as well as the alloys that went into C3PO and R2D2, based on Ben Kenobi's disreputable appearance on Tatooine some eighteen years later. Possibly, though, he had to scrub it on rocks, which would take a toll on even the sturdiest material. [Update: And, come to think of it, Tatooine took a heck of a toll on Kenobi himself, didn't it?]
  
• Everyone seemed really to enjoy hand-to-hand combat in this movie; every lightsaber battle involved smiles and laughter - admittedly a lot of it sinister, but Kenobi's grins caught the light in each fight scene I can recall.
  
• Sword-fighting is hot, especially if you're good at it. Think of Inigo Montoya, of Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans (who also showed the S.A. factor of long rifles), of Carey Elwes in both Princess Bride and, more so believe it or not, Robin Hood: Men In Tights. (Don't take my word for it - watch him.) Anakin and Obi-Wan, being the best sword-fighters in the piece (since the older Force-users tend to do more "send the Force toward the opponent with a rigid claw-like hand" maneuvers), clearly had training in both grace and deportment, and also in exhibiting an economy of movement bespeaking Utter Confidence and Total Competence. Whoo-ee!
  
• Was that really Jimmy Smits? Huh. Jimmy Smits. Whaddaya know.
  
• Mark Hamill wasn't all that bad, on balance - better in V than in IV, kind of odd in VI. Carrie Fisher was fine once she lost the accent with which she did the first fifteen minutes of IV. Hayden Christensen seemed to improve over the course of III's two hours, I think primarily because he had fewer quips and more eyebrow-work to deliver toward the end.
  

On to the substance of my comments: The first half hour or so of Sith had me alternately rolling my eyes and laughing out loud, but at some point after that I got in touch with my Greek tragedy side and realized that there was actually something very classical about this movie. (I'll resist calling it a "film" - Star Wars, never to be known as A New Hope no matter what kids today think, wasn't a "film" and no other movie in the series ought to claim that moniker lest it be seen as a social climber.) Here I shall announce -

***SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!***

...although anyone who cares at all can figure out the way things have to happen in III in order to make IV, V, and VI possible. So. Greek tragedy. There is a love affair, destined to end in death: the "best" possible death, too, for a tragedy - death in childbirth. There is a flawed hero, his pride and impetuousness destined to lead to his downfall. There is a prophecy, destined to be fulfilled by the flawed hero, who does eventually fulfill it but not... just... yet. There are demigods whose behavior is more noble than that of the gods, who - in this version - are almost all amoral and sinister. There is a terrible bargain, which draws our hero down the slippery slope of evil, his pride allowing him to believe that he'll be able to stop before he falls into the pit at its end.

Folks, it wasn't bad.

Episode III had to do three things. First, it had to explain all the loose-hanging plot points from IV, V, and VI. Check. Second, it had to have a story of its own. Check, though it was a bit of a stretch at the beginning. Third, and most importantly, it had to provide a credible reason for Anakin's transformation into Vader, along with a believable sequence of events carrying him through it. By resorting to the classical approach, Lucas actually pulled it off: the combination of love, a prescient vision of death, and a deal with the Devil to hold that death at bay - well, it worked for Frank Herbert in the second of the Dune trilogy, though he forced his hero to be heroic rather than flawed, and allow his love to die. In fact, it works every time, as a concept.

As screenwriting and acting, maybe not so much. I haven't seen Episode II (but I will now, just to complete the cycle); I understand the "love affair" between Padme and Anakin is not exactly Romeo and Juliet, or even Maddy Hayes and whatsisname on "Moonlighting." Knowing that the suspension of disbelief over that plot device alone was a big problem for many watchers, I was predisposed not to believe it too readily in this movie - and Natalie and Hayden didn't give me a lot of reason to change my mind. Still. Once I made up my mind that the story alone, even if fairly woodenly written and played, was enough to catch my interest and even tug at my heart a bit, I was able to enjoy how very beautiful Hayden and Natalie are, how dead she was going to end up and how disfigured and inwardly destroyed he was going to end up, how fantastically Alec Guinness played the older, weary Obi-Wan, his wisdom hard-won from years in the desert - who knew, back in 1977, that he'd turn out to have been so impulsive as a young Jedi? Makes you see his exhortations to Luke to be calm, be patient, let go, in a whole new light.

All right then. I return to my first statement: I wish I could have been eleven while I watched this movie; I would have been more credulous, certainly, but also more forgiving. Those of us who grew up with Star Wars have expected each episode to grow up with us. When I was a pre-teen, Star Wars was just right: black and white, good and evil with the good guys always winning in the end, never ever by cheating. The Empire Strikes Back hit in the fullness of my teens, getting the hook in good and deep about scoundrels: my first marriage might owe something to that darn conflicted Han Solo. Return of the Jedi reached me as I was graduating from high school, blurring the lines between right and wrong but still ending happily (all too happily, with those foolish teddy bears. Oh well).

But Episode I didn't come about for another sixteen years. Lucas made the right decision as a moneymaker to address it to a new generation of fans, keeping some character and story continuity to appease us oldsters, but in essence, it was aimed at the teenage me instead of the wife-and-mother-and-career-woman me. Was it the right decision as a filmmaker? Who am I to say? Because here's the thing: for all my pretensions, I couldn't have written this screenplay. It may be unsubtle and, at base, classically derivative upon analysis, but I couldn't have conceived of this as a solution to the threefold problems I mentioned a few paragraphs up. As Yoda might (but wouldn't) put it, smart am I, but create something such as this, I could not.

Standing in the breach

Long time no blog... Blame my sister and her fiance, whose impending nuptials are taking a good chunk of my free time. I don't grudge them a minute - but it does get in the way of my timeliness!

The recent Newsweek faux pas (if that isn't too innocuous a term for a mistake resulting in seventeen or so deaths and hundreds of injuries) has revived the languishing Abu Ghraib fiasco and a general sense, in the media, of distrust for the American military. I'm late to the table, but it's time for me to say my say on those who stand in the breach for us.

The U.S. military is heir to the British, of course. To understand all the implications of this inheritance is far beyond me, but some things are obvious: the British military was and is synonymous with honor and duty. That's not to say there haven't been wartime atrocities committed by the British, or by Americans; but these two and their "relatives," at any rate, explicitly rejected that earlier, longstanding military inheritance of rape and spoils as the proper right of the victor. The world has followed suit, at least publicly - but we can see the vestiges of prior custom among UN peacekeepers, for instance.

In America, the military still makes men - and women, these days. Rude, haphazard teenagers undergo a scant few weeks of basic training and begin to metamorphose, if they make it through; they stand straight, their clothes and shoes and hair and bodies are clean and neat, they know when to look someone in the eye and when to keep eyes front, and they begin to learn about esprit. They begin to learn that they are responsible not only for themselves but for the well-being of their entire unit, and that their unit is responsible for completing its mission, on which may ride the fate of many more civilians who do not or cannot wear the uniform. They learn appropriate pride - not vanity but a knowledge of their own worth and the worth of the guy next to them and, as well, the worth of the ones who would be undefended if not for them. Some military people may secretly - or not so secretly - look down on civilians, but at the same time they realize that the right to live as you wish, the essence of American civilianhood, is unutterably precious and worth fighting for.

Another inheritance: in old Britain, the military was a conduit between classes. More surely than through education, assassination, religious vocation, or simple deceit, a patient man could improve his family's lot by joining the Navy. Perhaps he himself might never achieve the officer corps, but his son could have that chance. And an officer could interact socially with almost anyone.

In the United States, the military was also a conduit from social ignominy "upward." More: it was, and still is in some areas, an absolutely unparallelled conduit from the generational poverty and despair suffered by some Americans of color, to something much better: the knowledge and the power of self-determination. There's nothing like knowing you are the primary author of your destiny to raise you from perceived victimhood to self-reliance, and many, many Americans of all ethnicities, including the white underclass that gets no play in popular media, have first experienced that knowledge when they joined up, made it through boot, sewed on the first stripes they earned, and passed in review surrounded by their new family. Not every member of the military becomes an automatic success, either in the military itself or later in the civilian world - but if the world into which you were born took it as given that you'd die in the bed you were born in, no better off than the squalling baby you once were, the military offers a stunning alternative that rests almost entirely on your own commitment to it.

Unfortunately it's not available to everyone. Because the mission of the military isn't to be a social program but rather is a serious obligation of government recognized even by libertarians, the disabled can't participate in it, at least not so far. Possibly as we are able to automate more and more of the work of war, some forms of physical disability in some areas may become irrelevant. Mental disability never will: there's no such thing as cannon fodder in America's infantry.

Aside from the almost complete absence of serious illness and disability (both are probably less common among military dependents than in the general population, I'd wager, because at least one parent has passed stringent physical and mental testing - and anyone who doesn't think that boot camp constitutes mental testing has never seen boot camp), the military world is a microcosm of society, with the tails of the curve cut off. There are good people and bad people, but not many saints or sociopaths. There are very smart people and not-so-smart people, but few supergeniuses (they're too nonconformist to cope with the conformity a military structure requires) and no clearly developmentally disabled people. Some are fundamentalist in their faiths; some are lukewarm; some are outright atheists. Crimes are committed, some types perhaps in greater proportion than in the civilian community; I'm preaching rather than reporting research here, but intuitively it seems obvious that that can happen when you select for wolves and reject dogs: the base level of aggression is higher in the military than in the civvie world as a whole, though not higher than in some civilian sectors (teamsters, police officers, any inner city). So there's domestic violence, assault, rape, murder - but these violent crimes are not as common as you might think, because of the self-discipline that is the underlayment of all military members' lives, not to mention the swift and sure judgment that's waiting for anyone who's caught. Neither is a guarantee of self-control, but both are strong deterrents.

Military service tends to run in families. I myself am a barren twig in this regard: my father was career military, but I decided not to join up because I was uncertain about whether I too would be willing to go career. In my seventeen-year-old mind, I was half afraid of how different military life might be from military dependence, and half mindful of the un-recouped cost of my training if I decided not to reup after my six post-training years. All right, maybe I was more than half afraid... Regardless, I turned down my best chance to follow in my dad's footsteps, and it's about the closest thing I have to a regret now. I can't truly regret it, because a different life after high school would have meant, well, a different life after high school, basically - and I love my husband and my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything. But I have a wide patriotic streak that I've never put sufficiently on display because of that decision half my life ago. And I hate being labelled a chickenhawk, because the stinging truth of it is that the chance to serve my country was in a letter in my hand and I passed it by. If I had had a crystal ball -

Futile speculation. I can't imagine not having my kids, not being married to the non-military guy I chose.

Moving on. American journalism seems to run, if not in families, then in classes - or at least the process of becoming a journalist seems to have predictable and homogeneous results, one of which seems to me to be passive voice-abuse. But more to the point, journalists who succeed in garnering a place in a major media organization seem to start from the premise that the American military is tantamount to the Roman military: killing for salt, looting for profit, raping for fun, torturing out of ignorant spite. It's frankly weird. It's like comparing a brand-new laptop to an abacus: they share one function - arithmetic, or war; and one physical characteristic - being rectangular, or being human. Yet the journalistic trade seems not to understand the distinction.

THe Hugh Hewitt interview with Terry Moran of ABC speaks to this strangeness. As Moran himself says, "There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous." That's a telling admission, I think.

Not for the faint of heart

John Bolton is up against it, as Condoleezza Rice was before him, as Bush appointees to the federal bench continue to be. And President Bush stands mute, or mostly mute, as the Democrats and their PR arm, the "news media," rant and wave their arms and invoke Nazi imagery (something that's simply not allowed in the blogosphere if you want to be taken seriously, unless you're over at Kos, so please forget I mentioned it). Every now and then I get a little peeved at our fearless leader for not sticking up for his subordinates more loudly and publicly.

Then I think about it, and I realize that he's got it exactly right.

We are, after all, attempting to be a majority of one, we American conservatives. Those who support the Bush administration's policies are going to be solitary voices in unfriendly rooms most of the time. If they buckle under the pressure of questioning by Democratic senators, if they shrink from the ghastly spotlight of the New York Times (some swear it puts ten years and ten pounds on you, unless you're at least a vegan from the Upper East Side), if they quail when their fashion choices or hairstyles become fodder for the lefty blogs, they have no place representing the US in 2005.

See, for instance (this will probably be the only time I ever link directly to Kos - enjoy it if it's your thing, then get the bleep on over there where you belong), this Kos entry claiming that Bolton ("our favorite mustached villain") is dead in the water versus Rich Lowry's discussion of Democrat tactics against Bolton - hint: the "mustached villain" comment is par for the course. I'd like to point out something about the Kos piece: its source is the NYT, which should surprise no one, and this phrase - "Four of 10 Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have expressed concern about Mr. Bolton, on a panel where one Republican vote against him could keep the nomination from reaching the Senate floor" - strikes me as a clear indication of which party is thinking and which is jerking its knees in partisan unison. This is not to say I have even the time of day for the "four of 10 Republicans" if their qualms about Bolton are based on the silliness that's been brought to light thus far - especially Mr. Specter, Republican In Name Only.

All I hope now is that before President Bush names a name, he first meets privately with the owner of the name and says to that man or that woman, "If you accept, you're goin' to have to cowboy up." Those on the coasts may take that colorful phrase as some kind of sign of childish bravado; those from Texas will understand what it would mean to him.

Update: PowerLine has much more on Bolton last night and today - or more to the point, on those opposing Bolton and, by extension, President Bush:

Vreeland [who yesterday claimed to have been a colleague of Bolton's at State in the early '90s, and who has leveled harsh criticism at Bolton's diplomatic skills] was a member of, and financial contributor to, a group called "Diplomats & Commanders for Change," which opposed President Bush in November's election. The organization's mission statement says that its members "are deeply concerned by the damage the Bush Administration has caused to our national and international interests."

That's what this is about: the attack on Bolton is being orchestrated and carried out by the administration's political enemies, as part of their effort to subvert the President's foreign policy.

Oh, and you may recall Melody Townsel, the former Moms Opposing Bush leader who claims that Bolton spent one wild night chasing her down hotel corridors, an accusation that is met with disbelief by anyone not actively working to bring him down. PowerLine (via Little Green Footballs via DANEgerus) notes that:

she has written her close friends at the Daily Kos to alert them to a history of plagiarism which she says will be used against her by Republicans.

I strongly recommend checking out the LGF link - it contains the text of her email to the Kossacks.

The only surprising thing about the Powerline pieces to me is that the brilliant John Hinderaker writes as if there's anything surprising about the source of opposition to Bush appointees' being the usual suspects (the Anti-Bush League).

The washout system works

I was just listening to that precious broadcast gem, "This American Life" on NPR. I can't find a link to a transcript at the moment - it may not be up yet - but when it comes up I'll include it here. [Update: here it is.] Good grief.

The final segment, in brief: a young man tries to get into the NSA, and fails. He was a pothead and-so-on in high school, but left all that behind in college and undertook to train himself ideally for a career in intelligence, achieving a grad school spot in foreign affairs at a top university and learning Chinese, and simultaneously with grad school applied to the NSA, a grueling process that includes a polygraph test. He failed the polygraph test - miserably - because his stress reactions wouldn't stop even for the easy and obviously truthful questions. Ultimately, under the interrogator's prompting to "dig deep" for whatever the reason might be for his overreaction, he "confessed" to seeing child pornography over the internet, something like 50 images. It was an event train that he didn't see coming: he's terribly stressed because he wants the job so much, he blabs unnecessary details all over the place about his drug use and every possible indiscretion he can think of (including the fact that he's gay, which, when the interrogator looked at him in puzzlement, he said was "illegal in some states" - untrue, though certain types of sexual activity regardless of who's doing them may still be illegal on the books, and unprosecuted), the interrogator tells him he's failing and urges him to seek the buried reason for it, he says he may have inadvertantly seen an underage person in internet porn but he has no way to tell, she presses him - he either has or he hasn't, and he says all right, he has then, she presses for a number of images, he comes up with 10, she presses further with veiled threats that if he's wrong, even by only one image, he's still lying, he changes his answer to 50...

Evidently to his surprise, he was rejected, and the letter he received gave the reason as "due to [his] involvement with child pornography." He got a lawyer in case the government decided to prosecute for this felony he had admitted to but not committed, took a second polygraph exam that he passed without problems, but the government would neither reconsider his application nor "clear his name." Unbelievably, he later applied at the CIA, and was rejected because of his failed NSA bid. (The "unbelievable" part is that he applied, not that he was rejected.)

Eventually, as in "in the last minute of the segment," the reporter got around to what should have been the point: the young man was absolutely, patently not suited to intelligence work, as he'd "cracked" even when confronted with a friendly interrogator. Yet the sense of the injustice of it all prevailed all the way to the very last sentence, in which the reporter said he would not reveal the young man's new home or job at the man's request, because now he realized the value of keeping some things to himself.

The young man named his failing "immaturity." He apparently still rails at the irony that people later found to have been Soviet spies "make the cut" but that he, completely loyal, completely dedicated to grooming himself for exactly this kind of work, did not. Can he really believe that he was ever cut out for human intelligence work - indeed, any intel work? Here are some qualities that ought to disqualify an applicant: Immaturity. Confessing to crimes not committed. "Diarrhea of the mouth." Lack of judgment. Inability to visualize the end of the road before taking a a completely unreasonable fork.

Obviously the system is not perfect; our intel services have been under heavy fire for believing their own stories too much, for building up said stories on shaky evidentiary foundations, and indeed for inadvertantly harboring Soviet asps in their figurative and collective bosom. But at least this story provides some indication that the people who wash out are the people who ought to wash out.

If we outlaw invasions...

...only dictators will invade.

Heh, as Prof. Reynolds would say. That Mark Steyn, he's something else.

Jamie: the sequel

Bought new unmentionables today (obviously without breaking the bank, if you follow my link)... Soon I expect to burst out of my cocoon of mommyness, spend a little time curing my silk-and-lace wings, and then catch the wind again, and taste the nectar, and altogether celebrate that I was I before I was a mom, no matter how Mom I always intend to be.

Take that, ZPG!

Rather a thrown-together post. Apologies in advance.

Mark Steyn, who somehow I missed all this time but who's swiftly jumped to the very top of my reading list, has this to say about babies, or lack thereof:

In practice, a culture that thinks Terri Schiavo's life in Florida or the cleft-lipped baby's in Herefordshire has no value winds up ascribing no value to life in general. Hence, the shrivelled fertility rates in Europe and in blue-state America: John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.

The 19th-century Shaker communities were forbidden from breeding and could increase their number only by conversion. The Euro-Canadian-Democratic Party welfare secularists seem to have chosen the same predicament voluntarily, and are likely to meet the same fate. The martyrdom culture of radical Islam is a literal dead end. But so is the slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism. This is the political issue that will determine all the others: it's the demography, stupid.

The Herefordshire (UK) baby he mentions was aborted because of a treatable cleft palate. The doctors responsible for the decision(?) and the abortion were not prosecuted for their action because authorities were convinced that they were acting "in good faith." What prosecution they might have faced if they hadn't been successful in convincing authorities of their good faith, I don't know; unlike the Supreme Court, I'm not terribly interested in the laws of other countries, at least as they relate (or don't) to our own system of laws and jurisprudence.

All over the board today, aren't I?

Steyn's op-ed piece is titled "The strange death of the liberal West" and deserves a read in toto. The upshot: our need for particular resources and our ability to produce them change over time - e.g., the oil that we were supposed to have run out of by now - but the changes rely on one thing: human ingenuity. Human ingenuity, it is patently obvious, is only available when there are humans. Falling birthrates denote a loss of the one resource we absolutely can't do without, he says.

When we're having a kid-intensive moment, my husband and I joke that we only ever wanted two children - sometimes these two, sometimes those two... In light of Steyn's comments, tonight at least I'm altogether happy to have had three.

"Be not afraid"

In the death of Pope John Paul II, the freedom fighter, the defender of life, the one who asked forgiveness and who forgave, the man who sought daily that his life be a reflection of the life of Christ, we are diminished and we are exalted. He was great, because he stood like a rock in the stormwaves of the end of the second millenium, sometimes submerged in the froth of rhetoric and disapproval but never washed away. He was great, because he placed his hope in his Lord and he garnered his strength from the Gospel: he was great, because he never attributed greatness to himself but to God alone. If the cardinals have among their number a man who can be as great, let the white smoke rise quickly over their decision to elevate that man. If they have no one as great to choose, let God lead them to choose the one who will at least not detract from the greatness of his predecessor.

In my time I've criticized Catholicism for its resistance to change - the changes I considered good, at any rate, such as the ordination of Godly women. I'm Episcopalian now because Catholicism was hard bread for my husband; I wanted to worship with him, even if it meant accepting a doctrine different from the one under which I was raised, and my criticisms made my decision easier. But today I say: Bravo, John Paul, for not listening to my kind. Change for the sake of "evolving standards of decency" or a "modern understanding" of good is a dangerous matter.

I believe that the Catholic church may eventually allow women to become priests. They may, on the other hand, decide to allow non-celibate - married - men to become priests, though I think the women have a better chance, sooner. But to embrace either of these changes because of a social evolution encompassing only forty-odd years, in an institution spanning two millenia and with roots much older, would have been foolhardy; there's no hurry. Conservative? Yes, John Paul was conservative, and so should any Pope be. The Holy See should not innovate; it should preserve the heart of the faith intact, and move as slowly and inexorably as a glacier to change its underlying landscape.

That his death follows so closely on the death of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo is a powerful evocation of John Paul's papal message that we are not to be afraid. Calls to kill Terri, in the guise of "letting her die with dignity," "giving her release," or "fulfilling her wishes," were rooted in fear: our fear of helplessness, of uselessness, of indignity exposed, of mysterious suffering we cannot quantify that can only be answered by death. John Paul's message, the message of his words illustrated by his long, difficult, private life made public for our edification, is that when we place our trust in God, we may not be spared suffering, but we will surely be given the resources to withstand it.

More than that: to triumph over it, even if the world sees only defeat.

An examined life: requiem for Terri Schindler Schiavo

She's dead, at last. Thirteen days after her last meal, Terri Schindler Schiavo has finally succumbed. As the horrible process went on, doctors confidently stated that she was beyond pain; thank God her doctors were not so confident in practice, and at least eased with morphine any suffering her twists and moans may have indicated.

I am Terri's friend. A young woman who, when she was able to choose her friends, might have numbered them in the dozens, can now claim them in the millions - or, more accurately, cannot deny them, even if some are friends she would never have chosen herself. What we share, we friends of Terri, is belief that even though she was critically impaired, even though she had little if any chance for improvement under the best of conditions, the fact of her humanity was unaltered. We reject the term "vegetable" as applied to a human being. We reject a "right to die" articulated on her behalf by a husband who, at best, was weary of the demands her continued life placed on him. We reject an equivalence between the enforced cessation of nourishment for a woman not ill and the turning off of machines that replace the functions of non-functioning organs. We reject the obscene notion that "quality of life" can be determined by someone outside the life in question, and that a public opinion poll ought to bear on an innocent woman's right to continue to breathe.

This is what we share: we recognize that Terri's worth did not, never did, depend on her ability to write a letter or walk across a room or talk on the phone. Her worth was not determined by, but was amply demonstrated by, her family's refusal to ignore the signs that she still inhabited her own body, however imperfectly - their continual treatment of her as their daughter and their sister.

And her worth was not diminished in any tiniest amount by her faithless husband's denial of it. His mouth formed the words "Terri's wish"; his life spelled out in bold block capitals, "MICHAEL'S WISH." Whether Terri herself would have chosen these last years is a question we can never answer; but we can certainly answer the secondary question of who believed her to have value, even in a hospice room.

I am Terri's friend, though she never knew me and I never met her. I'm swallowing past a lump in my throat, typing with tear-blurred eyes, because God refuses to waste even this sad and dreadful hour, even these long and grueling years. A pretty woman who might have lived out her days shopping and going to PTA meetings and pursuing a career inside or outside her home, God has transformed into a warning signpost at the border of the dark woods we know as the "right to die": "Beware - wild animals!"

The slippery slope is a favorite fallacy in basic logic classes. The formulation is simple: a result will inevitably follow from a starting point. The fallacious part is the inevitability, not the following. Therefore: as often in the past thirteen days as I have heard kind people suggest that Terri should have been injected with enough morphine or some other humane drug to carry her off quickly rather than allow her to linger, I cannot agree. To allow doctors to assist suicide is to grant them license to do harm at the request of the patient. The harm is final; otherwise we would be talking about a kind of sado-masochistic relationship that the well-adjusted might be able to permit though not to condone. And the myth that suicide is a private matter is one that we as a society have chosen, correctly, to repudiate. To allow doctors to assist killing that is not suicide, such as to bring about Terri's swifter death, would be to grant them license to do harm to a person at the request of another. In this case, the "other" was a construct of a demonstrably estranged husband and - most horribly - a court of law. The only grace we can cling to in the behavior of this construct was that it did not ask or urge a physician to speed Terri to her death. It killed her, not passively, but at least it did not seek professional help to do it more quickly.

One terminus - a word I choose deliberately - of this slippery slope is involuntary euthanasia. While that end is not inevitable, it is absolutely necessary that we know that one path down this wooded hill leads there. The insistence by some that this "family matter" was not the province of government is an empty one; this "family matter" strikes at the deepest convictions we hold: that life is an inalienable right; that the taking of life without due process is not permissible; that the defense of life is a proper role of governments among men; that where the rights of individuals meet in conflict, the proper role of government is to act such that the fewest or smallest rights are lost. Here, the judiciary decided that the right of a husband to speak for his wife in requesting her death, though her wishes were at best inferred from minimal conversation in questionable context by compromised witnesses, trumped the right of the woman to go on living. In essence, the right to cause death trumped the right to life, in the initial judgments. And, in later judgments, the right of the judiciary to rule unchallenged trumped the right of the legislative and executive branches to act as a check and balance on it.

God lets nothing go to waste, not even this sad and dreadful hour, not even these long and grueling years. We will reap - something - from this hour, from these years. God cherish Terri's soul, and God help us choose the right path down this wooded hill.

Halliburton Part II(b): The performance

Continuing in my exploration of Halliburton's role in the rebuilding of Iraq, I want to move on (so to speak), first, briefly, to the issue of cost-plus contracting for government work.

The LOGCAP contract is described at length here:

• The cost-reimbursement pricing structure of the LOGCAP contract is
  necessary to provide the flexibility and responsiveness required to support military
  contingency operations. Under a cost-reimbursement type contract, there are no preestablished prices and services. Instead, there are “estimated” and “target” costs, but the Government is obligated to pay the contractor for all incurred costs which are reasonable, allowable, and allocable to the contract. Under all cost-reimbursement type contracts, including the LOGCAP contract, the Government assumes the majority of the risk related to the cost of performance. Because of this, intensive monitoring and oversight of the contractor’s costs are required when a cost-reimbursement type contract is used.
  
• For LOGCAP services during an EVENT, the Government (i.e., appropriate
  military commander or MACOM) identifies its requirements and submits them to the
  contractor through the Government contracting officer. The contractor then quickly
  develops a rough order of magnitude (ROM) estimate of the costs and provides this
  cost estimate, along with an estimated performance time schedule, back to the
  Government. After the rough estimates of costs and performance times are reviewed,
  adjusted if necessary, and accepted, the necessary funding must be provided by the
  organization requiring the support.
  
• These funds, along with the statement of requirements, are provided to the
  Government contracting officer who then reviews the funds and services to ensure that
  they conform to contracting and financial policies. After this check is completed, the Government contracting officer may issue an order to the contractor to perform the work. The prices for the services are still not firm, since the contractor remains entitled to reimbursement of his incurred costs. A partnership among the contracting officer, the contractor, and the organization receiving the support is formed to constantly monitor and control costs while ensuring responsive, effective services.
  
• Contractor profit is expressed in terms of a base fee and an award fee which
  is payable for performance. An award fee pool is available to the contractor for above average performance under the LOGCAP contract. An award fee plan has been
  developed to focus contractor effort towards the areas of performance, coordination,
  flexibility, responsiveness, and cost control. The contractors performance is monitored by an appointed LOGCAP Award Fee Board. The Fee Determining Official (FDO) is the Commander, CETAD. The Award fee Board meets on a periodic basis to evaluate
  the contractors performance and recommends an award fee to the FDO. MACOM
  personnel may input to the Board during both planning and contingency execution
  phases. Input on contractor performance is encouraged from supported commanders
  and from the Government contracting officer staff in the area of operations.

In other words, the perception that Halliburton did a lot of work, presented the government with a bill, and received a check in return leaves out many steps and significant oversight. Importantly, the oversight is provided by government contract administrators, who are not only not appointed but often career civil servants, and therefore not likely to have been in Halliburton's or Cheney's pocket, barring outright bribery of individual administrators, which I've never seen alleged. My experience with the Feds and with private contracting, from both sides of the table, would tend to indicate the opposite, in fact: with so little to hold over the heads of contractors, those responsible for administering contracts seem to wield their one weapon - oversight - with a good deal of determination. That is to say, government administrators can get high on power, not to put too fine a point on it and not to offend any who may read these lines; given that the monies in question are Our Tax Dollars, I'd rather have the contract admin staff scrutinizing each expenditure than rubber-stamping invoices any day.

On to Halliburton's performance under LOGCAP (see my earlier post for a discussion of LOGCAP). Recall that the time period in question involves Halliburton's second time around: Halliburton was re-selected for the LOGCAP contract in 2001, after having been the LOGCAP contractor during the Clinton administration from 1992 (at LOGCAP's inception) until 1997.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41 from March 1989 until January 1993. It's widely reported, but citations are vague to invisible, that in 1992-ish Cheney commissioned Brown & Root to perform one or two studies on military outsourcing, then awarded Brown & Root a contract (LOGCAP) that essentially gave them everything that their own study or studies concluded was optimal. As we have seen, the military takes a different view: LOGCAP, conceived in 1985 as a set of regional contracts for military support, wasn't working well. The need for several prime contractors, one for each region, was inefficient, both logistically and in terms of contract administration. In addition, local commanders resisted the presence of untrained civilian personnel in their areas of operations. It had already been concluded that a single global contract was the way to go. I'm having the devil's own time finding detail on the study or studies referenced; however, it's clear that Brown & Root, as a major oilfield services provider with the means to perform considerable additional support functions, would have been a logical choice for LOGCAP in the era of Desert Storm.

Cheney left office along with Bush 41 in January 1993. In 1995, he became CEO of Halliburton. Did he get the job because of his political connections? What good would they have done in the Clinton era? Surely "It's time for a change" should also have meant that any sweetheart contracts awarded under G.H.W. Bush would not be renewed under Clinton. So unless Halliburton was unfairly awarded LOGCAP in 1992 only because Cheney took a liking to them and the Clinton administration, which actually signed the LOGCAP contract, failed to notice the dearth of substance in the rationale for hiring Brown & Root, I have to conclude that Cheney's CEO-ship was not the result of Brown & Root's LOGCAP status in 1995.

Cheney resigned as CEO of Halliburton in 2000, having aggressively moved the company into the international sphere. Halliburton, like many other corporations during the '90s, benefited greatly from the global marketplace, and under Cheney's leadership became a world player where before it had been much more a national one. LOGCAP was up for re-award in 2001, after Cheney had already "cashed out" of Halliburton, to the extent that he could, in preparation for the 2000 Presidential race. Cheney's deferred compensation package (one common reason for a CEO to receive deferred compensation rather than a lump sum would be to avoid too great a cash outflow in one quarter, for instance) was structured in such a way that he would not benefit if Halliburton stock went up, and he took out insurance to protect his investment in the event that it went down. Further, he is donating the after-tax proceeds from the exercise of his stock options to charity. Link here - a sort of "hostile witness" link that nevertheless states my point.

The re-award of LOGCAP to Halliburton in 2001, as I stated in my earlier post may well have been colored by 9/11. I have not yet found a timeline to indicate how long the contract-award process is - it could easily be over a year, which would mean it would have been initiated by the (possibly lame-duck, depending on the timing) Clinton White House, on schedule. But even if the entire process took place under Bush 43, the Halliburton award still makes sense: the winner had to be an American company, it had to be able to provide oilfield services, it had to face the very real possibility of work in a Middle East combat zone with fast-moving military operations going on all around it. Who better? Who had last performed under these circumstances? Who was now, by dint of '90s growth and investment, that much more able to meet the military's needs?

Now, there are other issues one could discuss here, particularly CEO compensation, government contracting procedures, and the use of civilian contractors in war zones. But there's no noteworthy wrongdoing going on. Is there small-scale manipulation and abuse of the system? I wouldn't doubt it; but those things happen at levels far below CEO/VP, as anyone who's seen an episode of M*A*S*H involving making a phone call home or getting barbecued ribs shipped overseas can easily recall.

Next up: overcharges.

Cri de coeur

I'm anguished. I think Terri Schindler Schiavo may die, unspoken-for. The attempts to speak for her continue to echo in not just metaphorical but real halls of justice; but her death is one day closer now, and another door has just been bolted shut.

I don't know the truth of the matter; I know that her family has mustered impressive testimony and affidavits that, at minimum, call for her reevaluation based on modern neurology, not the decade-old opinion of a non-neurologist doctor neurologist [corrected 4:33PM EST 3/23/2005 - my apologies] who, in the words of the Rev. Robert Johansen in the National Review Online, "seems to have a knack for finding PVS. Cranford also diagnosed Robert Wendland as PVS. He did so in spite of the fact that Wendland could pick up specifically colored pegs or blocks and hand them to a therapy assistant on request. He did so in spite of the fact that Wendland could operate and maneuver an ordinary wheelchair with his left hand and foot, and an electric wheelchair with a joystick, of the kind that many disabled persons (most famously Dr. Stephen Hawking) use. Dr. Cranford dismissed these abilities as meaningless. Fortunately for Wendland, the California supreme court was not persuaded by Cranford’s assessment." Dr. Cranford diagnosed Terri Schindler Schiavo as in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS, after a mere 45-minute examination; a second doctor, Dr. Peter Bambakidis, afforded her half an hour. PVS is generally diagnosed over months of observation, not minutes.

I'm sick over it. I'm heartbroken. If you don't know that Terri Schindler Schiavo responds to instructions, that she discerns and turns toward familiar voices even over music and unfamiliar voices, that she shows preference for some pieces of music over others by consistently vocalizing during them, that she has been denied even the basic range-of-motion physical therapy that would help to straighten her limbs for over a decade, that nurses testify that she has been spoon-fed in the past and has not choked but that the court ordered medical personnel to desist from feeding her this way because she might choke, that she has never choked on her own saliva yet does not drool, that a bone scan appeared to show broken bones for which she was never treated, yet her husband's desire to have her cremated immediately after death has been upheld by the same court over the pleas of her family to preserve her body for examination first... well, now you do know those things. If you remain convinced that she does not deserve a hearing in a court that has not patently demonstrated itself as unfriendly to her, and that her husband, with his common-law wife and their two children, is her proper advocate, well, my living will will explicitly keep you from my bedside.

I don't want to sow division, honestly I don't. But where there is this much question, should we not err on the side of life rather than death?

Sideline on Heinlein - UPDATED

I keep running across the Dean.

I started reading Heinlein when I was about eleven, if I recall - his juvies, of course, probably with Have Space Suit, Will Travel among the first. I plowed through them as fast as I could; my dad, a lifelong fan, owned many, possibly most, of the juveniles, and nearly all of the adult fiction Heinlein had published by that time. I read Glory Road, my first Heinlein "grownup" book, in one summer day when I was about 12, and Stranger in a Strange Land at about 14 or 15, having worked my way through the less odd selections before then. In retrospect I'm surprised it took me that long - and in fact my memory may be faulty; I'm going from "sense memories" of what my bedroom looked like while I was reading each book, and to tell the truth, none of these memories are all that definitive. I can say for certain that I read The Number of the Beast when it was first published; I read the serialized first chapter in the now-defunct Omni magazine, rushed out and got the book as soon as it was available in paperback (impecunious as I was), and read it in a hurry just before the family moved to England when I was about to turn 16.

In all that time I never met another kid who had read Heinlein.

I continued to buy his books as soon as they came out, and to track down the few I didn't already own; I even took a course in college in which he was the subject of a unit. (I was deeply disappointed by it, but I have to admit that the prof who taught the course finally articulated for me the pattern I'd known about for close to a decade by that time: the three-stage Heinlein character.) I'm writing aobut him now because I just came across a new(?!) book of his in the library, some 15 years after his death. It's his first "novel," though Spider Robinson, who wrote its intro, was correct in calling it a series of lectures loosely knit together by a story line. It's more like a long cultural essay than a novel. And I've been discovering over the past year or so that Heinlein is much more popular in the blogosphere than I ever thought he was among "real" people. Selection bias? No doubt... but still, his contribution to the cultural landscape that's under construction even now appears to be profound.

I understand there's a biography in the works. I can hardly wait to read it - all my sordid questions answered. Virginia Heinlein, who I just discovered was his third wife rather than his second, was my hero for years, though all I knew about her was her wavery reflection in his books and the contents of one intro to The Past Through Tomorrow. Finding out about her is really more of my reason for wanting to read the bio than finding out about him.

More, post-Schiavo: Robert Heinlein gave me my politics, by and large. He gave me the hope of a bright future for humanity. He gave me my respect for the great literature of the English-language tradition. For a while, he gave me a kind of uneasy agnosticism, before C.S. Lewis gave me back my faith. But in some realms, what he tried to give I have refused to accept.

One of those areas is euthanasia. Heinlein as personified by his third-stage characters, the crusty old men who people his books, regularly championed ending one's life on one's own timetable. Of course, many of his characters were doctors themselves, or had easy access to aother means of suicide, and none, ever, grew senile. Brief discussions of senility in his books inevitably led to the characters' unanimously concluding that if such a fate were to befall them, would someone please put them out of their misery... And his reasoning was that once the mind is gone, the soul, or self, ought to go too - he was never too clear about where the soul resided (except in one short story, where he, tongue-in-cheek, put it in the pituitary gland), but clearly he thought that a senile person was still "in there," suffering tortures because he was unable either to think or to leave.

I don't know what happens inside the mind of a senile person, or one - like Terri Schindler Schiavo, with profound brain damage. But I am confident of this: that with every devaluation of humanness on functionalist grounds, we are closer to involuntary euthanasia. I won't go so far as to say that involuntary euthanasia will be the needful outcome, someday, of Terri's death, but I will say that I fear even the first steps down this path, because these first steps are the easy ones.

Just as I argued all through Terri's long ordeal that where doubt existed as to where she, the elemental she, resided, we ought to shrink from any action that might evict her, so to speak, since we poor humans don't possess the ability to knit body and soul together and give them life, I say the same about the old and the damaged. Since we don't know where our humanity resides, we ought by default to conclude that it resides in the part of us that we have no power to create, but only to destroy. And then we ought to protect those whose functional humanity is no longer obvious.

It's possible that I may grow senile in my old age, or that I may suffer some injury someday that will render me as uncommunicative and possibly as unconscious as Terri Schindler Schiavo (I can't quite bear to let her married name stand alone). It's possible that I will be either terribly weary or terrified inside my own head - seeking release from torment. But here's the rub: I will be granted that release, someday. There's no need for men to provide it; it will come. Catholic tradition created "purgatory" and made it a sine-qua-non for sinful humans; who am I to be released from some form of it, simply because some doctor has that power? God's mercy will provide my release, in God's time. It's not for me to rush it.