Politics and Free Thought at the Eclipse of Reason
posted by Matthew Harwood at 3:41 PM
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But it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq - as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people - that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own gradiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.The frightful thing about Iraq is that even if we do not stay for the first reason, we will stay for the second reason. So as the U.S. military continues to occupy Iraq to keep it from becoming the "new Afghanistan," "collateral damage" will spiral even more out of control thereby creating more insurgents. This is rightfully described as a disaster and probably the worst thing I can write is I do not see a solution that can achieve both objectives outlined above. We have lost whatever legitimacy we originally had with the Iraqi people which ensures the U.S. will only sacrifice the blood of insurgents, civilians, and America's young in a war with no end in sight and with incoherent justifications and objectives.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 11:57 AM
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posted by Matthew Harwood at 8:23 PM
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posted by Matthew Harwood at 12:51 PM
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The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.An impartial intermediary is a foregone conclusion. Enough said.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 1:18 AM
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posted by Matthew Harwood at 5:44 PM
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posted by Matthew Harwood at 11:10 AM
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President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.Arlen Specter barked a bit at Gonzalez...
Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into the role Justice lawyers played in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency listens in on telephone calls and reads e-mail without court approval, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Without access to the sensitive program, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility closed its investigation in April.
"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales....but by most accounts he’s preparing to play ball with the White House by proposing a bill aimed at bringing the surveillance program under the review of the FISA court.
Last week, Gonzales said the bill gives Bush the option of submitting the NSA program to the intelligence court, rather than requiring the review. Specter said Tuesday Bush assured him he will seek the court review if the legislation passes without significant amendment.So the president who killed the Justice Department investigation of the surveillance program will be given the option of submitting the program for FISA review. Nice to see the legislative branch standing up for itself.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 10:06 AM
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Federally funded "pregnancy resource centers" are incorrectly telling women that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma, a minority congressional report charged yesterday.--MM
The report said that 20 of 23 federally funded centers contacted by staff investigators requesting information about an unintended pregnancy were told false or misleading information about the potential risks of an abortion.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 12:53 PM
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Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: "it is a matter of great concern to us ...that these civilian deaths are occurring. It's a tragedy."--MM
"I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts," he added, while defending as "self-defense" Israel's military action, which has had "the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths".
posted by Matthew Harwood at 10:16 AM
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posted by Matthew Harwood at 1:41 PM
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[Sen.] Graham indicated to the New York Times -- as did Administration officials -- that Congress could "limit" Common Article 3 "in a way that resembled the language of the [McCain Amendment]." Of course, as Graham concedes, this really wouldn't so much be "limiting" Common Article Three as gutting it, because, according to Graham himself, the restrictions of Common Article 3 go "well beyond the McCain standard." (The Washington Post reports that the White House and Senator McCain are crafting a bill that would track the McCain Amendment and that "makes some changes to Common Article 3," such as dropping the phrase "outrages upon personal dignity.")This raises an interesting dilemma for those who opposed military tribunals and inhumane interrogation tactics as instances of Executive overreach. Hamdan may have curtailed the Administration’s ability to sidestep Congressional approval, but it may not, in the end, have much practical impact on detainees. Should Congress move forward with an initiative similar to the one Lederman describes, opponents can no longer claim that the Executive is acting outside of its constitutional authority. Opponents may continue to challenge the “Graham/McCain/Administration initiative” as being inconsistent with an international treaty, or simply, as bad policy, but those arguments will be tough sells considering the current makeup of Congress, the Court, and the public.
How can that be? After all, the McCain Amendment categorically prohibits all "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Well, as I've tried to explain, Congress has defined those terms under McCain to include only what the Due Process Clause would prohibit if the interrogation were taking place in the United States. That is to say, conduct that "shocks the conscience" -- a standard that the courts have never applied in the context of interrogations intended to elicit information about future terrorist activity. As I feared, the Administration apparently has (if Graham's remarks are accurate) construed the McCain "shocks the conscience" test not to prohibit techniques such as sleep deprivation and "cold cell," i.e. hypothermia. (Whether that's the best understanding of the Due Process standard is open to serious question -- certainly it would not be under Justice Kennedy's concurrence in Chavez v. Martinez, which might have the support of five Justices on today's Court (although Justices Souter and Breyer have not yet tipped their hand). But Justice Thomas's opinion in that same case indicates that it takes a whole lot more to shock his conscience (and Justice Scalia's) than it does to shock Justice Kennedy's.)
But Common Article 3 is not limited to "conscience-shocking" conduct, but instead prohibits all violence against detainees and "outrages upon personal dignity." CA3 therefore almost certainly does prohibit techniques such as cold cell, or prolonged sleep deprivation.
The Graham/McCain/Administration initiative now being hatched thus would authorize the use of techniques that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Congress has the power to do this: Where a statute authorizes something that a treaty prohibits, the statute governs for purposes of domestic law if it was enacted subsequent to the Senate's ratification of the treaty.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 11:02 AM
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·The World Islamic Front’s Statement, “Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders” of 23 Feburary 1998The texts are by no means exhaustive. Nevertheless, they do show a consistent reproduction of the “Other” in a theological manner that legitimizes the violent (re)conquest of territory.
·Bin Laden’s first post-9/11 speech broadcast on Al-Jazeera on 7 October 2001
·Bin Laden’s recording broadcast on Al-Jazeera on 3 November 2001
·Zawahiri’s letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi dated 9 July 2005 and placed on the webpage of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence on 11 October 2005
[F]ixations on particular narratives of collective identity – the stories through which “peoples” enact their identities and collective coherences (and on particular geographical imaginaries) and the spatial models allocating global proprietary control – participate in violence and inhibit ethical modes of mutual recognition at a global level.This is why I compare such seemingly disparate historical phenomena as Al-Qaeda terrorism and the U.S. elimination of its indigenous population. The point is not to demonstrate the similarity of two different historical situations “on the ground,” but to emphasize the similarity in ahistorical logic: That the difference between “Us” and “Them” has been revealed by God or Providence and not by self-interest. Which means more generally and abstractly that if a particular people or community swim against the tide of a divinely determined history, they are destined for demise. I call this the theology of conquest.
…(W)ith no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that constitute their reality, states are (and have to be) always in a process of becoming. For a state to end its practices of representation would be to expose its lack of prediscursive foundations; stasis would be death. Moreover, the drive to fix the state’s identity and contain challenges to the state’s representation cannot finally and absolutely succeed…Ironically, then, the inability of the state project of security to succeed is the guarantor of the state’s continued success as an impelling destiny.For a state’s continued existence then, as one danger is dealt with another must be conceived and articulated. Campbell shows this in relation to U.S. foreign policy as the Cold War ended the “War on Drugs” was quickly launched.
When social groups constitute their identity in religious terms and experience themselves as a sacred collectivity (the faithful, the righteous, or God’s chosen people, for instance), as a corollary they tend to constitute their rivals in negative fashion (heretics, infidels, apostates, evil, bestial, demonic, satanic, etc.) Under such circumstances, the pursuit of self-interest…can be experienced as a holy cause, in support of which any violence is justified.As each case study will show, the discourses produced by Al-Qaeda and within the early United States dehumanized their opponents not only in the eyes of the “sacred collectivity” but also in the eyes of the divine. Their campaigns of violence were therefore not man’s will but God’s law and/or design, thereby absolving them of acts they would dare not perpetrate on one another without fear of punishment.
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Asqa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.The fatwa was signed by both Osama Bin Laden of Al-Qaeda and Ayman al-Zawahiri, then emir of the Jihad Group in Egypt. The first two paragraphs of this document presents identity, difference, and danger in the most Manichean of ways. Identity is conceived of as submission to God and his Prophet Muhammad or as being Muslim, while difference and its corollary, danger, are encapsulated by a quote from the prophet Muhammad, “I have been sent with a sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped.” The mission is clear: the Prophet demands the world must be subdued in the name of Allah. Yet, the situation is dire, as the statement explains the “Arabian peninsula has never…been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches, and wiping out its plantations.” The statement supports this assertion by detailing the “aggression” of the United States towards Iraq and the West’s influence in keeping Arabia divided into “paper statelets” in an effort to protect the state of Israel. This logic is inherently defensive and deflective. Islam’s weakness expressed territorially has nothing to do with internal weakness, but with external oppression from a perverse “Other” whose contact and influence weakens the unifying reality of Islam. Throughout the document this “Other” is constructed as “pagans,” “locusts,” “crusader-Zionist alliance,” and “Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them” seizing on Muslims’ legitimate historical grievances through the dangerous theological prism of “believers” against “infidels.” The remedy to this situation is one of faith and action for all Muslims: Believe in “Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it” and fear not because the hereafter awaits. The “hereafter” grafts another dangerous trend onto an already dangerous theology mixed with irredentism and calls for violence against the “Other.” Not only is it legitimate to harm or kill the target, but by killing this enemy of the faith, the attacker is rewarded with everlasting bliss in Paradise for being God’s instrument.
Psalms 2:8: ‘Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.’ And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: ‘Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’Commenting on a massacre of Pequot Indians, Puritan theologian Dr. Cotton Mather made it plain the theological frame in which the battle was conceptualized: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.” He also had the tendency to describe them as “Ravenous howling Wolves.”
Englishmen who settled in America at the beginning of the 17th century brought as part of their historical and religious heritage a clearly delineated religious myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, and in the 17th and 18th centuries they shared with their fellow Englishmen an elaborately developed secular myth of the free nature of Anglo-Saxon political institutions.Race and creed operated jointly to fashion an identity that left the Indians, bereft of ancestry and Christianity, on the outside looking in as their interactions increased with the newcomers’ territorial expansion. As time passed and the English colonists’ successes mounted, culminating in a successful revolution, belief in their providential roles in history only solidified with what was perceived as ample empirical evidence. And this was not wholly illogical considering a small enclave of colonies -- beset by danger on all sides -- had defeated the greatest military power in the world. Even the most irreligious of the revolutionary generation believed in the United States’ elected status.
Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization, of science, and of true religion?While the de facto process of Indian removal started after the War of Independence, it did not become official government policy until 1830 when President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act passed Congress. President Jackson was familiar with the indigenous as his rise to national prestige came with his victory at Horseshoe Bend where 800 out of 1,000 Creek Indians perished in battle. Afterwards, Creek lands were seized by the United States. It is recorded that Jackson told the Creek chief Big Warrior that “the United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit, had they taken all the land of the [Creek] nation.” With his rise to the presidency, Jackson’s theological discourse of danger continued along the same lines as Providence [i.e. The Indian Removal Bill] pushed 70,000 Indians east of the Mississippi River west with disastrous results. Lewis Cass, Jackson’s Secretary of War from 1831-1836, wrote in an 1830 essay championing Indian removal for The North American Review that “(t)he Indians are entitled to the enjoyment of all the rights which do not interfere with the obvious designs of Providence…” Indian resistance followed this policy of removal west, but again, their struggle to maintain their traditional lands and identity only assured their inferior, thus expendable, worth. The Seminoles of Florida were a prime example of this. Instead of acquiescing to removal, the Seminoles waged guerilla warfare, attacking white settlements on the coast. In response, David Levy of Florida constructed the Seminoles as the most objectionable, vile “Other” imaginable: “They know no mercy. They are demons, not men. They have the human form, but nothing of the human heart. Horror and detestation should follow the thought of them. If they cannot be emigrated, they should be exterminated.” And largely they were, as forced emigration was largely a death sentence for the Indians and “reinvigorated the nascent doctrine of manifest destiny.” The U.S. State Department’s website describes the immediate toll of “Indian Removal” on one Indian tribe, the Cherokee Nation: “Under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe made their trek to the dry plains across the Mississippi. Thousands died en route from the brutal conditions of the “Trail of Tears.’”
If metaphysics was pre-condition of inhumane warfare, the abandonment of metaphyics is a pre-condition of humane warfare. In the words of Richard Rorty… “without metaphysics we can dedicate ourselves to save other people from pain and humiliation. Our first obligation must not be to seek the ‘truth’ but to eliminate pain.”To kill or declare war for theology or faith is cruel, vicious and pointless, precisely because real, physical pain and suffering are meted out for an unprovable abstraction. It deprives real human beings of the one thing almost all of “Us” hold dear, and that is life itself.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 4:33 PM
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First, the Legislature could rationally decide that for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement - in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits - to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.I'm a straight man that someday would like to get married but does that mean I've entered into an immoral arrangement if my wife and I choose not to have children? Are we just selfish ass blue-state careerists if we decide against children?
The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. …el4 There is a second reason: The Legislature could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father. Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like. It is obvious that there are exceptions to this general rule - some children who never know their fathers, or their mothers, do far better than some who grow up with parents of both sexes - but the Legislature could find that the general rule will usually hold. …
In sum, there are rational grounds on which the Legislature could choose to restrict marriage to couples of opposite sex. Plaintiffs have not persuaded us that this long accepted restriction is a wholly irrational one, based solely on ignorance and prejudice against homosexuals.
The court concludes, however, that same-sex marriage is not deeply rooted in tradition, and thus cannot implicate any fundamental liberty. But fundamental rights, once recognized, cannot be denied to particular groups on the ground that these groups have historically been denied those rights. …I have a new heroine to watch now.
Simply put, fundamental rights are fundamental rights. They are not defined in terms of who is entitled to exercise them. …el4 The claim that marriage has always had a single and unalterable meaning is a plain distortion of history. In truth, the common understanding of "marriage" has changed dramatically over the centuries. …
The long duration of a constitutional wrong cannot justify its perpetuation, no matter how strongly tradition or public sentiment might support it. …
Defendants primarily assert an interest in encouraging procreation within marriage. But while encouraging opposite-sex couples to marry before they have children is certainly a legitimate interest of the state, the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from marriage in no way furthers this interest. There are enough marriage licenses to go around for everyone.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 11:11 AM
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…an autonomous subject/individual free to discover and master nature and place it at the service of one own society for fulfilling human needs. This worldview is both secular and man-centered, and as such required the replacing of the cosmological views of the world by a rational worldview based on modern science.It is primarily in this cultural sense that fundamentalists like Qutb concentrate their antagonism toward the West.
This Jahiliyyah is based on rebellion against God's sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others. It is now not in that simple and primitive form of the ancient Jahiliyyah, but takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed. The result of this rebellion against the authority of God is the oppression of His creatures.This directly relates to why Qutb believed democracy was idolatrous. Sovereignty was situated in the human person rather than Allah. The rules that governed the society did not stem from a perfect divine source, but through the collective and flawed desires of the human political collective. The only outcome from “this rebellion” could be “the oppression of His creatures.” The West and its sovereignty of man (and not to mention its colonialilsm) fit perfectly Qutb’s typology of what constituted jahiliya and what Islam was the polar opposite of. Nevertheless, as Qutb would propound his theory of Islam against the cultural modernity of the West, he would ironically draw on the concepts associated with the West’s modern project to reject it. The West is always present in Qutb’s writing, whether setting the terms of the debate or as the subject to be fought against.
…[T]he Shari'ah which God has given to man to organize his life is also a universal law, as it is related to the general law of the universe and is harmonious with it. This obedience to the Shari'ah becomes a necessity for human beings so that their lives may become harmonious and in tune with the rest of the universe…Whereas Qutb conceives of shari’a in the modern sense as an enforceable legal system governing the Islamic state as well as all life, scholars today argue shari’a did not mean anything approximating Qutb’s definition in the Koran itself. As Bassam Tibi notes, the term shari’a occurs only once in the Koran. Husain Fawzi al-Najjar, a critic of the Islamic state concept, asks the necessary question of fundamentalists for whom Scripture is the be all and end all of Islam: “If Islam was meant to be a political order, then why does the Qur’an leave this issue without further clarification?” As we will see with more liberally inclined Islamists, shari’a is an ethical framework, not a divinely revealed legal system in which punishment is derived. Worse, Qutb violates his own fundamentalist tenets, as the shari’a was not constructed into a coherent legal body until the eighth century, long after Muhammad’s death and his revelations termination. This is why Tibi argues it is a post-Qur’anic construction.
It is necessary that there should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination [to begin the “Islamic revival in some Islamic country”] and then keeps walking on the path, marching through the vast ocean of Jahiliyyah which has encompassed the entire world. During its course, it should keep itself somewhat aloof from this all-encompassing Jahiliyyah and should also keep some ties with it.
“In all other systems, human beings obey other human beings and follow man-made laws. Legislation is a Divine attribute; any person who concedes this right to such a claimant, whether he considers him Divine or not, has accepted him as Divine.”Human legislation is therefore heresy, meaning democracy as a political framework is jahiliya and must be abolished. Therefore Qutb resides in the rejectionist wing of political Islam where western concepts like state, revolution, and freedom are Islamicized and projected back into a past that never existed to create a totalitarian state governed by a legal system ostensibly derived from God. Thus, Qutb’s theory and program has ironically more in common with the Communists he so hated and the Soviet Union they spawned than anything in Islam’s history.
Moderate, pragmatic Islamists…are remarkably flexible with respect to modes of political organization, providing for institutionalized checks on the ruler in the form of separations of powers, parliamentary rule, and in some cases even multiple parties. They are more positive than is often acknowledged concerning the protection of human rights, which are generally founded on duties toward God but nevertheless widely seen as part of the common heritage of all humankind.As such, it is a movement seeking at best dialogue and reconciliation with the West or at least détente, by highlighting certain Islamic concepts that show compatibility with liberal democracy. I will therefore look at these concepts – hurriya (liberty), adl (justice), shura (consultation), and ijtihad (rational interpretation) – through the work of liberal Islamists such as, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Laith Kubba, Radwan A. Masmoudi, and Abdul Karim Soroush.
The first honors “[those] who avoid gross sins and indecencies and, when angered, are willing to forgive, [those] who obey their Lord, attend to their prayers, and ‘conduct their affairs by mutual consent”…(Qur’an: Surat al-Shura, 42/37-38). The second passage is in the sura of ‘Imran: “Take counsel with them in the conduct of affairs…” (Qur’an: ‘Imran, 3/159).Again, while Tibi argues shura is the historical leftover of the “pre-Islamic system of intertribal consultation among the leaders of ethnic groups,” all that matters is that the concept of shura is being used to derive modern notions of democratic processes and norms.
posted by Matthew Harwood at 12:06 AM
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