Victor Davis Hanson: Going Against the Grain Liberates Presidents

Surprisingly, I agree with this essay by Victor Davis Hanson virtually in its entirety. If a president does something that their own side is more inclined to criticize, they can act almost with impunity. The key, though, is to have given your own side enough red meat not to rebel when you do it. Bush learned the hard way with Harriet Miers that the base will sometimes rise up. That was, though, a combination of her being an obvious crony appointment and social conservatives being an advanced state of paranoia due to having slavishly devoted themselves to the GOP for thirty years and gotten little to show for it. That's why I knew she was toast when the speech in which she sounded sympathetic to Planned Parenthood v. Casey started circulating the Internet. Twenty-four hours later she was no longer the nominee.


Adding to that, in international matters the president doesn't really need to run anything by Congress unless they want to launch a full-scale ground invasion. War is one area where the Court tends to stay out of the fray as much as possible, probably because if it didn't it would probably get nobbled in one way or another. The War Powers Act is more honored in the breach than in the observance.

Thus it's entirely possible that Obama would bomb Iran. The fallout would be severe though. I suspect we'd end up with a ground war, since Iran could retaliate by blocking the straight of Hormuz causing economic catastrophy for the world. We'd probably need to wage full-scale war to clear it and keep it clear.

Actually, waterboarding IS a dead issue

Why? Because Obama stopped doing it. At least officially, which is probably all that anyone can expect. The CIA has always been up to all sorts of illegal, amoral, and sometimes downright evil stuff. The Bush administration was only unusual in that they got stooges like John "No law or treaty can stop the government from crushing a child's testacles" Yoo to "make it legal" in the Palpatine sense. Even if all Obama did was push torture back into the shadows, that's still a victory for civilization.

"If we can blow them up, then we can do whatever we want to them"

That is the logic Victor Davis Hanson uses to declare waterboarding a "dead issue":

Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?

That's always been a stupid argument, no less so now that Dick Cheney has used it. Since we vaporized lots of Japanese women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and boiled lots of Japanese women in Tokyo with napalm, does that mean it would've been okay for General MacArthur to force Japanese women to serve as "comfort women" for American soldiers? Of course not. Likewise blowing up enemies on the field has no moral bearing on whether it's legitimate to torture them in confinement, i.e., after they have been rendered non-threatening.

Hanson in general has gone to seed in the last few years. Most of the Right has moved on from the disastrous Bush administration, but Hanson must continue to defend them and the failed neocon enterprise. He despises the Obama administration but won't admit that the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration led to the Obama administration.

U.N. Torture Investigator Denied Unsupervised Access to Manning

This story just won't go away. President Obama really needs to do more than just take the military's word for it. I was never uncynical enough to expect him to expose himself to the charge of weakness on National Security--he hasn't done a single thing like that after his first few months in office. But there's doing nothing and then there's blatantly doing nothing. This is the latter and it's incredibly stupid.

Ironically, Manning might have been treated better had he been caught in 2007 or 2008. Bush, buffeted by criticism over his official torture program enhanced interrogation program would have been a colossal idiot to let this sort of thing go on with a non-Muslim white American citizen. Wait, never mind. I take it back: Manning's lucky he wasn't caught back then.

That Terry Jones is suffering financially...

gives me hope for this country. I would have thought there'd be enough violently anti-Islamic nutbags out there to make sure he and his Church were rolling in dough for being willing to burn a Koran. Fortunately, that appears not to be the case.

Bradley Manning isn't the only American in solitary confinement

This article brings to light the overuse of solitary confinement in the United States.

Clearly there are cases where the prisoner is so incorrigibly violent that your only choices are to lock them up in solitary confinement, subject them to summary execution, or let them try to rape, murder, and torture their guards and fellow prisoners until one of those kills the prisoner in self-defense. Of those options, the first seems like the least bad.

Ezra Klein suggests we start really paying for war

Not a bad idea, with one proviso: we don't need to pay for the whole war with taxes and spending cuts. Big wars in the past required borrowing. The same purpose, keeping us out of wars that aren't worth a few bucks more being withheld every paycheck to us, would be served if we had to pay for a substantial amount of the cost of the war in new taxes or spending cuts.

Wikileaks is irresponsible

After the last post, I feel the need to flesh out my overall position on Wikileaks. While I think that our government and many in the punditocracy are overreacting, I do think that Wikileaks' carpet bombing approach to exposing government secrets is irresponsible. It releases mountains of classified data, most of which has little to no public interest (and is extremely boring) and some of which has put lives in danger (which isn't to say that some of it isn't within the world's right to know: that the Saudi's have been lying about their oil reserves has consequences for the entire world). This flies in the face of the cost-benefit analysis that has traditionally gone into publishing state secrets.

Worse than that: it makes the environment more hostile for leaks in the future. Journalists and leakers are free to publish not just because the courts protect free speech, but because the overall climate allows it. Traditionally, leaks against an administration could depend on support from the opposition, or at least on the opposition saying the harm to freedom of speech and of information incurred by going after the leakers was greater than the benefit of plugging the hole. Wikileaks has taken leaking to such an anarchistic extreme that the whole political establishment is turned against it. If Julian Assange does eventually end up in the US charged with something, it will be a chilling precedent. This is also significant as far as the courts are concerned: judges are not immune to public opinion and public passions. Why do you think they tread on eggshells when National Security is at stake?

Don't get me wrong: leaking classified information, even if it is against our national security interests, can absolutely be justified. The people who leaked the details of Bush's Official Torture Program "Enhanced Interrogation Program" are heroes as far as I'm concerned. That is something that the American people had a right, and a duty, to know. So did the rest of the world. Publishing the kitchen sink just because you can is another matter entirely.

State department spokesman unofficial says what I've been thinking

WaPo:

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has called the treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley E. Manning, an Army private whom military jailers forced to sleep naked for several days last week, "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

As I said on Matthew Yglesias' Megan McArdle's blog:

Absolutely right. The only thing surprising about this is that it happened in such a high-profile case. You'd think some political pressure would have been brought to bear to ensure that nothing like this would happen since it would inevitably show up in the papers worldwide (which it is, even if it was a bit slow in starting).

Obama's official response is disappointing, but thoroughly predictable. There's no way in hell he's politically stupid enough to show even basic human sympathy for Bradley Manning the uber-leaker. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there's some backchannel chewing out going on about now. It is an international embarrassment and what's more it put Obama in the position of alienating either the portion of the general public, who tend not to give a damn what happens to people who cross the bright line between Good People and Bad People, and the significant part of his base that's very concerned about torture¹ and human rights (as practiced and observed, or not, by the U.S. Government and not just third world countries and China)². He can't be happy about that.

As Talleyrand said, “This is worse than a crime, it's a blunder.”

¹Although I would not use the word torture to describe this. The incident in question is where the word "degrading treatment" seems right on the money.

²This includes me, though I don't think I'd describe myself as being part of Obama's base.

Security Now has the Scoop on Two Troubling Bills

This is a very important Security Now to watch.



The first bill, COICA, which would allow the justice department to blacklist websites that infringe copyrights, mandating they be removed from DNS by ISPs, can be studied in more depth here. The other hasn't been proposed yet; it's expected to be proposed next year.

Full-body Scans on the Street Outrageous

What's next? Google Full-body Streetview?

This has got to be against the fourth amendment. Making people submit to a full-body scan to get on an airplane and randomly scanning people on the street are two very, very different things (and I'm not saying the former is right to begin with). In the one case you are voluntarily trying to board an airplane (i.e., if you chose to go by car, train, or boat you could avoid it), in the other you're being virtually strip-searched at random on the public street with no reason to suspect you've done anything wrong at all.