A World Spinning our of Control

A Lebanese MP is killed. A Lebanese broadcast journalist "gloats" about it not knowing that her microphone was "live" and she and the person she was talking to were sacked. Some Lebanese soldiers were killed in an attack on a refugee camp -- how can there still be a refugee camp holding those that left Palestine in fear of the Jewish people. Correction: how can there be a second and surely a third generation of people descended from those who left Palestine who are still in a refugee camp? That was 60 or so years ago. Is their presence there due to their belief that they will soon or someday get to return and don't want to put down roots elsewhere or because life is good in refugee camps in Lebanon (that is not a serious question) or what?

We move to Gaza where Hamas has driven out those Fatah military and political leaders they have not killed. And quickly on to the West Bank where Fatah is going after Hamas leaders. This will surely mean that Israel cannot possibly make peace with a Palestinian state since there will be two of them and Hamas is very unlikely to want to deal with Israel and conversely. Meanwhile, Israel, in what has to be an act of desperation has made the 283 year old Simon Peres President. I may be off on his age a bit. Israel still has clearly not recovered from their very costly "victory" over Hezbollah.

Moving over to Iraq we find that everyone is at war with everyone else. It is impossible to sort out what the dynamics are there. At least, from this chair I can't figure out how Islamic militants can bomb Mosques that have been in place for a very long time because they are being used by some other group of Muslims. The US did its best not to bomb a mosque when it won its great victory in Iraq by toppling Saddam. This is a paradigm case of a Pyrrhic victory. I do not know who we are fighting against, if anyone. Apparently it would be bad for an infidel state to bomb a Mosque but okay for a rival Muslim group to do so. So far, at least, the Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Saudis have not condemned this sort of thing (as far as I know). Occasionally I read about the US killing some insurgents but there are at least two sorts -- the pro-Al Queda group or set of groups and the non-pro-Al Queda group or set of groups. Are we trying to fight Shiites too? I did read that Sadr has suggested that Shiites loyal to him should cool it. Meanwhile, I have read that Turkey has invaded Iraq. They, of course, are terrified of a union of some sort between Turkish and Iraqi Kurds. I gather we did not rush northward and start shooting at Turks. They are our allies after all.

Meanwhile much of the West is condemning Iran for this, that, and the other thing. The most remarkable thing I have read about Iran is that "Fifty-seven Iranian economists have launched a scathing attack on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." I hope that they are not killed. If not, this would be the one good thing I have read about the Middle East this morning. I am grateful to learn that the US Secretary of State, Condy Rice, opened an Iranian art show or, rather, an art show featuring Iranian artists in the US. There have been interactions between American and Iranian wrestlers as well. This brings to mind the cultural exchanges between the Soviets and Americans during the Cold War. It took a long time for those exchanges to do any good, assuming, probably counterfactually, that they did any good at all. Condy made the fatuous and totally meaningless because hopelessly false claim that art is a language and that art can help two different peoples understand each other. The claim she made is that art is "the language of peoples who need to know each other and understand each other." Art is not a language. And having an art show in the US of Iranian artists will not help Americans and Iranians understand each other. How in hell can one understand a country that has a bunch of Ayatollahs who seem to run the country, a whacked out President who seems to run the country, a Revolutionary Guard that seems to act on its own, and an elected body that manifestly does not run the country (at least as far as I can tell). To be fair I ought to concede that I am not sure who runs the US -- it is some combination of George Bush, rich people, corporations, and the religious right. I think we would have to forgive the Iranians who find it difficult to understand us.

I am going in for surgery today to have my tongue surgically removed from my cheek. This post does have something to do with language, thanks to Condy's unbelievably ignorant statement so I have not totally violated your trust.

How do We Know When a Policy has Failed?

In my morning paper yesterday, there was a story presenting Tony Blair's reaction to the escape of 3 suspected terrorists who were under "partial arrest." The Brits were holding them to keep them from traveling overseas to carry out terrorist attacks. In short, the Brits were trying to protect others from terrorist attacks. Blair wants to toughen the British laws for dealing with such terrorists. The predictable response of Civil-liberties campaigners to Blair's call for tougher measures was

"Punishment without trial is a failed policy on both sides of the Atlantic," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human-rights group Liberty.

This raises the question as to when can we definitively say that a policy has succeeded or failed?

For anyone to make a warranted claim that a policy has failed, one must articulate what one takes the goals of that policy to be and then demonstrate how the policy has failed to satisfy those goals. Our Civil Libertarian did not do that, and for good reason. He can't. The goal of the British and American anti-terrorist laws, however distasteful they my be, is to prevent terrorist attacks. And, since the 9/11/01 attack in the US and the attacks on the London transport system on 7/7/05, there have been no substantive terrorist attacks in these two countries despite the fact that they are the two countries which, not counting Israel, are most despised by Muslim terrorists. By any concrete measure of success or failure, one would have to conclude that the domestic security policies of the two countries have been successful.

It is always possible, of course, that the absence of terrorist attacks in the US and UK since those in 01 and 05 is not at all due to the special domestic security laws of the two countries. One could make an argument that conventional police work has been sufficient to stop most terrorist attacks. Sometimes it is the incompetence of the terrorist that causes a failed attempt. I give you Richard Reid. who wanted to bring down an airliner with a shoe bomb. He was caught by persons on the airplane after an initial effort to set the bomb off failed and then tried, convicted, and sentenced in an American court of law, not some secret military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.

It could be that the draconian Homeland Security laws have nipped specific attacks in the bud but officials aren't telling us this because they don't want to provide potential terrorists with information as to how we go about catching them. Or we have not heard about such successes because there haven't been any. This is the Catch 22 that the CIA was in during the Cold War. We heard about its failures but it didn't want to tell us about its successes. One of the reasons why they might not have wanted to tell us about their successes is that they might have been more disturbing than the failures. I have in mind the overthrowing of the Allende government in Chile.

I understand why the US government wanted its Homeland Security apparatus. Terrorists represent a special class of criminal. I presume that some criminals might be reformable but terrorists are not in that class of criminals. Bank robbers know they are criminals. Terrorists believe they are not. They do what they do for reasons that seem to them to be perfectly rational and they see their actions as fully justified. American criminal law is ill-suited to dealing with terrorists.

Suppose that we have two groups of people we believe intend to engage in criminal acts. One group plans to rob a bank. The other intends to blow up the bank and kill everyone in the building housing the bank. One cannot arrest either group without probable cause and, given the application of standard provisions of criminal law, one cannot detain either group for more than a relatively short period of time without charging them with a crime. In advance of their carrying out their plans, the best one could hope for is a conspiracy charge. Sadly, that would surely mean that they would be offered a chance to get out on bail and move forward on their plans.

On a well-scripted TV show, our two sets of criminals would be shown putting their plans in action with, perhaps, our terrorist group planting of C4 all over the bank. At the last second, our heroic cops come in and arrest the bad guys red handed. In reality, while we may be willing to let the odd bank robbery happen because we didn't have enough evidence to arrest and incarcerate the bank robbers before the act, we cannot allow the odd terrorist attack to take place because our ordinary criminal laws are insufficient to stop the attack. And that is the rub. The American system of justice is designed not to protect us from future crimes but to capture and punish those who have committed crimes. By its very nature, conventional criminal law is incapable of dealing with terrorists.