I'm in No Man's Land

"Look, just don't say this stuff, no one wants to go there."

It's not quite a quiz. It's not a satire, either....

Ahistoricality Alert: Did Lincoln Violate the Geneva Convention?

Mr. Jones responds to a historical fallacy (selectivity) with one closer to my heart: ahistoricality, or, to use the more technical term, presentism.* It's true that Lincoln's orders during the Civil War often violate our present sense of the rules and morals of war, and individual commanders carried out what can only be called atrocities without punishment or even uproar. But this is one situation where relativism is required: the ethics of war -- Hemingway said that war, no matter how justified, was a crime, but neither he nor I are actually pacifists in any meaningful sense -- have changed dramatically over the 20th century. In fact, there wasn't much "Law of War" in the mid-19th century, particularly in the context of civil rebellion: in theory, the North could have considered every southern soldier a traitor and shot them on sight; Geneva actually would protect against that now, at least for uniformed combatants. Now there is a substantial body of law, largely based on avoiding repeats of past atrocities, which should bind the President against torture (which is pretty well defined, unless you happen to be willfully ignorant or Alberto Gonzales), unaccountability ("ghost" detainees), arrest of minors, etc.

The relevant question is whether Lincoln's conduct of war was bounded by the conventions and laws of the time, whether he violated existing guidelines, whether he restrained his troops from committing atrocities which they might otherwise have committed, legally or otherwise. The Order that Mr. Jones cites was a remarkably advanced statement of principles for its time, and that made it unlikely that officers trained under less restrictive rules, or soldiers hastily assembled, would follow them clearly and consistently. That the statement was accompanied by the repeal of Habeus Corpus, which, as Mr. Jones notes, dramatically reduces Lincoln's stature as a paragon protector of rights and legal ethics, but given the nature of the war being fought, it's not incomparable to the USA PATRIOT act....

* There's also a bit of selectivity in Mr. Jones' limitation of discussion of Bush war policy to Abu Ghraib and interrogation technique.

Of Course It's Political! It's Policy!

We need to make a sharp distinction between policy and politics:

LONDON (Reuters) - Make Poverty History (MPH), hailed as one of the most effective lobbying campaigns ever with its simple message and signature white wrist band, was banned on Monday from television and radio advertising in Britain.

Advertising watchdog Ofcom said the goals of its campaign, including an array of stars clicking their fingers to ram home the message that a child dies of preventable poverty every three seconds, were political and therefore outlawed.

"We have reached the unavoidable conclusion that MPH is a body whose objects are 'wholly or mainly' political as defined under the Act. MPH is therefore prohibited from advertising on television or radio," Ofcom said on its Web site.

They thought that global poverty was going to be solved without politics? That doesn't make it "political": it's a non-partisan policy group. Now, I know the rules in the UK are different, but I think it's safe to say that either the rules or the interpretation in this case are too broad.

Good Work: So Quoted

So Quoted is the blog of someone who apparently really enjoys looking things up and tracking things down. The Clarke's Third Law Corrollaries is worth the price of admission, for me. But there's more.

The Pollyanna President

Unlike Scrivener [via IHE], I don't really think that Bush is dumb in a straightforward intellectual sense. Odds are good he's as smart as I am, and in some ways (like remembering people's names and faces) he's probably considerably higher on the scale. Whether it's his ability to pick people or innate, he's a damned sight better at political strategy than I am (though, to be fair, I've never really been put to the test, as nobody has ever taken my political advice in an actual competitive campaign).

What he lacks is, in my view, two crucial things: empathy and compassion, a really strong moral sense, but that's not the issue here*, at least I don't think it is; and the sense that bad things can happen. Foresight, and the understanding that "risk" means that sometimes things go wrong, seems to be entirely lacking from the politics and policies of this administration. "No one could have foreseen..." is, as Scrivener and others have noted, flat out wrong, in addition to being prima facie evidence of the administration's failure to consider accident and failure as possibilities.

The entire Iraq war and reconstruction has been a whole series of high-risk policies which failed to go as planned, resulting in embarrassing retrenchments and redirections, not to mention unnecessary human suffering in the present and foreseeable (if you do that sort of thing) future. New Orleans was a high-risk city: everyone who seriously calculated the odds knew that disaster was a matter of time. New Orleans' great charm is not its luck, but its sang froid in the face of the inevitable. New Orleans is not a city of wishers and hopers, like our administration: it's a city of people who live in the past and present like there is no tomorrow. It would be an insult to the city to say that we have a New Orleans kind of president, because he insists on making plans for others, instead of living life for himself.

* Though, as Anne Zook says, "'Incestuous nepotism' doesn't even begin to describe these people and the inbreeding is producing some monstrous results." Though it would be somewhat hypocritical for Congress to impeach as incompetent cabinet members and agency directors they already confirmed, it's hypocrisy even I can live with. Repudiating the sins of the past is the right kind of hypocrisy. But they must redeem themselves: we can't do it for them.

Speaking Ill of the Dead

Alan Dershowitz is not someone with whom I agree with any regularity. And I disagree with his attacks on Rehnquist's youth and clerkship -- very unforgivingly one-sided view of events, it seems to me, cherry-picking character assassination -- though in proper context the incidents he cites might well mean what he says they mean. But it's his evaluation of Rehnquist's career as Chief Justice, which spans most of the time I've been aware of the Supreme Court as an institution, which rings true:

Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots. [emphasis added]

That Roberts clerked for Rehnquist shouldn't immediately disqualify him*, but that kind of partisanship, that regressive conservativism which is unworthy of the name, is not the kind of reliability which we should be looking for in a Supreme Court Justice, Chief or otherwise. [via Sideshow]

* Update: This, on the other hand, is the most damning review of Roberts' career I've seen yet, one that seems to actually distinguish between his "work-for-hire" and his fundamental views. [via Chapati Mystery]

It's easy to snark....

It's easy to put down criticism of the administration as "hindsight" and "feigned indignation" but there's lots of us who've been saying things about preparedness and resource management, cronyism and tunnel vision, responsibility and accountability for quite some time now. And there's lots of ways in which the ideology and methodology of the administration is so clearly unsuited to handling serious crises and complex issues; this isn't new, either.

No, we're being pretty damned consistent, actually. We called it before, and we're calling in that marker now.

New Fundamental Principle

"Any sufficiently complete incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"...

God and Katrina

I wasn't going to say much about the disaster, yet. If it's Jewish theological discussion of disasters and God's plan you're looking for, I'm with her.

Update: This is good, too. Though I would argue that we should distinguish wrestling with fate, accident and the injustices committed by fellow humans from our struggles to accept the justice of God, which is not limited to what we can see and understand in the present.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good: History Carnival #15

The Bad: Carnival of Bad History

The Ugly: Teaching Carnival