“For The Greater Good”

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob. It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs. I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness. Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

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Later: my friend novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page. here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we sort of agree with this bozo.”

Filed under: absurd, Christianity, US politics, war | Tagged: drones, God, gun control, US military | 2 Comments »

Guilt By Drone

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Unless you have the misfortune to live under their flight paths, it’s easy to push drones to the back of your mind. That’s what’s so perfect from a US military point of view: remote-control warfare, with the emphasis on ‘remote.’ See no evil, know no evil. What does an operator sitting in a bunker in Nevada know of what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan?

What do you?

While you might have registered the fact that US drone use in Pakistan quintupled in the Obama years from the Bush years, you’ve probably avoided dwelling on it. You almost certainly haven’t thought through the personal and political havoc these drones are wreaking. And you probably don’t want to even consider reading Living Under Drones, a 165-page report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Center at Stanford and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU (that mouthful of authorship is off-putting enough).

Enter Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani writer whose deliciously wicked novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist touched the raw edge of western anxiety, and whose newly published satire How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is a well-deserved best-seller. Hamid has the novelist’s ability to bring you inside experience that otherwise remains… remote. So it was a savvy move when the New York Review of Books asked him to review the Stanford/NYU report, even if they then published his piece under the almost perversely understated headline ‘Why Drones Don’t Help.’ If you don’t read the report itself (there’s a summary here, and the full report is downloadable), at least read Hamid’s review of it.

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is any misconception that the drone strikes are primarily counter-terrorist in nature, aimed at key leaders of international terror networks, this can be dispensed with [....] The elimination of ‘high-value’ targets — al-Qaeda or ‘militant’ leaders — has been exceedingly rare: fewer than 50 people, or about 2% of all drone deaths. Rather, ‘low-level insurgents’ have been the main targets [....]

In the media, the term ‘militant’ is often used in describing drone casualties. The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people. A ‘militant’ who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a ‘militant’ who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat top his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the ‘current administration’s apparent definition’ holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed.

In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant. Your death in a drone strike is all the proof that’s needed of your guilt, and thus of the right to have killed you.

Neither Orwell nor Kafka could have dreamed up better.

Hamid continues:

This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are ‘extremely rare’ or have been in ‘single digits’ since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children.

This includes so-called ‘signature strikes’ which attack unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise “behaving like militants” as well as people trying to bring aid to injured victims of strikes.

Hamid goes on to look closer at the harrowing experience of those affected, and at the widespread Pakistani revulsion at the use of drones. And with the US now intensifying its drone campaign elsewhere, as in Yemen, he cogently makes the case that their use only weakens already weak governments and thus severely undermines America’s own foreign-policy interests.

In other words, this isn’t counter-terrorist; it’s counter-effective. What’s touted as “clean” technology (for the man in the bunker) is in fact as dirty as ever. And the depressing conclusion is that the Obama administration is as stuck as its predecessor in the self-defeating meme of a military “war on terrorism.”

Filed under: technology, US politics, war | Tagged: Bush, drone warfare, fatalities, Living Under Drones, Mohsin Hamid, NYU, Obama, Pakistan, Stanford, Yemen | 3 Comments »

Guns, Cash, and Votes

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

As my friend Charles Mudede noted, these graphs say it all (courtesy of The Sunlight Foundation):

Filed under: ugliness, US politics | Tagged: election spending, gun control, gun lobby, NRA, US Senate | 5 Comments »

U.S. Held Hostage

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Could it have been clearer? The United States is being held hostage by the National Rifle Association, which has enough senators in its deep pockets to block even the most basic attempt at meaningful gun control.

President Obama called the Senate’s capitulation yesterday “pretty shameful.” Make that totally, horrendously shameful. Just two days after carnage in Boston, the US Senate had not had enough death. Instead, it ensured that there’ll be more Newtowns, more kids mown down, more “senseless tragedy.” In fact the Senate has essentially written the script for it.

Since a few readers seem to think that I get “too angry” at times — Zen meditation never was my thing — I’d like to point out that the New York Times praised Obama for his evident anger, and that the lead editorial in today’s paper is very close to my current anger level. Titled “The Senate Fails Americans,” here’s how it begins:

For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.

Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.

Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”

Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.

Polls show that an ever-increasing majority of Americans — 86% just last week –want at least proper background checks for those who buy guns online or at gun shows, yet the Senate denied even this most elementary precaution. Which means that this Senate does not represent the will of the people. Only that of the NRA.

So here’s how the New York Times editorial ends:

It’s now up to voters to exact a political price from those who defied the public’s demand, and Mr. Obama was forceful in promising to lead that effort. Wednesday was just Round 1, he said; the next step is to replace those whose loyalty is given to a lobby rather than the people.

“Sooner or later, we are going to get this right,” he said. “The memories of these children demand it, and so do the American people.”

Politicians think we’ll forget. Let’s not. Senators are for re-election in 2014, and again in 2016, and again in 2018. And our responsibility as citizens is to make sure that every single one of those nay-saying bums who have sold their souls in order to stay in office is booted right on out of office.

In the meantime, I suggest they sponsor a mental-health-care bill, since one is evidently badly needed — for themselves:

Filed under: ugliness, US politics | Tagged: elections, gun control, New York Times editorial, Newtown, NRA, Obama, Senate | 2 Comments »

Tragedy Or Terrorism? Really?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Conservatives are angry at President Obama’s initial avoidance of the word “terrorism” for yesterday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon. (Today he finally used the word.) I’m angry at him for that too, but for a very different reason.

Obviously I know as little as you do about who made and placed those two bombs, but it was clear from the get-go that this was a terrorist attack. That is, a planned, concerted attack on civilians, in a crowded space, designed to kill and maim as many people as possible at random, and to spread fear and panic.

So why avoid calling it what it was? The reason given by White House insiders yesterday was that they didn’t yet know who did it and why.

Excuse me? What exactly does that reasoning imply? That the bomber’s identity defines his actions? That “domestic” terrorism is somehow less fatal than “foreign” terrorism? That if the bomber turns out to be anything other than Muslim, then it’s not terrorism?

A similar tack was taken by many liberal online commenters. “Let’s hold off on determining if this is terrorism until we know more,” they kept saying. But it seems to me that their caution was based on the same underlying assumption — that what they meant was “Let’s hold off on calling it terrorism unless the bomber turns out to be Muslim.”

In effect, they were acting as a kind of mirror image to Fox News, where the instant assumption was that since this was terrorism, the perpetrator could only be Muslim.

So to use one of Obama’s own favorite phrases, let me be absolutely clear:

If the bomber turns out to be a lily-white right-wing Christian whose ancestors came off the Mayflower, he is still a terrorist. As clearly a terrorist as the stock image of the jihadi in a suicide vest.

Moreover, this was not “a tragedy,” as Obama called it — thus prompting countless television reporters to fall back on stock phrases like “a tragic day” and “this terrible tragedy.” This was murder. Mass murder.

“Tragedy” implies that it could not have been avoided, that it was somehow fated. That was the whole point of ancient Greek drama, where the idea of tragedy was invented. But terrorism is deliberate. It’s a cold-blooded decision made by humans (or rather, people who pass for human). And to call it tragedy is to imply one way or another that the perpetrator is somehow not quite responsible for his actions. (Yes, almost certainly ‘his’ and not ‘her.’)

Of course I realize that Obama probably decided on “tragedy” out of the earnest desire to avoid spreading panic and thus terrorizing more people. That’s part of the role of president, I guess: the national reassurer. But I was not reassured. Sure, his first response beat continuing to read from “My Pet Goat” by several miles, but that’s setting the bar about as low as it can get.

The so-called “war on terror” has been a disaster for the US not least because even when it happens right under our noses, we still can’t recognize that it’s not who does it that makes terrorism, or why. It’s what they do.

Whether they’re political or religious; white or brown or black; left-wing or right-wing; “domestic” or “foreign” or any combination of all of the above — if they target, kill, maim, and terrorize civilians, they’re terrorists.

And may every one of them — whether in Boston, in New York, in Oklahoma City, in Atlanta, in Beirut, in Jerusalem, in Baghdad, in Kabul, or in Benghazi — rot in whatever conception of hell you care to name.

Filed under: Islam, ugliness, US politics | Tagged: "war on terror", bombing, Boston Marathon, Muslim, Obama, terrorism, tragedy | 12 Comments »

My Interview With Homeland Security

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

So since it looks like I’ll be traveling quite a bit in the foreseeable future, I thought it might be an idea to register with Homeland Security’s trusted-traveler program and thus avoid the hassle and long lines at airport security. Which is how come I turned up yesterday at SeaTac’s US Customs and Border Protection office for my interview.

I did kind of wonder how it might go in light of the fact that The First Muslim has just been published. What would Homeland Security make of this? Should I even mention it? Were they likely to make a biographer of Muhammad a trusted traveler, or would stereotype win the day so that the subject alone would set off alarms in the bureaucratic mind? There was only one way to find out.

The interview didn’t start off on quite the right note.

“Sorry to hear about Margaret Thatcher’s passing,” said the Customs and Borders officer when I told him that I had a British passport as well as an American one.

“I can’t say I am,” I replied before I could bite my tongue. “Not least because my father was a doctor in the National Health Service, which she did her best to dismantle.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t make assumptions.”

And with that he had my interest. I hadn’t expected that apology.

“You’re a writer?” he said. “What do you write about?”

“Religion and politics.” And with that I had his interest.

“Big subject!” he said.

“Which you could say is why we’re here in this office right now,” I replied.

We both smiled kind of ruefully.

He pulled up the US customs record of my travels. “So you focus on the Middle East?”

“Of course. It’s where all three of the major monotheisms began, and it’s where religion and politics are most intricately intertwined.”

“Isn’t that so,” he said. “In fact that’s what I studied.” Turns out he’d majored in Middle East history — specifically the 1920s to the 1940s. “The Brits seem to have had a lot to do with creating today’s Middle East.”

“With a little help from the French, true,” I said. “They have a lot to answer for. As do we, especially since we went marching into Iraq with no idea of what was really happening there…” Oh god, what was I saying to an official of the US government?

Yet he was nodding, though whether in agreement or in acknowledgment of my hopelessly liberal point of view wasn’t clear until he said: “We all need to know much more history.”

And that was my cue. I reached into my pocket and handed him my card — the one with the cover of The First Muslim on the front. “This might help some,” I said.

He studied it a moment, and then: “Interesting! Thank you. I have to read this.”

The next thing I knew he was taking my photograph and my fingerprints (on a neat little machine glowing with green light), explaining the intricacies of how to use my newly approved trusted-traveler status, and giving me his card.

As I picked up a coffee before wandering out of the airport, it occurred to me to ask why I was surprised at how relaxed and sensible the interview had been.

Partly, I think, we’re so used to inane encounters with low-level TSA contract employees in the security lines that it’s easy to forget that there actually are intelligent people higher up the line.

Partly, as an immigrant to the US, my experience years ago of dealing with another branch of what is now Homeland Security, namely the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had been downright Kafkaesque. (In fact I’d have said that the INS officials I encountered then had deliberately out-Kafkaed Kafka, except that I knew they’d never even heard of him.)

And partly too, of course, there’s the Orwellian Big Brother aspect of Homeland Security — the awareness that one way or another, we are all, however innocent, under surveillance.

That may be one more thing the Brits, among others, have to answer for.

Filed under: Islam, Middle East, sanity, US politics | Tagged: airport security, Homeland Security, Kafka, Margaret Thatcher, Orwell, The First Muslim, trusted traveler program, US Customs and Border Protection | 11 Comments »

Armed To The Eyeballs

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

“Listen to this,” I said. The opthalmologist had just walked into the room, and instead of a pliant patient waiting to be examined, found me up in arms. As it were. He and his technician stood stunned as I read them this passage from a speech by President Eisenhower in 1953, five years into the Cold War:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

That is straight from the horse’s mouth — I mean, the five-star general’s mouth — and it features large in a superb piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker of a couple of weeks back (forgive me, I’ve been a tad distracted here with publication of The First Muslim, and am just beginning to catch up).

“How much military is enough?” reads the sub-heading of the piece. You know the answer already, sadly: the unholy alliance of military and industry means that there’s no such thing as enough.

The United States spends more on defense than all other countries combined, Lepore reports. Military spending doubled between 1998 and 2011. The United States sells more guns in foreign markets than any other country. As she puts it, “At home and abroad, in uniform and out, in war and in peace, Americans are armed to the teeth.” Make that the eyeballs.

Moreover, “much of the money that the federal government spends on ‘defense’ involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the US military enforces American foreign policy.” Not least by dint of hundreds of military bases all over the world.

Lepore pays special attention to Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. An avowed conservative “viscerally pained” by what he calls “Americans’ infatuation with military power,” Bacevich says that lately,

Americans have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.

In an updated edition of his 2005 book The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (due out in a few weeks), Bacevich writes that “the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameless failures of the Iraq War” should have led to major rethinking of the use of force. But there’s been none, and that, he says, is a civic failure: “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.” As Lepore tartly notes: “Don’t ask, don’t tell. But especially, don’t ask.”

She’s written a densely argued article, one that I guess you’d call wonkish in its focus on the legislative debate over cuts in military spending. It’s a good thing my eyes were judged fit to serve, since this is not your usual bedtime reading. But then that’s Lepore’s point. Unless we can rouse ourselves to pay attention and to insist that “between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint,” we only enable those besotted by guns and war.

Filed under: US politics, war | Tagged: Andrew Bacevich, defense spending, Eisenhower, Jill Lepore, The New American Militarism, The New Yorker | 4 Comments »

Caption This Photo!

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Like we really needed this:

This is how to advance the cause of gun control?

What the hell was Obama thinking? Why on earth did he feel the need to claim that he was into skeet-shooting “all the time”? And then to kowtow to Fox News demands for “proof” by releasing this photo?

So go ahead, accidental theologists. Let’s caption this photo.

Fire away!

Here’s a few that come instantly to mind:

– “Hey, see how tough I am — I can shoot lumps of clay to smithereens all day!”

– “Look, ma, I can make things go Bang!”

– “I’m the new Teddy Roosevelt.”

– “I shoot, ergo I’m American.”

– “I shoot, ergo I am.”

Filed under: absurd, US politics | Tagged: gun control, Obama, photo, skeet shooting | 8 Comments »

Zero Bland Thirty

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

After a mind-numbing two and a half hours of Zero Dark Thirty last night, I came away with a single piece of information: Jessica Chastain has amazing hair.

That red mane stays toss-worthily silky even in the deserts of Afghanistan. The dust clouds raised by helicopters landing right in front of her can’t dull her plastic glossiness. Nor can the sight and sounds of torture alter the uncanny blandness of her expression.

The movie’s much-talked-about scenes of torture are peculiarly sanitized: shown, but not shown. There is no real sense of agony or degradation. The chief torturer’s lines are a bunch of clichés straight out of the Hollywood B-movie playbook. And the effect of torture on both victim and perpetrator? So far as this movie is concerned, non-existent.

And this is what’s being touted as some kind of breakthrough for women? It’s hardly news that there are women CIA analysts, or women movie directors. And after seeing the infamous photos of Private Lynddie England at Abu Ghraib in 2004, do you really want to join the chorus of “Wow, look, a woman torturer!”

Zero Dark Thirty is a movie with zero point of view. It has no engagement with any of the political and ethical issues it indicates but never explores. Despite its subject matter, it is, in the end, a movie as bland as its star. Its “reality-TV” lens on the slow accretion of intelligence work is merely confusing. And I suspect director Kathryn Bigelow knew this, interspersing moments of ham-fisted emoting to keep her audience from nodding off.

All of which raises the question of why this movie was made at all. A question whose answer apparently lies in the swell of orchestral music toward the end, signaling American triumphalism.

But my reaction was more of a shrug.

“We” killed bin-Laden, true. And…?

Filed under: ugliness, US politics, war, women | Tagged: Afghanistan, Bin Laden, CIA, Jessica Chastain, Kathryn Bigelow, torture, Zero Dark Thirty | 2 Comments »