Damn, Jim Henley is smart

Back when Henley was a libertarian, he was one of those libertarians smart enough to realize that war is a government project and that we forget that fact at our peril.

He's no longer a libertarian, but his critique of war these days is no less sharp:

Across a whole range of problems there's a class of responses I'll dub the "low road" and another class I'll call the "high road." Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; "dominance"-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).

I don't presently care to argue that there is never any "need" to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases--torture--I have a much easier time saying "Never go there." But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.

Nine years into the invasion of Afghanistan we have to agree that pulling out after a decade is just too soon. Back in 2001, the Taliban's failure to turn over Osama bin Laden within a couple of weeks showed the hopelessness of diplomacy. . . . [A Wall Street Journal editorialist] judges the European and Canadian liberation of travel to Cuba a failure because Cuba has not become a neoliberal paradise in the decade since, while leaving aside the fact that Cuba hasn't become a neoliberal paradise after 50 years of American cold-war against the country.

This dynamic occurs over and over again: trying to end terrorism by alleviating suffering can never work, but conquering an endless series of dusty countries must necessarily work this time; prison reform doesn't work because recidivism doesn't drop to 0% overnight, but longer prison sentences and three-strikes laws obviously will eliminate all crime if we're just serious about it; this time will be different.

Peace and justice don't, can't, just happen, and they're very hard to see when they're still a long way off.

Just identifying the pattern won't make it go away; but unless we see the pattern, it never can.

Checking my own records

Not unrelated to the previous post:

I was reading the NY Times Week in Review from last Sunday--specifically the article on how, surprise surprise no one could have predicted yadda yadda, all of the recent Islamic terror attacks on the US are driven by anger about the US's destruction of Iraq and, to a lesser extent, the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

My brain started ping-ponging backwards through my own attitudes towards our Glorious Mission in the Graveyard of Empires to see whether I really had documented my reluctance to the war at the inception, as I now like to think I did.

What a relief: I did. I found a post I made on rasff praising this ob:

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 02:11:30 +0100, "Michael Paine"
<mikepaine@extinction.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>At core my concerns are two: that more
>innocent people are going to be killed (in Afghanistan) and that this method
>of response is ineffective as a tool for taking terrorism apart (and hence
>more innocent Americans will be killed). I believe that the US (and its
>allies) can more effectively combat terrorism by other means. I believe that
>footage of killed innocent Afghans will contribute to raising support for
>terrorist causes, and that it is likely that some of the children of the
>dead may, in turn, rise as terrorists in turn to attack innocent Westerners
>in the future. I believe that it is more effective dealing with the causes
>of terrorism by preventing the creation of terrorists than it is to deal
>with terrorists after they have committed their acts of terror.

It was vaguely conceivable to me, in September 2001, that a very carefully managed military action in Afghanistan--even a fairly large one--could have a positive net effect in reducing terrorism, but that there was basically no chance that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika could do it, even if they contented themselves to stopping at Afghanistan.

One of the many many bad things about the US invasion and destruction of Iraq was that it was done in such a way as to further the perception that "the West" was "attacking Islam". The invasion of Afghanistan could be justified as a response to the country that had aided the September 11th attacks; the invasion of Iraq could only be seen as "some Muslims attacked us, so let's kill some other Muslims", despite a few thin efforts by Bush to say that no, no, really we weren't attacking Saddam Hussein just because he was a camel jockey heathen.

Anyway, I'm glad to see I had some sense back then.

By the Numbers

And a quickie grabbed off RayRadlein's twitter barrage:

You should always give 100% at work:

12% Monday
23% Tuesday
40% Wednesday
20% Thursday
5% Friday

Huh, that was a shared birthday I didn't know about

Debbie Harry, 1 July 1945.