Damn, Jim Henley is smart

[womzilla]

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.