Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Politics

  • Conservative Political Deception

    Ben Witherington has a good post today about political deception with a brief intro on parthenogenesis. On the latter, I would simply note that I see no particular benefit to Christianity in proving that a virgin birth is possible. The value of the doctrine stems at least in part from the fact that it is not possible, and thus, if it happened, it was a miracle.

    The other portion is certainly worth reading. His comments on his interview on the O’Reilly Factor are quite interesting. The only thing I have to add is that liberals are equally capable of such shenanigans, and that we should decry them wherever and by whomever they are perpetrated.

  • A New Baptist Covenant

    Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are both tied to the formation of a new umbrella group of Baptist denominations in an article in the Washington Post. I should point out what could easily be missed–Clinton described himself as a cheerleader and refused to be interviewed. Carter is apparently more involved. This is not the formation of a new denomination, but more of an alliance of denominations that want to see a different definition of “Baptist” than is presented by the Southern Baptist convention.

    Though I’m Methodist and have no plans to become Baptist, I certainly would welcome such an organization simply because the voice of the large number of members represented by the individual denominations is often not heard. In addition, if successful, the organization will combine the voice of predominantly African-American denominations with that of predominantly white ones.

    One of the issues that is bound to catch the eye of the press at least, is the fact that two former Democratic presidents are involved. It certainly caught the attention of the Washington Post writer. These churches should be careful not to get tagged with a political label any more than they must. While having former Democratic presidents involved in any way increases the political visibility, I would certainly not suggest they reject such involvement. I believe in separation of church and state, not church and statesman, and certainly not church and ex-Presidents.

  • A Welcome Alliance

    MSNBC.com has a good story on scientists and evangelical Christians working together on the environment. This is a very welcome alliance.

    This isn’t a matter of anyone compromising on their principles, but rather an alliance for action on issues on which both sides can agree.

  • Losing a Battle, Losing a War

    In all the debates about winning or losing the war in Iraq, what I find extremely frustrating is that the discussion so often occurs without adequate context. Today Joe Carter writes about How We Lost the War (And Will Lose the Next One Too). I agree with many of his comments about American public opinion, but I think he also displays the dangerous tendency that Americans have to simply not think about the context of other countries, from the leadership on down.

    Carter presents his rather excellent argument which is quite logical in a sterile sort of way. I even agree with the conclusion of his argument. Pulling out at this point cannot be painted as some sort of victory. It’s a loss. But in arguments the devil is often in the definitions, and there we have the real problem with this argument. Points #1 and #2:

    (1) The object in war is to impose your will on your enemy.
    (2) The will of our enemy is that we leave Iraq as soon as possible.

    The enemy has a good idea what his will is, and what he wills is something that can potentially be accomplished. The American people, on the other hand, aided by mixed messages from their government, really never had any idea what their will was for Iraq. One could reverse the logic, and instead use our will as the standard, and our failure to impose that will means defeat. But the problem would be to discover just what our will was.

    Here are some options:

    1. Removal of Saddam Hussein from power
    2. Elimination of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq
    3. Removal of a potential base for terrorists
    4. Creation of a new, stable government in Iraq
    5. Creation of a democratic government in Iraq
    6. Creation of a government friendly to the United States in Iraq
    7. Creation of a society that would take a stand against terrorism

    Well, #1 was accomplished and should have been expected. From a tactical point of view, capture and execution of Saddam Hussein was an added benefit. (What the process did to overall strategy is worth consideration.) It turns out there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction to get rid of, so #2 is accomplished, in a way. There’s no evidence that Iraq was an above average base for terrorism. In fact, Afghanistan and Pakistan probably remain better bases, and terrorists don’t settle in for the long haul in one location, at least surviving terrorists don’t. The remaining items are either contradictory or simply impossible in some other way. Donald Stoker, quoted by Carter claiming that combatting an insurgency normally takes 8-11 years, provides an interesting base line. I have no reason to dispute his estimate.

    But one aspect of context when one deals with the Middle East is time or perhaps timelessness. If you spend 8-11 years imposing peace, and you succeed, you still have no assurance–or better not even a probability–that the imposed peace will last once you withdraw. Feuds can go underground only to pop back up as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Notice that the chief image for U. S. involvement from the Arab side of this is the crusades, and they were fought hundreds of years ago. Iraqis can still think in terms of restoring the glory of Babylon, which takes it into millenia. Americans simply can’t fathom that kind of thinking as a rule.

    But there is a substantial problem in Iraq. Assuming that we want a democratic government, which seems to be part of the strategy, there is simply no reason for anyone to assume we’re also going to get a government that is friendly. We are much more likely to get one that is more similar to Iran than anything else, and such a government is not going to be pluralistic in nature, but inevitably will tilt toward one center of power or another. Based on population, that would be a Shi’ite dominated government. At a minimum, such a government would no longer stand as a counter-balance to Iran in the region, and could very well become an Iranian ally.

    If your will in a war is self-contradictory, then there is simply no formula for victory. I don’t blame the American people for losing this war. There was never any potential strategy for victory. The one thing that could have made any of it worth anything would have been the finding and elimination of weapons of mass destruction. The removal of Saddam Hussein is, without context, a good thing to do, but we’re not going to be any happier with a Shi’ite dominated government, which right now is the most likely accomplishment of this war. We’ll still have attrocities in Iraq; they’ll just be against a different group of people.

    Now I’d advocate staying on the simple grounds that we’re responsible for the current version of the mess. But I don’t think that we can make it better for the long term. The Iraqi people are going to have to decide for themselves whether they are going to return to all of the ancient feuds or whether they are going to learn to work together. History indicates that without some substantial force, the disparate elements that were brought together to create Iraq are not likely to form a terribly stable and peaceful union.

    Many people seem to believe that my opposition to the Iraq war is an oppostion to war, that I don’t want us to go after terrorists or find and capture Osama bin Laden. On the contrary, my opposition to the war in Iraq is precisely because it detracts from that very goal. It expends huge quantities of human and material resources for at best marginal benefits. It is as though a commander in a war attacked a fortress that would become isolated in a properly conducted war, and expended huge amounts of ammunition and numerous troops to reduce that fortress when it could be simply isolated and allowed to become irrelevant. If you further imagine a fortress that is simply not going to fall or will take up the same enormous resources to occupy, you have the strategic impact of Iraq on the war on terror. It doesn’t get us anywhere, and it expends troops that are more useful elsewhere.

    But based on the polls and on the truly silly notions held by many people, I also have to agree with Joe Carter’s conclusion:

    What is even more distressing than the fact that we have lost this war is that we are likely to lose the next one too. We have no interest in fighting in engagements that last longer than a season of 24. Given this reality our best option is simply to refuse to fight. Rather than engage in ‘pre-emptive wars’? we should take a page out of France’s strategic playbook and make a habit of ‘preemptive surrender.’?

    I’m afraid that no matter how much I believe the war in Iraq was a mistake from pretty much any angle, there will be numerous conflicts that will be good ideas, and based on the polls and general reasoning, I’m afraid the American people won’t back those up. I am wondering whether the completion of the war in Afghanistan, making sure that the government can stand, that the country can remain free, and that terrorist operations there can be largely eliminated, would receive the continued support of the American people were the news media focused on that country instead of Iraq. And there we do have the possibility of accomplishing good things, and we already have.

    Unfortunately, I think Joe Carter is right that we simply don’t have the staying power for such a conflict. He and I disagree on the Iraq war itself, but I think we would agree on the broader issue. The American people will only tolerate a conflict if the losses are minimal and don’t distress us. The potential strategic gains or losses don’t seem to matter. At the moment, I don’t think we even have the will to pay for and support the type of security we need to protect our homeland, much less to support operations worldwide for decades to come. The 8 to 11 year estimate is probably good, based on history. Understanding the middle east would suggest that the estimate is low for the type of conflict we’re in, and we need to be ready to stay the course for more than 8-11 years, and that each such war is merely a battle in the larger war on terrorism.

  • Only the President Can Stretch (Break) the Law

    Attorney General Gonzales is apparently concerned that judges may make decisions about security issues that they are not qualified to understand. According to MSNBC:

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases.

    Of course, the administration that brought us the Iraq war and FEMA run by a much-underqualified lawyer is qualified to tell us that no judge is qualified to hold them accountable. Ultimately this leads to the attitude that now pervades the Bush administration that even the voters cannot hold them accountable. In their view nobody is qualified to hold them accountable, because they just know.

    In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”

    In other words, only the administration is qualified to stretch the law. Those judges should just keep out of it.

    “We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

    Following on some other really stupid remarks, this displays an astounding level of arrogance.

  • National Religious Freedom Day

    I should have known about this, but hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Today is National Religious Freedom Day. I wonder why there is not more publicity surrounding this.

    Our freedom is a good thing to celebrate and defend.

  • Behind Every Peaceful Protester . . .

    . . . is someone who is willing to fight for it.

    I don’t mean disrespect to peaceful protest. There is a great value in it, and in civil disobedience, though civil disobedience has been somewhat tamed since the days of Martin Luther King. When I was stationed at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, a protest leader told me that she informed the security police before a nuclear protest about how many would be there, and how many would cross over the line onto the base. That way the SPs could have the right number of vehicles along with lunches to feed the protesters before they received whatever letter they were going to get or they were charged. Gandhi and Martin Luther King never had it so good!

    Nonetheless, such protesters do have a definite role in holding our feet to the fire on a variety of moral issues. The desire to protest is not limited to the left or the right, though the causes are different. Neither is the impulse to move toward violence if things don’t change, or don’t change fast enough.

    What is often missed, I believe, is the fact that peaceful protest requires an ally: The conscience of the people one is protesting against. If those people are without consience, then the peaceful protester quickly becomes a dead protester. Gandhi was successful because whatever their faults, the British had limits beyond which they would not officially go. Certainly there were atrocities, but those were embarassments to the administration. I know some will say that it’s simply the shame that makes this work–the rulers don’t really have a conscience, they just don’t want to get caught. But even the fact that they don’t want to get caught indicates some conscience.

    (more…)

  • What Happens in the End

    I think Fareed Zakaria is right on point with his Newsweek commentary We Might ‘Win’ But Still Lose. He notes:

    If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there’s a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder. Colonel Duke puts it bluntly: “[The Mahdi Army] is sitting on the 50-yard line eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them.”

    This has been the problem from the first. The question is not how many battles we can win. Doubtless we can win battles. The question is what the final result is going to be, and just how final it will be.

  • Back to Elections

    I actually wrote this thing a couple of days ago because I was tired of all the hype about lobbying reform, which I expect will make much less difference to the way business is done than the hype about it suggests. Like pay as you go, it’s something that makes good headlines, but the question is always whether the people who pass it will live up to the expresse ideals. I didn’t post it immediately because I couldn’t find a good analysis of the bill or any nice incidents to link to.

    That is, until this morning, when MSNBC.com sent me a late Christmas gift. In an article titled So much for congressional lobby reform? they tell us about a great democratic celebration, similar to an earlier Republican celebration when they were in the same position. All of which goes to show that the lobbyists and the congressman are still going to be working closely together.

    Which leads me to what I think is the only possible solution: Elections. Elections would seem to be the basis of a republican form of government, but it seems that the basic responsibility of citizen’s to inform themselves and to vote are fading further and further into the background. But we already have elections and they don’t seem to work, you say? Indeed we do. But if elections don’t work, nothing else will. If we as voters don’t start turning out the people who behave in a corrupt manner, there is nothing that will do it.

    What will happen, of course, is lots of things that create headlines, so that we’ll feel like something has been done. That’s why laws are named as they are: “No Child Left Behind,” “A Bill to Simplify . . .,” etc. Nobody names a bill “Lots of regulations to make a marginal change, at best,” though that would be closer to the truth.

    Campaign finance reform, some aspects of lobbying reform, term limits, and other similar projects are often hailed as great benefits for democracy. We have some of it in the first 100 hour efforts of the new Democratic leadership in congress. But I think we need to ask whether passage of new rules is the proper response to violations of the old rules, and whether restricting people’s freedom is a proper response to a lack of responsibility. (See House Democrats Prepare to Tighten Lobbyist Rules.)

    I think it’s quite appropriate to place limitations on what elected leaders can accept, but I’m extremely worried about restrictive reporting requirements on lobbying organizations, and other methods that tend to restrict political commentary or restrict access of citizens to their government. In the flurry of reform legislation, one thing that seems to be neglected is that we’re talking about people who were caught, and very frequently punished for their violation of the old rules. Under those circumstances, I suspect the new packages have more to do with making people feel that their legislators are doing something substantive than with actually accomplishing anything new.

    I received an e-mail alert from the Traditional Values Coalition. The reason I bring up their alert in particular is that TVC is an organization with which I almost never agree. In fact, this particular alert is typically hysterical on a number of issues. In general, I do not wish the TVC well in their efforts. But I absolutely do not want to prevent them from having access to elected leaders to lobby. In reality, however, I doubt that lobbying groups will be more than inconvenienced.

    I’m going to be watching the results of this legislation. It’s hard to work through all the details and people disagree on what will apply and what will not. For example, will reporters who work for companies that have lobbyists still be permitted to go to lunch with congressional staffers? Some interpretations suggest not. The real question is this: Two years from now, or four or six, will we be able to say honestly that congress is less corrupt, more responsive and responsible?

  • Pay as You Go – But Will They Do It?

    In a fine example of political maneuvering, the new Democratic majority in congress is pushing a pay as you go policy on spending, to combine with greater transparency on pork barrel projects.

    Since it’s probably impossible to have federal building projects determined strictly by some neutral group on the basis of value in building infrastructure and the economy, I suppose making the methods of getting pork into the budget more transparent is a good thing. At least it’s a better thing than what we have. So is “pay as you go,” something the federal government has not done well on in the past.

    But passing a bill that says they’re going to pay as they go may not be the same thing as doing it. As voters, we should be very watchful of what actually goes on. Some of the methods that could be used to circumvent such legislation could include creative accounting practices (corrupt corporations have nothing on the federal budget on this point) and special exceptions for important things. Of course those items would be passed with much less fanfare.

    Both Republicans and Democrats are talking balanced budgets these days. Clinton would up with a surplus. At this point, I’m not willing to believe that the Democratic congress will show similar restraint to what President Clinton did. I’d love to be surprised.

    The important thing is not to be deceived by the names of bills, or by passage of laws that are essentially intentions. Look for the performance.