Patriot Act paranoia is a common affliction among the civil liberties-obsessed, but Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Editor for the New Republic, has just taken it to a new level. Rosen is concerned about the FBI's use of the Patriot Act as part of a new, pre-emptive approach to terrorism:

Since September 11, increased information-sharing has been the first element in the Justice Department's two-pronged strategy to prevent terrorism. The second element involves prosecuting suspicious individuals or groups quickly for low-level crimes rather than waiting years to build a more elaborate case. In many ways, the prevention strategy offers a new twist on an old prosecutorial tactic. Call it the Al Capone approach: Unable to prove that Capone was a mobster, the government prosecuted him for tax evasion instead. Now, the government is using similar tactics to take suspected terrorists off the streets before they can launch an attack.

What's wrong with this strategy? Well, according to Rosen, "since September 11, the Bush administration has also used its new surveillance authority to prosecute or deport hundreds of people who have nothing to do with terrorism." His evidence? They're being prosecuted for non-terrorism-related crimes.

A comprehensive tracking study by Syracuse University in December 2003 found that the Justice Department had overstated the number of terrorism-related convictions by creating a new category after September 11 called "Anti-Terrorism," which includes immigration offenses, identity theft, and drug cases "intended to prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats where the offense conduct is not obviously a federal crime of terrorism." According to the Syracuse study, only half of the more than 6,400 "terrorist and anti-terrorist" matters referred to prosecutors by investigative agencies in the two years after September 11 involved actual acts of international or domestic terrorism....

What's more, the 9/11 Commission noted that, of the 768 aliens arrested as "special interest detainees" and lawfully held on immigration charges, 531 were deported, 162 were released on bond, and only eight--including [9/11 suspect Zacarias] Moussaoui--were remanded to the U.S. Marshall Service as terrorism suspects.....critics of the prevention strategy, such as David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center, note that, of the nearly 5,000 foreign nationals detained since September 11 on immigration charges, only three were actually charged with any terrorism-related crime.

That's right--we know that the strategy of convicting terrorists of lesser offenses is being abused to round up non-terrorists, because many of those convicted under the strategy are being convicted of lesser crimes than terrorism. (Perhaps the rest were charged with tax evasion?)

Rosen has an additional objection:

[S]tate and local officials seem less enthusiastic about the prevention paradigm than their counterparts in Washington. Four states and nearly 330 local governments have passed resolutions objecting to the Bush administration's use of the Patriot Act and its efforts to enlist local officials in the war on terrorism. For example, the district attorney in Portland, Oregon, insisted that state law banned his city's police from apprehending people who had violated only immigration laws or from collecting information on the political beliefs of citizens, except as part of a criminal investigation.

Note that the Portland DA's rationale had nothing to do with whether the Patriot Act was being used to target real terrorists or mere petty criminals. That is, his complaint was against the FBI's uses of the Patriot Act tout court, even against terrorists or their collaborators. No doubt many--probably the vast majority--of the local resolutions passed against the Patriot Act and the War on Terror were of a similarly undiscriminating variety, outright condemning the Patriot Act, as applied by the FBI, as an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties. Now, where on earth might all those political bodies have gotten such an idea?

An Exegesis of Feminist Research on Women in Information Technology
The important computer science organization ACM has a thrice-weekly posting called TechNews of news items about the world of computing and technology. When the posters are not shilling for Linux or actually reporting on something interesting, hardly a third-of-a-week goes by where they fail to discuss what every nonthinking IT professional knows is a crisis of monumental proportions: the small number of Women In IT.

I have known many feminist computer scientists for a long time, and they have always known the cause of this problem. In the seventies and early eighties they knew that the problem lay with the way that parents and grade school teachers treat very young girls and boys: these parents and teachers (perhaps unintentionally) steer girls away from an interest in computer science. Studies were done, and this explanation was proven correct. Of course, these feminists were young adults with no children of their own. Later they had children and their friends had children and they saw differences between girls and boys, so they no longer offered this up as the explanation; in fact, they had never offered this up as the explanation, so no apologies were necessary.

New explanations were needed. This is a problem that has to be explained and fixed because ...

Well for one thing, we need a huge number of additional IT employees (or at least we did before the "bubble" burst), and where else can we find them but amongst women? I suppose we could look for more men, since most men are not IT employees, but presumably the men who aren't in IT have a good reason for not being there: they aren't good at it, or they aren't interested in it, or they are otherwise gainfully employed. Women who aren't in tech, on the other hand, are leading useless lives and need to be saved. For another thing, women have a lot to offer IT that men just don't, and presumably these special skills aren't as important in that other stuff (law, medicine, motherhood, etc.) we want to take them away from.

Here, chronologically from almost five years of the ACM TechNews archives, are some explanations that have been offered for why there are so few women in IT and for why we need them so badly, as well as discussions of how to solve the problem. I've only chosen a small number of articles that I find especially amusing. ACM is obsessed with this issue (in a totally one-sided way), and this obsession reflects the incredibly totalitarian atmosphere in the IT industry, and especially in university computer science departments. (Remark: My host, Dan Simon, objects to this slur upon the IT industry.)

I've put (links to) these explanations on a separate page. If you read them you'll learn that sexism is to blame for the large number of female entrepreneurs; or that the real problem is that women don't like introverted white male geeks; that video games are the problem; that men do social networking better than women; that IT is too time consuming; that women are differently abled; that the rise of dot-coms hurt women; that the fall of dot-coms hurt women; and much, much, more. Each of these articles is idiotic and most are self-contradictory, but the sum of them together totally destroys any illusion that the ACM takes this subject seriously.

Here is a challenge for my reader(s): Find a feminist oriented article about women and IT from the last four years that was deemed too stupid to make it into ACM TechNews.

Here are the links.

It should be obvious by now that the battle between John Kerry and the organization known as "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" (SBVT) has nothing to do with what, exactly, John Kerry did or did not do in Vietnam. The actual accusations about his service record are for the most part exceedingly minor--at worst, that Kerry wasn't quite as heroic as he has claimed, and may have exaggerated his bravery a touch. The sole accusation with any potential substance is that Kerry later claimed to have been in Cambodia, when in fact it's doubtful that he ever was.

But the reason for this accusation's significance is precisely that it calls into question Kerry's political record, not his military one. For while Kerry may have used his claimed military heroism to burnish his character credentials, he later used his claimed runs into Cambodia to buttress his political positions as an antiwar activist and politician. Similarly, most of the SBVT animus towards Kerry, judging by their public pronouncements, is a product of his antiwar activism, not the petty details of the episodes that won him his medals.

However, SBVT dare not make Kerry's antiwar history the issue itself, for the simple reason that their staunch belief in the justice and honor of that war is far from unanimously shared among voters. Were they to assail Kerry as a hippie pinko radical traitor, they would run up against a great deal of opposition from people who considered Kerry's antiwar stance a principled and justifiable one. Indeed, there's no guarantee that such a debate wouldn't earn Kerry more support than it loses him. So instead, SBVT call Kerry a liar--and who can argue in defense of lying?

Of course, SBVT hardly invented this tactic. Anti-Bush partisans prefer to call him a liar, a fool or a corrupt dictator rather than discuss the nuances of Iraq policy--on which Kerry has a hard time defensibly differentiating himself from Bush. Similarly, former president Clinton's haters accused him of corruption, dishonesty, immorality, even murder--anything but bad policy choices, since his policy decisions were for the most part highly popular. These days, only unsuccessful politicians get the honor of being attacked for their unpopular political positions. The rest are subjected instead to withering personal attacks, calculated to rally the faithful and perhaps win a few stray fence-sitters, while alienating nobody but the hard-core partisans who are already invested in the attacked candidate's manifold virtues.

The success of such attacks, however, is far from certain, and ultimately depends on the strength of the attacked candidate's political support. Bill Clinton, for example, was pummelled by a series of far more devastating shots--alleged draft evasion, Gennifer Flowers, and others--yet survived to beat an incumbent president basking in the triumph of a spectacularly successful war. His secret: a detailed, brilliantly crafted policy program that allowed him to dismiss personal attacks as insubstantial compared to the "real issues".

Kerry, on the other hand, has been light on policy proposals, choosing instead to run largely on the theme, "I'm a war hero"--and, more generally, "I am not George W. Bush". And because the politician who lives by "character" dies by character, the SBVT attacks have exposed a clear vulnerability in Kerry's campaign strategy. If I were Kerry, I'd be instructing my advisors to come up with some surefire, voter-pleasing new campaign promises--and quick.

We need to have a sense of substantivity and proportion about "privacy".
Substantivity means that our discussions about loss of privacy should actually be about loss of privacy, and proportion means that stronger concerns should actually reflect greater loss of privacy.

Although I've been interested in privacy issues for some time, the immediate spark for these remarks is a discussion by Eugene Volokh about a decision of judge Kozinski objecting to (and presumably asserting the illegality of) the collection of DNA from people who are on probation after having been convicted of a crime. Kozinski's argument is that this will lead, via a slippery slope, to the collection of DNA from many more people, and perhaps from all people. He points out that a similar expansion has already happened with the collection of (searchable) fingerprints, and I think he is right that there is the "danger" this will happen with DNA. Volokh also feels that the slippery slope argument is well made (oddly, he doesn't explain why such an argument is appropriate to a judicial -- as opposed to a legislative -- decision), although he chooses not to discuss whether or not the "bottom of the slope" is truly a bad thing. Kozinski deplores the bottom of this slope, saying that we will all come to accept it because "the fishbowl will look like home".

What exactly is so bad about the government having all our DNA fingerprints on record? Unless I've missed something, Kozinski (see page 11530 here) thinks this is not much worse than the government having all our finger fingerprints on record, and he laments about how close we've come to that. He recognizes the huge help these databases provide in solving crimes, and is sad that the public doesn't realize ... what exactly? What is the substantive harm of having our fingerprints on record? You'd think he would give some examples. Perhaps the government goes to legal brothels and collects fingerprints to match with political opponents? Would this be the best way to get dirt on people? At least some people claim that DNA fingerprints are special, in that they could, conceivably, wind up containing health information about people, that can then be used by the government to ...

The government collects a huge amount of financial information on all of us; both the invasiveness of the collection of this data and the potential for its misuse dwarf by orders of magnitude anything we have to fear from the collection of (DNA) fingerprints. Similarly, the substantive invasion of privacy and potential for abuse from searching my home or person dwarfs that of swabbing my cheek. Why should we be so sure that those "framers" of the constitution would think otherwise if they were brought technologically up to date?

People generally have nonsubstantive and/or disproportional attitudes towards "privacy". They are horrified at the possibility that Microsoft might collect some information about their computer hardware while doing an "update". But they have no concern whatsoever that the phone company keeps records of every cell phone call they make or receive, including who they call, when, and for how long. (I know these records exist because I receive a copy of them every month with my bill.) And Mastercard knows about all my travels and purchases and the movie rental store knows about my kinky tastes in film, but these are not typically our concerns.

One of the big scandals of the modern day is that our medical records are not computerized and networked so that any doctor with a legitimate need can have access to them. In addition to giving timely and accurate access to the most important aspects of a person's medical history, this would allow automatic checking of many things including adverse drug interactions. The one and only reason given for not doing this is "privacy concerns". These concerns are substantive, but greatly disproportional to the enormous loss of life that happens every day due to the nonexistence of this system. (I hope to write more sometime about the pros and cons of such a medical system.)

I am not denying that we have much to fear from inappropriate behaviors of our government. Just to give one example, I am horrified that merely because I am suspected of using my car to deal drugs, the government can take that car away from me. But we should deal with substantive abuses in a direct way, and not by arbitrarily denying the government access to the data it should have. If by consenting to have my cheek swabbed I can greatly reduce the probability of my house being broken into and my family assaulted, this is not an example of living in a fishbowl, but rather an example of my privacy being greatly improved in every substantive way. If Mr. Kozinski lives in an apartment building, we can be reasonably certain that he insists on having a doorman who monitors everyone who comes and goes and who learns a great deal about the occupants of the building. He can afford this, and no doubt he also has access to whatever (very intrusive) bodyguards he needs to follow him around and protect him. I would guess that when it comes to his own life, he chooses substance in privacy over whatever he imagines the framers would want for him.

The New Republic apparently believes that economic redistributionism is due for a big comeback. This past week, it published two articles on successive days advocating the return of taxing the rich to pay the poor (or at least, the not-rich). Now, I'm anything but a fanatical libertarian, and it's entirely possible, for all I know, that current levels of government-mediated wealth redistribution in America are less than optimal for maximizing collective happiness. But these two articles are so nonsensical in their reasoning that they cast more doubt than light on their common position.

The first, by economics professor Barry Schwartz, argues as follows: studies have shown that people who are overwhelmed by an excessive number of choices are less happy than those with a more moderate range of options. Wealthy people, because of their wealth, have inordinately many options in life, and are therefore most likely overwhelmed by them. Hence, taxing them and giving the proceeds to the poor (who have far fewer options) will tend to make both groups much happier.

It's, as they say, a creative argument, to be sure. And no doubt some rich people would actually be happier with simpler, more spartan existences. But such people have an uncanny ability to find means--drug addiction, religious discipline, self-impoverishment through profligacy--by which to reduce their choices in life. It's hard to imagine that the failure of the rest to find such means is due to a lack of resourcefulness, rather than a lack of inclination.

The second article on the subject is somewhat less obviously ridiculous than the first. In it, political science professor Jacob Hacker argues that public opinion about the economy is pessimistic these days--despite the economy's fairly robust performance--because family income has become more and more unstable over the years. Hacker's solution: massive government-mediated income redistribution in the form of "insurance" against income instability, in the spirit of the Social Security program. By increasing the safety of the average family's income, Hacker argues, such programs would increase public confidence and encourage economically productive risk, in the same way other forms of insurance make otherwise excessively risky activities feasible.

Now, I'm all in favor of risk reduction through insurance, and I'm not at all averse to government-provided insurance, in those cases where it's valuable for it to be universal. Retirement and medical care are two such cases, in my opinion, and while I acknowledge the problems that have beset government-run health care and retirement insurance plans lately, I'm far from convinced that these problems are inherently insoluble.

But Prof. Hacker's argument suffers from two glaring flaws. First of all, he rests his case on the premise that today's pessimism about the economy is a product of rising income instability. But his own figures indicate that income instability in America rose massively from the 1970's to the 1990's--the latter period being one of widespread economic optimism such as the nation hadn't seen for decades. Apparently, gloomy predictions are less well correlated with widespread income instability than he implies.

Secondly, Prof. Hacker writes as though economic insecurity is crowding out risk-taking on the part of anxious Americans. Yet American household debt--as pure an indicator of risk-taking as one can imagine--is at an all-time high today. (Indeed, this kind of risk-taking is likely more potent than income instability at generating feelings of economic insecurity.) If Hacker's goal is to correct the level of risk-taking among households, then he'd do better to recommend ways of increasing the costs of risk to today's credit card-bingeing, zero-down mortgage-signing American households.

There was a time when appeals for income redistribution were straightforward: one would cite the plight of some miserably disadvantaged group, and declare it a shame that they should suffer so terribly in a society where the privileged enjoyed such wealth. Apparently, it's much harder than it used to be to find such people, because today's advocates of redistributionism have to resort instead to absurdly specious arguments in making their case. We are, indeed, living in fortunate times.

On The Importance of Averting A Crisis
I don't know how many Americans are following it, but there is a serious crisis brewing in the relations between Canada and Iran. Canadian citizen and journalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested for taking pictures during a protest in Iran in July, 2003. She was (apparently) beaten to death in prison. Now the Canadian government is demanding that the government of Iran see to it that the people responsible for this murder are brought to justice.

Fortunately I happen to have a book of interesting front pages of the New York Times, and I came across an article describing a very similar situation. That situation was resolved peacefully, and hopefully we can learn from it so as to resolve the current one equally well.

The situation I am referring to was described in the Times on October 15, 1933. A short time earlier -- in separate incidents -- an American citizen, a Swiss citizen and a British citizen had been beaten in Germany for not giving the Hitler salute. There followed outraged responses by the respective governments. Happily, everything worked out okay. The persons guilty of attacking the American were arrested in Berlin and are "facing prompt sentence by a special court attached to the Berlin Landgericht". In fact, we are told that the trial is supposed to take place on Monday. (The article appeared on Sunday.) The other incidents were resolved more quickly. The Germans stated that "the political police arrested today four storm troopers who had taken part in the outrage on [the Swiss and British citizens.] The storm troopers were taken to the Oranienburg concentration camp."

The article (at least on the front page) doesn't explain what a concentration camp is, and I for one have no idea, but at least the crisis was averted and peace restored. I'm sure everyone in the Canadian government is hoping that things will work out just as well with Iran.

Hodding Carter, advocating wetlands restoration in a New York Times op-ed, has unintentionally written one of the funniest sentences I've ever seen in a newspaper column:

The Everglades, once an awe-inspiring, slow-moving river rife with screaming birds, saw grass and alligators, is now just a big swamp.

Singing the praises of a mosquito-ridden, alligator-infested bog--while keeping a straight face--can't be easy. But doing so while dismissing today's slightly smaller version of the exact same mosquito-ridden, alligator-infested bog as "just a big swamp" is quite a trick.

Then again, Hodding Carter, once an awe-inspiring, slow-moving press secretary....

(For more ruthless ridicule of the "save the Everglades" movement, see my comments at the bottom of this old Slate article on the subject.)

Slate seems these days to be on a one-publication crusade to gut the criminal justice system. First, Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg, whom I've ridiculed in the past, published a bizarre, incoherent anti-death-penalty article with the apparent theme that because the death penalty makes many people feel uneasy, it will therefore always....uh....make many people feel uneasy. (The occasion for this article, incidentally, was the recent declaration by the governor of Maryland that his approval of an execution didn't make him feel uneasy.)

Five days later came defense lawyer Gerald Shargel, who had only a month earlier decried Ronald Reagan's "pernicious impact on the federal judicial system", in the form of the "unforgiving legislation" with which he "sought to smite what he perceived as the criminal menace." This time, Shragel was crowing victoriously about the "unprecedented chaos and procedural paralysis" created by the US Supreme Court's recent Blakely decision, which struck down one of Shargel's least favorite Reagan-era initiatives, the federal sentencing guidelines. To anyone other than a defense lawyer, the prospect of chaos in the criminal justice system might seem a trifle alarming, but apparently the editors at Slate find the defense bar's naked enthusiasm for mayhem to be far more compelling fare.

In between Weisberg and Shargel--that's three pro-leniency articles in a five-day span--came law student Dana Mulhauser, who echoed the standard complaint about the now-stricken-down federal sentencing guidelines: "the results have been Draconian", because "legislatures....tend to be punishment-happy". One of his examples: "[f]or legal immigrants, convictions for offenses as minor as writing a forged check result in mandatory detention and deportation."

Now, as a matter of fact, I happen to be a legal immigrant to the US, and in the highly unlikely event that I were to be convicted of check fraud, I could hardly blame the INS for deporting me. If I can't even justify greater leniency towards people in my own exact circumstances, then why on earth is (presumed American citizen) Dana Mulhauser--or the rest of Slate's stable of anti-punishment activists--complaining on my behalf?

"This is not efficient. I will not comply."

According to the Guardian, a "senior US intelligence official" is about to publish a book that amounts to a "bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an 'avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked' war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands." Spencer Ackerman has apparently interviewed the book's anonymous author, giving a fairly detailed picture of his view of the war on terror. (NBC's Andrea Mitchell has also interviewed him.)

All in all, the position taken by "Anonymous" is not a surprising one for a foreign policy bureaucrat to take. It is, however, surprising coming from an American foreign policy bureaucrat. For his words perfectly encapsulate the worldview that has dominated European foreign policy thinking for decades. It is a worldview, in particular, that will be strikingly familiar to any student of a certain British statesman, circa 1938.

Consider his characterization of Al Qaida: the enemy are extremely angry, and not entirely without justification. ("Bin Laden's critique presents in resonant Islamic terminology a coherent jihadist explanation for practically everything Muslims can find offensive about the U.S.") Confronting the enemy would entail unspeakable bloodshed on the most massive scale imaginable. ("To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden....this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.") Fortunately, the enemy's grievances are limited and regional. ("U.S. support for Israel that keeps the Palestinians in the Israelis' thrall; U.S. and other Western troops on the Arabian peninsula; U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; U.S. support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low; U.S. support for apostate, corrupt and tyrannical Muslim governments.") We can therefore avoid confrontation--and the resulting horrific carnage--by acceding to the enemy's demands. ("I think we should look somewhat at our relationship with Israel. Clearly we need an energy policy, not just in the United States but in the West, that makes us less dependent on oil out of the Gulf. For myself, I can't figure out what American interest we would have in Saudi Arabia if it wasn't for oil.") Then they will happily return to butchering their minorities and leave us alone. ("If they all killed each other to their heart's content, it wouldn't affect America at all.")

Now, it should be noted that despite its most famous calamitous failure, appeasement--as characterized by the above list of principles--isn't an obviously foolish strategy in every instance. As applied to Europe's rebellious colonies, for example, it provided a fairly apt justification for a war-weary continent to disengage from its troublesome overseas possessions--a policy which had plenty to recommend it at the time, and even in retrospect can claim at least one spectacular success (India) and many positive results for postcolonial Europe (if not always for the populations of the former colonies themselves). Clearly, appeasement's costs and benefits must be evaluated for each case independently.

How well, then, does European-style appeasement apply to America's war on terror? Two crucial incompatibilities leap to mind. First of all, the radical Islamists' goals--however limited they may have been at the start--are clearly no longer merely regional. Their rhetoric, their global reach, their choice of targets--all point to a movement dedicated to attacking "infidels" wherever they may be found, not merely in the Middle East. (Indeed, pace "Anonymous", Al Qaida has shown remarkably little interest in Israel for a supposedly regionally-focused organization.)

Even more jarring, though, is Anonymous' assertion that apocalyptic levels of violence will be necessary to crush Al Qaida. ("They've ridden out two wars. They're on the offensive at the moment. What are we left with? If we don't use our military power, we really just sit and take it.") His claim that the war in Afghanistan was a complete failure demonstrates the absurdity of this view: "[soon] you're going to have a government back in Kabul that looks like the Taliban, perhaps under a different name." Perhaps, but the last Taliban government crumbled completely in a couple of months at the hands of a ragtag rebel army, assisted by a few well-placed American smart bombs and special forces ops.

And that's the real weakness of the appeasers' claim that America's military prospects are hopeless: Al Qaida is not Nazi Germany, with a formidable modern army poised to conquer Europe. It's not even Iraq under Saddam Hussein, with a large-but-decrepit army and rumored caches of chemical and biological weapons. It's a terrorist organization with no territory of its own, hiding out among allies in a few regions where at least some of the locals are friendly. Such groups make enemies as easily as they make friends, and America only has to help those enemies enough to keep the balance of power firmly weighted on America's side.

Afghanistan has already fallen; Pakistan appears to have been won over, after a couple of failed assassination attempts clarified the Pakistani president's thinking somewhat; and Saudi Arabia's royal family now has ample reason to respond to Al Qaida's threat to its own hold on power. However chaotic Iraq may be right now, there will doubtless be plenty of Shiites and Kurds eager to accept American help in subduing al Qaida-allied Sunnis, the descendants of Saddam's murderous henchmen. Where, then, will the terrorists go? Syria? Iran? Dangerous enemies to be sure--but again, regimes that are not exactly world powers, and not without regional (and even domestic) adversaries of their own. If this is the threat of which "Anonymous" speaks, then one can only imagine how frightened he must have been of Saddam Hussein, who now inhabits an American-run prison. Rank timidity and abject capitulation in the face of any threat of violence may seem like a perfectly reasonable prescription for toothless Europeans, but it's strange advice to offer to a well-armed, assertive America. I'm afraid Anonymous has wasted his career on the wrong continent.

Conspirator Eugene Volokh has been hosting a discussion of the controversial topic of what makes a man sexy, and whether modern men are up to snuff in that department. It all began with a comment from a friend of his to the effect that "most men can learn to be sexy", but that "most men don't really want to be sexy; they want sexy to be them". That is, they "behave as if the only life possibilities are being the way they are, or acting. The idea of growth and change don't make the radar." [sic]

There followed claims that men do try to be sexy, but in the wrong ways (i.e., by being financially successful, instead of elegant or charming); that male sexiness is a matter of confidence--which specifically includes comfort with one's natural self; and that women create the problem by being forgiving of poor presentation in men, while the latter are far more exacting in their standards regarding women.

What puzzles me about the whole discussion is that it takes for granted Prof. Volokh's friend's original assertion that modern men are unwilling to pursue sexiness to please women. Yet, within my lifetime, I've witnessed a veritable revolution in men's fashion, in which it has become perfectly acceptable (for some, positively mandatory) for a man to spend hours per week at the gym, building his muscles, large amounts of money on exotic hair and skin care products (and considerable time each day applying these products), and even larger amounts of money on conspicuously labeled designer clothes that at one time were seen, when worn by men, as the very symbol of risible superficiality.

In fact, the real novelty of the complaint that began the discussion is that it was phrased, not as a romantic wish for an idealized Prince Charming, but rather as a mildly petulant scolding of the not-up-to-snuff male. Of course, revulsion at slovenly, charmless men is hardly new--these were the heroines' dreaded matches in countless traditional romances of past eras. Today, though, women are not bound by the need to secure their material futures through such unappealing marriages--they can fend for themselves in the job market quite nicely, thank you. As a result, they are free to demand more from men--the same things, in fact, that men have always demanded from them: conformity to their own ideal of attractiveness and charm in the opposite sex.

And men are complying in droves, toning their muscles and highlighting their hair as demanded by the new, independent woman. No wonder Prof. Volokh's friend feels free to ridicule the blindly self-satisfied male as hopelessly uncompetitive--for in today's market, that's what he is.

I have a long-term interest in "freedom of speech", and in trying to understand and explicate what it means, or at least what it should mean. I am not especially interested in what any particular law or constitution or court has said about this. Rather, I am interested in what freedom of speech should mean, and in what laws our legislators should make regarding freedom of speech. Some of what follows is original, and some is not.

"Freedom of speech" means, in its simplest form, the freedom for me to speak to people who want to listen to me. This is indistinguishable from the "freedom to listen", that is, the freedom to listen to those who want to speak to me. I think it is also indistinguishable from freedom to write (to those who want to read me) and freedom to read (those who write for me). It is a special, and most important, case of freedom of association and freedom of activity between mutually consenting adults.

There are many issues that have to be discussed relating to this. Some examples are: libel and slander, copyright, conspiratorial speech, crime facilitating speech, crime inciting speech, advertising speech. I hope to address all of these in the future. For now, let me just say that libel and slander laws do such immense harm to freedom of speech and give us so little in return, that I think we should completely get rid of these laws.

What I want to address for now are some aspects of the issue of how the Speaker and the Listener get together. Some of this is very difficult. For example, what laws, if any, should there be restricting "spam"? After all, one man's annoying spam is another man's perceived penile improvement.

But some things are simple. If you want to speak to someone who you know doesn't want to listen to you, then this is not your right by freedom of speech, and it interferes with his right to freedom of association. For example, some people have suggested that protesters have the right to "confront Bush". But in fact, no one has (or should have) the right to confront anyone (other than law-breakers) who wishes not to be confronted.

So what then is the legitimate purpose of protesters? The legitimate purpose of protesters, or demonstrators, is to present information and opinions to those who might care to hear them. The targets of their statements are probably not the object of their protest but rather potential sympathizers, and decisions about how and where they should be permitted to protest should take this into account. Now I realize this is easier to say than to do, especially since we shouldn't expect or desire our public officials to make decisions about public speech that are too subtle. But there is no reason we should go out of our way to protect the right of some people to harass others.

For example, if I shouldn't be allowed to harass a co-worker by following her and imposing my views on her, then I shouldn't be allowed to get together with my friends and harass people going to an abortion clinic. Or harass delegates at a conference under the guise of an "anti-globalization" protest.

Now I am more for free speech than just about anybody, but we should realize that massive, harassing, often threatening demonstrations are not about speech, but rather they have more in common with a riot -- in which case they shouldn't be allowed, or with a parade -- in which case parade permits should be issued for use of public land on whatever basis parade permits are issued. In practice these massive demonstrations are very much against freedom of speech, since the participants usually do every thing they can to inhibit and drown out the speech of those they disagree with. I don't know exactly how demonstrations should be constrained, but the goal should be to minimize harassment and maximize the number of different views expressed that can possibly influence people.

A related issue concerns the question of when it is right to send someone a complaining letter/email/phone-call. Since we don't know how to regulate spam I don't expect we will be able to regulate this, but at least we can think about the morality of the situation. A typical example is when an ivy league professor says that Bush is worse than Hitler and what the U.S. really needs is to be attacked a lot more by terrorists. A typical response by outraged bloggers is that everyone who is disgusted by this should send the writer complaining email; a phone call or two wouldn't hurt either. Why do they advocate this? Are they seriously trying to change this person's views? No, they are merely trying to harass him so that he will think twice about making such statements in the future. I have been on the receiving end of such harassment, the perpetrators being ivy-league-professor-types and their friends. The real harm done by such professors is not the disgusting public statements they make, and not even the much more damaging harm they do by imposing their views in their classrooms, but rather their near total success at intimidating colleagues who disagree with them into silence. We should fight this intimidation, and not become part of it.

A similar problem arises with a recent remark by Tim Blair, who is well-intentioned and who I generally respect. Unfortunately he thinks that because Jon Bon Jovi made some public statements that some people disagreed with, it is appropriate for those people to drive by his house and shout things out. I don't think it is appropriate, and I don't think harassment like this should be legal.

I hope to write more on this subject. By the way, the best writer on the internet on Freedom of Speech, Eugene Volokh, has also discussed many of these issues here.

---

I've updated this post, adding a 4th item to the list of things bloggers shouldn't do.

The passing of Ronald Reagan has reignited the debate over his role in the death of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The standard conservative line, expressed, for instance, by John Lewis Gaddis, is that Reagan's expensive arms buildup forced the Soviet Union into a level of military competition that it was economically unable to sustain without either reforming politically or collapsing economically. As Gaddis quotes Reagan: "capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism – money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever."

The problem with this theory is that economic hardship and military competition have never succeeded in bringing down a ruling Communist regime, before or since. Former Soviet acolytes Cuba and North Korea, as well as China under Mao, continued their militarily aggressive and brutally oppressive ways through economic catastrophes far worse than the Soviet Union suffered during the 1980s. Likewise, non-communist dictatorships throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and even the former Soviet Union itself have flourished during massive economic failure--and some have even found the resources for foreign military ventures along the way. Apparently, ruthless repression, combined with control by fiat of an entire nation's wealth, can compensate for a lot of economic mismanagement in winning obedience from one's downtrodden populace.

An alternate theory, more palatable to liberals, is that it was American engagement and detente, not competition, that brought down the Soviet Union. I had thought that a previous version of this thesis--that the Helsinki accords fatally undermined the Soviet Union's claim to legitimacy, by committing it on paper to respect human rights--was about as ludicrous a version of that theory as one could ever hope to find. But a recent variation, touted by Slate's David Greenberg, and by John Patrick Diggins in the New York Times, is even more laughable: it credits Reagan himself, who, by being friendly and accommodating towards Chairman Gorbachev, supposedly seduced him into enacting reforms that were fatal to the Communist Party.

Putting aside the ridiculous idea that a Soviet dictator would agree to dismantle the apparatus of his own power as a result of the beguiling charms of an American president, the simple fact is that Reagan spent most of his administration confronting and denouncing the Soviets whenever possible, declaring his expectation that Communism would disintigrate and his intention of speeding the process as much as he could. He did talk face-to-face with Gorbachev at several summits, and reportedly they were on good terms. But any Soviet leader who could be talked out of power by a charming foreigner would have been talked out of power by one of his more ambitious comrades in the Party long before reaching the top.

Of course, we're left with the question of why the Soviet Union did collapse, if not as a result of Reagan's bluster or charm. Slate's Fred Kaplan implicitly offers an intially plausible theory: that the Soviet Union fell because Mikhail Gorbachev, the top of the Soviet pyramid, recklessly initiated a whole set of reforms that quickly and fatally undermined his own Party's hold on power. The attraction of the theory is that it fits our normal picture of autocracy: if the autocrat's word is law, then the autocrat's decisions--including those that result in a complete surrender of power--will be obeyed.

However, the Soviet Union was not an autocracy tout court, but rather an institutional oligarchy, with a ruling party instead of a ruling despot. Such regimes usually act to save themselves even in the face of squeamish leadership--think, for instance, of the Chinese Communist Party's purge of Zhao Ziyang for lacking the stomach to attack the Tienanmen protesters, or General Jaruzelski's declaration of martial law in Poland, overthrowing the civilian communist leadership, in order to crush Lech Walesa's Solidarity union.

There have, it is true, been cases of such institutional oligarchies giving up their monopoly on power--Mexico and Taiwan come to mind. But both these countries already had fairly robust civil societies independent of government, thriving commercial sectors, relatively free information flow and even rudimentary democratic politics by the time their ruling parties accepted a democratic change of government. What caused the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to acquiesce so meekly in its own overthrow, in the absence of similar internal forces?

My best guess--and I admit that it's at best a guess--is that more than any other ruling oligarchy, the Soviet Communist Party adhered to an elaborate founding ideology that commanded its members' loyalty--and was also vulnerable to refutation. In particular, the premise of Soviet communism--putting aside the unfalsifiable ideas about the perfection of socialism--was that the revolution that began in Russia would gradually spread to the rest of the world, until capitalism had been completely defeated.

The real shock, then, that fatally undermined the Party's faith in itself was the wave of instability that shook the communist world during the 1980's. In Poland, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, communist governments actually stood a chance of being overthrown and replaced with non-Marxist alternatives. This was nothing like the heresies of China and Yugoslavia--mere schisms within the fold--or even the Nazi invasion, a military attack from outside. Nor could it be compared with the brief, easily-crushed uprisings in Eastern Europe in 1956 and 1968. Rather, the prolonged threat of genuine counterrevolution from within, emanating simultaneously from several parts of the empire, cast doubt on the historical inevitability of irreversible Communist advancement, as expressed in the Brezhnev doctrine. Meanwhile, the economic burden of buying quiescent loyalty from Eastern Europe, Cuba and other allies was approaching unsustainability, and thus threatening a further erosion of the communist domain.

Only such a fundamental challenge to the founding premises of Soviet communism, I believe, could have persuaded the Party to accept the huge--and ultimately lethal--risk of Gorbachev's proposed reforms. And only a widespread perception of these reforms' urgent necessity could have held the Party back from abruptly terminating them before they spun wildly out of control, breaking up the empire they were designed to save and bringing down its ruling Party.

How much the Reagan administration contributed to this challenge is difficult to estimate, even in retrospect. Would the Nicaraguan and Afghan rebels have posed a serious threat without American aid? How much did American encouragement affect the Polish underground resistance? Regardless of the answer to these questions, though, the Reagan Doctrine was, in retrospect, clearly on the right track--most likely moreso than either the massive arms buildup of the '80s or the diplomatic lovefest that followed it.

Most of the discussions I've read about American mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq seem to me to be a bit off. Let us take it as given that American's have treated some Iraqi prisoners in ways that are morally very wrong and (possibly) illegal.

Let us also take it as given that America mistreats (in far worse ways) prisoners in federal prisons. Let us also take it as given that Americans in the 1940s mistreated prisoners of war and raped innocent civilians. Let us even take it as given that Allies during WWII murdered vast numbers of German prisoners of war. (They did.) Let us also take it as given that Americans committed a large amount of inexcusable bombing of civilians during WWII.

So what should our reaction be? First of all, we should not in any way excuse these atrocities on the grounds that our enemies are worse. On the contrary, we should be trying to put people and governments in power that -- in addition to the other characteristics they should have -- have a strong commitment to not permit this kind of abuse. If Kerry, for instance, has a history of outspoken opposition to the mistreatment of prisoners in Massachusetts prisons and in federal prisons, then this would be one good reason for voting for him over Bush. This is a discussion for all supporters of America to engage in. They should be discussing this with each other, and WITH NO ONE ELSE. (Similarly, questions of whether Israel should have settlements or should occupy the West Bank or should destroy homes, are questions for supporters of Israel to discuss amongst themselves, with absolutely no representation from those who want to destroy Israel.)

Furthermore, these discussions are of absolutely no relevance to the question of who is on the right side in the war, or to the question of whether or not America should attack or occupy Germany or Iraq. So I strongly disagree with Andrew Sullivan when he states that "This administration ... has erased some of the distinction between who we are and what the enemy is, a distinction central to the moral case for this war." The distinction may be central, but it is robust enough to withstand an awful lot of bad behavior on our part, given what the enemy is. Should we really consider turning the world over to utter barbarians simply because we fail to live up to our own ideals? (Should we open up our prisons because they are horribly run?)

But, you may ask, might not "our failure to live up to our own ideals" become sufficiently severe that our opinion of who is on the right side in the war might shift? In principle, yes. In practice, the genocidal monsters we (and the Israelis) are fighting now, or were fighting during WWII, are so terrible that we'd have to work very hard to even approach the situation where there is some sort of moral equivalence.

But, you may ask, is there not a danger that some people with a poor moral compass might switch sides upon hearing of American bad behavior? Not really. The difference between the two sides is so great that there may not be one single person in the entire world who will change sides because of this. Of course, there are many people who will say that they used to support the Americans but have now switched sides, or imply that they used to support the Americans but are now agnostic; these people are lying. Does anyone really believe that the allied bombing of Dresden caused someone to become a Nazi who wasn't already one before?

But, you may ask, aren't there decent people who believe -- incorrectly -- that American bad behavior is causing people to switch sides? Certainly. Those who believe this have a very low opinion of Iraqis, and I wish they would explicitly recognize that. Also, if they think we should withdraw, or they think we should not have entered in the first place, due to the reality or likelihood of our bad behavior, then I would like them to make a clear argument for this position. Do they feel the same way about non-American troops? Do they feel the same way about UN troops? (This is just one example of misbehavior by UN troops; this is another.)

But, you may ask, isn't it possible to fully appreciate the moral gulf between America and its current enemies, and still think it was a bad idea to invade Iraq? Of course. Perhaps it wasn't sufficiently in America's interests or sufficiently moral, especially if you believe the outcome will merely be replacing an awful dictator with a slightly better one. Perhaps you feel we should have given up on Iraq (especially given the retroactive knowledge of a lack of WMD) and spent some of the money on, say, Afghanistan. I would like to see someone make these arguments well. Typically the argument given involves understating Saddam's awfulness, hindsight about the WMD, and a whole slew of adhominem arguments about Bush, or oil, or Halliburton, or Je Zio Lik neo-conservatives. I believe the situation was very similar in the years leading up to America joining WWII. There were undoubtedly decent arguments that one could have made for America not getting involved in the war. But people did not make decent arguments. They understated the awfulness of Germany, and they overstated the awfulness of imperialist England. (A perfect example of such a speech is one made by William Randolph Hearst. When I visited his mansion I listened to a tape recording of that speech, and it changed my life.)

John Rosenberg complains that author Percival Everett complains that a New York Times review of Everett's latest book mentions that he (Everett) is "African-American". Everett apparently feels that it is "insidious racism" for someone to think that his race is in any way relevant to his career as an author. Rosenberg suspects that Everett is being somewhat insincere.

Well we can finally obtain closure on this issue. It seems that Everett is the (presumably proud and willing) recipient of the 2002 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. This "is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers." Everett is also on the panel judging the 2004 awards.

Dan Simon has graciously permitted me to guest-blog here, until such time as I bring the discourse down to too low a level. My pseudonym "LTEC" stands for "Let Them Eat Cash"; this is a slogan I made up that summarizes and over-simplifies the kind of capitalist welfare-state that I advocate.

I hereby promise to try to stick to the following rules that I have made up:

1) I will never accuse someone else of being "arrogant". The fact is that our opponents always appear arrogant to us, and us to them, so that the word effectively has no meaning. Perhaps someday someone will describe a meaning for this word in such a way that we can reasonably judge a person's arrogance independently of his opinions. Until then, it's a good word not to use.

2) I will never describe an opponent as being "well-intentioned" unless I have good evidence for this, and truly believe it. In fact, I believe that many people, including many journalists and many people that I know, are very ill-intentioned indeed.

3) I will not call a person "stupid", unless I actually believe it. One thing I have learned is that some very intelligent people are capable of saying really stupid things ... and capable of being very ill-intentioned.


Of course, the statements I will make here represent not only my own opinions, but also those of Dan, my family and my employer.

UPDATE (June 17, 2004)
4) I will not make fun of an opponent for being old or young or thin or fat or ugly or of bad complexion. I will not be one of those people who delight in pointing out that Michael Moore is fat. I will not be like Solzhenitsyn who can write for a thousand pages about the murder of tens of millions of people, and then accuse the murderer of being "short" and "pockmarked".

I'm pleased to welcome a guest blogger for a trial run. "LTEC" describes himself as a "cowardly university professor", and his views on many subjects are somewhat different from mine (whatever he might claim on that score).

If you prefer to contact him privately, he can be reached at "letthemeatcash, at yahoo-dot-com". I hope you enjoy his postings.

The "Copenhagen Consensus" project, an effort headed by environmentalist gadfly Bjorn Lomborg to rank global development efforts by cost effectiveness, is under fire for disparaging anti-global warming measures like the Kyoto protocol. Strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions ranked dead last on the project's list of proposals, and were singled out, along with "guest worker programs for the unskilled", as "bad" ideas.

Now, I confess to being a bit of a global warming skeptic, for various reasons. But let us put skepticism aside for a minute, and accept the oft-touted climatologists' "consensus" that global warming is at least highly likely to worsen, and at least partly caused by the burning of fossil fuels. It still doesn't necessarily follow that the best approach to dealing with it is to attempt to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

Consider, for instance, snow. It kills thousands a year worldwide (through transportation accidents, strandings, avalanches, and so on), and no doubt costs billions of dollars a year to deal with. Nevertheless, it is not widely believed to be a wise idea to try to mitigate the damage caused by snow by altering the weather (say, by figuring out how to keep snow away from inhabited areas). On the contrary, any such effort, it is assumed, would be bound to be hideously expensive, massively disruptive, and far from certain to succeed. That's because weather is notoriously difficult to change, and has such widespread, varied and complicated effects when it does change that assessing the net impact of any such change is virtually impossible.

Similarly, global warming--even if it is significantly a consequence of human behavior--is likely to be hideously difficult to reverse in a controlled, unambiguously desirable way. By comparison, coping with the possible effects of global warming seems like a far more tractable problem. Expanding deserts? Desertification has been going on for a long time, and all sorts of means are available to combat (or cope with) it. Increasing tropical storm activity and flooding? Again, storms and floods are well-understood phenomena, normally (and far more efficiently) dealt with using evacuations, shelters and barriers rather than by attempts at prevention. Colder winters in some locales? See under: snow.

My strong suspicion is that environmentalists' focus on attempting to reverse global warming itself, rather than mitigate its ill effects, is motivated primarily by an emotional--even religious--aversion to human influences on nature. Because global warming is seen as manmade, undoing it--in effect, returning nature to its supposed pristine state before human intervention--is viewed as desirable in itself, irrespective of the practical costs and benefits. Conversely, coping strategies which simply accept weather as a given are acceptable only when the weather is purely the product of Mother Nature's whims. As far as I can tell, there is no practical reason to make this distinction.

The main story in this week's New Yorker is entitled, "Among the Settlers", and carries the summary blurb, "Some Jews believe God sent them to the occupied territories. Will they destroy Israel?". A narrated online slide show by the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, explains his concern: the settlers, in forcing Israeli troops to protect them by militarily occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are placing Israel in the ultimately untenable situation of ruling undemocratically over a hostile Arab population roughly as large as its own Jewish population. The resulting tension between Israel's security needs and democratic character is irresolvable and potentially ruinous for the nation.

This argument is, of course, decades old. It was at the heart of the Israeli peace movement's position in favor of unilateral withdrawal from the occupied territories at least as far back as the 1980's. It remains today the core belief of the dovish Israeli left. And it's therefore entirely unsurprising for it to feature prominently in the New Yorker. What's odd about it, though, is the timing of its presentation. Prior to the start of the current hostilities in September 2000, Goldberg's thesis was widely embraced as a justification for the Oslo process. Shortly thereafter, it was trotted out as an explanation for the terrorist campaign known as the "Al Aqsa intifada": by failing to withdraw unilaterally from the territories, Israel had provoked the bloodthirsty wrath of a subjugated people. The same argument was used to declare "Operation Defensive Shield" (the return of Israeli troops to the territories) doomed to fail.

But today, the empirical evidence is unmistakable: vigorous military action in the West Bank and Gaza has drastically reduced the ability of terrorists to operate against Israel, and the number of victims of terrorism has declined with similar alacrity. (There have been no suicide bombings inside Israel proper for two and a half months now, and far fewer civilian casualties this year than at the same time in the previous two years.) The crisis atmosphere in Israel has hence abated somewhat, with the expected salutary effect on democratic politics. In short, Goldberg's analysis simply doesn't stand up to the facts: it was surrendering the territories to terrorists that put both Israel's security and her democracy at risk, and retaking control of them that warded off the danger.

Indeed, it's striking to compare Goldberg's assessment of Israel's prospects with the objectively assessed prospects of the Palestinians. Four years ago, the latter were on the very verge of getting their own state, making peace with their powerful neighbor, and establishing their unquestioned geopolitical legitimacy. Today, they are destitute, violence-torn, occupied, largely forgotten, and without any apparent hope of mitigating any of these problems. By comparison, the supposed long-term threat to Israel posed by the settlers seems negligible. Why would Goldberg even bother to pay attention to it?

The answer is that despite the pragmatic phrasing of Goldberg's argument, it was never seriously intended as a hardheaded analysis of Israel's situation. Reading between the lines of Goldberg's narrative, one can clearly discern that his real concerns are moral and political, rather than practical. He believes that Israel's military rule over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is morally wrong, and should be ended for that reason. (And it would be unfair not to concede the obvious point that the Palestinians living in the territories do undergo suffering at the hands of Israeli troops. Their movement is interfered with, their safety is endangered by military incursions, and their political aspirations are left unfulfilled.) Moreover, Goldberg is politically opposed to the settlers and their religious-nationalistic agenda for Israeli politics, and wishes to see Israel take a more secular, internationalist path.

But this moral/political argument, taken on its own, runs up against the practical counterargument that withdrawal from the territories would be a security disaster for Israel--as, indeed, it was the last time it was tried. (The Oslo process handed over large portions of the territories to the "Palestinian Authority", which promptly turned them into terrorist havens.) After the debacle of Oslo, it's hard to find anyone with even a scintilla of sympathy for Israelis who is willing to demand such enormous security risks from Israel merely to cater to some leftists' moral and political preferences. Hence Goldberg has to rephrase his case as a practical one: Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza to protect settlers, not to suppress terrorist activity, and this occupation therefore threatens Israel's long-term safety, rather than enhancing it.

This pattern of argument--"it's only practical to embrace my moral and political outlook"--seems to crop up repeatedly in debates over Middle East policy. For example, it's mirrored in the debate taking place in America over the treatment of prisoners by US troops in Iraq. The latest offender is Fred Hiatt, who argues in the Washington Post that the stories of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison are first and foremost a setback to Iraq "hawks", who want America to remain in Iraq to shape its political future.

Iraqi detainees might have been going home to their families and saying, as German POWs did so many decades ago, that these American soldiers are for real, that they treated us humanely -- that maybe they mean what they say about liberation, not occupation. Instead, the United States is reduced to pleading that it's not as bad as al Qaeda...Who pays the price for the president's dishonesty? Soldiers such as Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli and his troops, who, as The Post's Scott Wilson reported last week, are out in Baghdad's slums, fighting insurgents one hour and fixing sewers the next. The prison scandal and the administration's failed response haven't doomed those efforts, but they've lengthened the odds. They've given aid and comfort to the enemy.

Now, there are certainly legitimate moral and political reasons for outrage at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US troops. (The scale of the abuses, and the appropriate scale of the outrage, are more complicated questions, of course.) But it's absurd to suggest that Iraqis' opinions of the US or its occupation will be radically altered by this set of revelations. They are, after all, only the latest (and most credible) of a steady stream of allegations of American misconduct that opponents of the US occupation have been beaming at Iraqis since the military campaign began. And if Americans themselves--as Hiatt concedes--have been reacting largely according to their partisan predispositions, there's no reason to expect that Iraqis would do otherwise. Most likely, those Iraqis inclined to disapprove of the American presence will cite the graphic images of mistreatment as yet further justification for demanding an American withdrawal, while those who prefer a guiding hand through the Iraqi transition to a new government will accept American claims that the misdeeds were isolated, atypical, and ultimately forgivable.

But then, Fred Hiatt doesn't need a practical justification for preferring that the Bush administration had "embraced the heroes such as Spec. Joseph Darby, who sounded the alarm[,]....apologized to the people of Iraq, appointed an investigator from outside the chain of command, pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions." Even if it could be proven that these actions would have had absolutely no effect on Iraqis, Hiatt would surely have recommended them as morally obligatory and politically appropriate. Likewise, if Jeffrey Goldberg could be convinced that the occupation and the settlers were not long-term threats to Israel's safety, he would almost certainly advocate ending the former and removing the latter, for moral and political reasons. The assertions by these writers that their preferred political paths are in fact practically necessary therefore deserve to be taken with at least a grain of salt.

As a final example, consider the "neocons" who argue that the Middle East must be democratized--at the point of a gun, if necessary--if America is to be protected from the threat of radical Islamist terrorism. The problem with this argument is that many of these same neoconservatives were advocating an aggressive, democratizing American foreign policy long before the Islamist terrorist threat became a matter of serious concern. At least some of them, it is clear, would be proposing American initiatives to undermine and then democratize authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, even if there were no Al Qaida. Hence, while it's easy to sympathize with their enthusiasm for dispatching odious despots, their assertions about the insufficiency of less aggressive alternatives should nevertheless be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism.

Some people would cite this story as a sad demonstration of the difficulty of being Jewish in the modern world. Others might angrily denounce the obscurantism of modern Jewish piety. I choose to look on the bright side: if Jews are free to worry about such literally microscopic issues, then their lives must be pretty good.