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The Drone Wars

I don't buy the notion that there's an extensive "controversy" over the use of unmanned drones (or as I like to think of them... robot planes) being used to hunt down and kill identified terrorists, even when the terrorists turn out to be American citicizens. The lack of controversy is not because I think there's nothing to be upset about... but because this is another one of those issues where everyone had an opinion going into it, and not much changed in the past couple of weeks when various "dramatic" revelations seeped out. "Controversy," I think, kind of requires at least some of us to be shocked into changing our minds when new information is revealed.

Along these lines, I think a lot of liberals aren't so much upset about drones as they are, still, not really thrilled about anything the CIA does, ever. Or even with the idea of a CIA. Myself, I tend to think "intelligence" remains an embarrassing business of failing to meet the definition of the term for those who do it, but I've relaxed a lot of my rigidity about what the CIA does (this, you may not understand, goes back to when I was 15 and wrote my first research paper on the CIA's role in assassinating Salvador Allende, and I'm real good at research). Especially since 9/11, I think the work of stopping terrorism is, first and foremost, the task of operations like the CIA, rather than, say, The Army.

As for drones, I am on the (admittedly unpopular, especially on the left) side of generally being okay with it, a position I've taken before, and where I remain comfortable. I don't want more terrorist events in the US, and I think "taking out" those who lead organizations that plot such terror actions is a way to do that. 

I also tend to think that it's tenuous to say that Anwar Al-Awlaki is best described as an "American citizen" while running Al Qaeda recruitment in Yemen; Awalki himself tended to claim Yemeni citizenship, having been born in the US while his parents, from Yemen, were here for University. He grew up mostly in Yemen, attended college in the US on a foreign student visa, and his role as an Imam advising and encouraging others to jihad doesn't seem like the most, erm, patriotic of lifestyles. His father remains a top Yemeni government official. All of which tends to undermine laments that al-Awlaki should be seen as someone like a next door neighbor who just happens to be living overseas. The argument about drone strikes against Americans absent an American legal process seems murky at best given this person as a target.

I'm not thrilled about any government program of targeted killing, and I'm not remotely suggesting that the drone program, its legal justification or its operational practices, doesn't deserve extensive scrutiny and debate. This is not about "shut up and stop complaining." But I do think we should sort out the complaints and keep in mind the practical realities of the world in which we live while doing so. The theoretical legal doctrines of using drones on "American citizens" ought to be questioned, but a world in which the only "citizens" are in the al-Awlaki family thus far is where theory and practice need, probably, to both be taken into account. I don't know if I'd feel the same about a drone policy under George W. Bush. And just today, John Yoo, Bush's legal architect of torture policy, took to the Wall Street Journal to support the Obama drone strategy... but at the same time offering a "you're justifying it wrong" on the legal questions, arguing that simply labeling people as "enemy combatants" trumps questions of citizenship. It seems to me the Obama Administration is less cavalier than that, and that's probably a good, or at least a better, way of thinking about things like this.

Similarly, I don't think the question here is whether drone policy can hinder or derail John Brennan's appointment to head the CIA; Brennan's come across as thoughtful and deliberate in his public testimony, and his experience seems appropriate for the job. And like most post 9/11 policy, Congress isn't especially brave challenging approaches to attack terrorist threats. But more pointedly, I don't think a majority of Americans are anywhere near the hand wringing of the anti-CIA left on drones and targeted killings of suspected terrorists. That may change, but I don't think the events of these couple of weeks, the revelations of memos and uncertain numbers of "civilian" casualties, have changed many minds. 

If you don't like the CIA, if you don't like armed conflict, if you don't like military approaches to international issues... then it seems to me the drone policy is really just a detail in a much larger, more complicated, and in some ways very idealistic, argument. That doesn't make a passionate commitment to anti-violence less worthwhile... but in the context of  a debate that's less about whether to have a drone program but more about how a drone program will operate, that position seems pretty much left out of the whole thing. We may get there, and in some ways, I'd be relieved if we did; we would surely be living in a better, more enlightened world. And maybe I have just given in to being a cynical realist when it comes to accepting a world of guns, drones and random acts of violence. But for now, the Drone Wars seem like a reailty we'll be stuck with for a while, a reality many Americans seem willing to accept. The enormity of changing that reality isn't a reason to stop trying... but it's a lot to take on, and I'm not sure the Pro-peace Left is really equipped, at this point, to effect that kind of change. And isn't that the way the CIA likes it?

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Benghazi Folds Five

I keep hoping, each time I hear a report, or watch yet anther pointless round robin of the usual suspects that some piece of information, some discussion... something, will finally end the national nightmare over "Benghazi". I'm not so naive - as some liberals were - that the election would silence the right, or prove them wrong... but surely, something had to come up that would shut this thing down.

I've given up on that thinking since Susan Rice went to Capitol Hill and apparently solved nothing by meeting with Senators who have been critical of her. Just what they're critical of, about her or the "talking points" she gave on Benghazi, still eludes me; but clearly, whatever happened in those meetings didn't help. Maybe, as some say, they could never have helped. But still, here we are.

What happened in Benghazi was indeed horrific and deserves to be examined and explained more fully. But I think the "problem of Benghazi" is, for our political discussions, something much more deep about three interlocking issues related to our current foreign policy that can't really be solved. 

The first is that just as Republicans lack a coherent domestic pllicy, they lack any sort of coherence when it comes to foreign policy issues as well. This was, if nothing else, the take away from the third Presidential debate, when Mitt Romney failed to really define any substantial foreign policy difference between himself and Barack Obama. Critics, and cynics, will point out that this is partly because the President is running a right-wing foreign policy, but I tend to agree more with people who say that we would benefit, mostly, from a robust debate of competing approaches to complicated foreign policy issues, and we're suffering for a lack of it. What we do "about Benghazi", how we deal with international terrorism, how we unwind our presence in Afghanistan... all of these issues and more (Iran? Israel?) are issues that don't even have a shrill, right/left partisan debate. Because, mostly, the right has nothing on most anything foreign. And that, really, is their problem, not the left's.

Second, this "debate over Susan Rice", even as it strikes me as stunningly pointless, tends to serve as a reminder that the President (still) has a small, insular group of insiders who serve as his primary set of advisors and confidantes, and he's done little or nothing to broaden that circle. I suspect that the President is deeply upset about how Rice has been treated, and lacks some perspective on the whole mess. I tend to think that attacks by people like McCain and Graham are similarly personally driven, and I don't think all of this is some triple secret scenario in which Senators want John Kerry to be appointed so Scott Brown can fill the remainder of his term. Mostly, I think something - I can't remotely speculate what - about Rice has been off putting or unfortunate, that it comes across in private discussions (though I think she was genuinely less than helpful in those "Benghazi explanation" appearances), and the objections to the idea of her as Secretary of State are meaningful and serious. I think the fact that a number of prominent Democrats - Kerry, Clinton, even the President - have let this mess unravel is indicative of some feeling that she's not going to get Secretary of State. I'll be fascinated to find out why.

But Third, the reason Rice and this "Benghazi scandal" is such a pointless exercise is because there isn't really a good answer about what to do about Libya since the removal of Qaddafi. Just as there's no good answer about how to deal with Egypt, just as there's little the US can do in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. the reality of foreign policy at this moment in our history is that we are not in a position to be the World's Judge, Jury or Policeman. We're not good at it, and we don't have the resources for it.  Republicans, after all, in some ways really only want to bring up Benghazi because they think some military force should have, or could have, fixed it - a notion that is obviously and demonstrably incorrect. Beyond that, they've never had an answer about how to deal with Libya, because in some ways, in terms of our national interests, we were better off with even a crazy strongman like Qaddafi in charge than the uncertainty and danger of what's happened since.

And this, the thing about danger and uncertainty, the problems that our entirely beyond our capacity as a nation to solve, is the thing that explains a lot about why Americans don't particularly like to engage in the long, difficult discussions that revolve around American foreign policy. It's difficult, it's messy, our pratcical needs can't always (or maybe ever) live up to our notions of our good intentions and our best selves, and we, as a nation, tend to prefer the story in which we are the hero, and the doers of right and good, where bad and evil can be easily defined. And we haven't had it that easy since World War 2.

My friend J asked me, a few posts back, just how I could justify, in any way, the foreign policy of the Bush and Obama Administrations of using drones and targeted assassinations to combat terrorism. And the answer I have, is, like this post, only that I think foreign policy is messy, that we as Americans can't fool ourselves into simplistic ideas about being the heroes of our own stories, and that in a world with complexities and hard choices, I, like many others, am comfortable with the idea that drone strikes are an effective way to prevent future plans of mass terrorism in the US. Is that a good answer, or the right answer to how America should act on the international stage? No I suppose it's not right, it's not good... it's just the way things seem to be, just now. And until we get a better, more robust, more honest, and more reflective foreign policy debate in this country, I think we're just kind of stuck.  And "the truth about Benghazi" is certainly not going to set us free.

On Hookers And Secret Services

Okay... so where were we?

I've been sort of chomping at the bit to comment on various stories - Ann Romney, George Zimmerman, you name it - but nothing is quite as captivating as the scandalous non-scandal of The Secret Service in Cartagena, now, is it? (And really... Cartagena? Other than Romancing The Stone... who's ever cared about Cartagena?)

My raction to the Secret Service story hasn't changed much since it broke: so... apparently after work the agents like to drink, carouse a bit, and maybe pick up a local resident for some R&R. And that's bad... why?

I'm not trying to excuse hooking, but in my own curiously twisted thinking on sex and sexuality, it's not people paying for sex that bothers me. What bothered me, say, about the Elliot Spitzer scandal, and made it scandalous, was both the outrageous prices he paid (which was simply foolish) and the fact that being Attorney General means enforcing the laws he was breaking at that time. That's hypocrisy, and that, it strikes me, is scandalous.

(Also, going to prostitutes while married strikes me as tacky and poor moral character, but that's a separate issue.)

So here's my thing: if the Secret Service agents were, say, using counterfeit money to pay hookers... then maybe we'd have a similar case; but  drinking in bars and bringing someone home for sex doesn't strike, entirely, as a firing offense. Again, tacky, perhaps; but not quite the federal crime it's being made out to be. Indeed, I'll be curious to see if some of these attempts to discipline Secret Service employees stand up as proper for a federal employer. Is off hour behavior really fair game for the government as an employer?

In any case, there's been a lot of huffing and puffing to try and dress up what is basically a salacious exercise in peeking behind other people's bedroom curtains as somehow a major breach of national security. You can almost see the visible relief of many media organizations reporting today's triumph "hooker may have been in President's hotel!" That's, you know, serious. It's almost like, you know, she was in the President's room. Except, you know, she wasn't.

All the heavy breathing doesn't amount to much, and can't really make the agent's behavior seem much more than what it is - tawdry, mostly, with a side order of tasteless. The idea that patronizing hookers might "lead to blackmail" is an old saw that was always meant to comment more on sexual behavior than any actual threat - it's the same nonsense that was trotted out about gays during the Red Scare years, and just as dopey. It's a suggestion that sex is dirty, embarrassing, and rather than be humiliated for a peccadillo, most people would, I don't know, pay thousands and reveal state secrets. Evidence of this actually happening isn't just mostly scarce... it's basically nonexistent. It's the stuff of movie plots and bad novels one buys in airports.

More to the point, these ideas of salacious blackmail seem especially absurd in this era where people's nude photos wind up on internet websites. Shocking? Embarrassing? Does anyone even know what these words mean anymore? The small number of people actually "shocked" to discover that Secret Service agents hire hookers lead especially sheltered lives and are, in general, awfully naive (almost as naive as the people who seem to think this only happened, once, in Cartagena). There's nothing especially shocking, or possibly even embarrassing about the President's guards getting randy after hours in a foreign country. The trope that this "could lead to national security breaches" is pretty much nonsense, and most sensible people, I suspect, get that, even if they hate to admit it. Because once you admit it... then we also have to admit that this story is getting way more play than it ever deserved.

I don't think, as Americans, we'll ever get over our nosiness, our voyeuristic tendencies, or our confused notions about sex generally. That's our culture, and that's how we define who we are - simultaneously wildly open and free, and puritanical and judge-y, all at once. By all means, go overseas and go wild with the foreigners. Just don't get caught. Or we'll really be mad. And if it helps us to pretend that somehow this is crucial to our "national interests", it's just a reminder of the lengths we go to when we need to justify our prejudices. Mostly, I suspect, the excessive interest in this story is about envy. And that's never pretty. And we're lousy at hiding it.

 

This American Lie

Maybe it's just a matter of timing - I didn't see it until late Friday afternoon, and the paid blogosphere does seem to cut out before Happy Hour on Fridays - but I'm surprised that the exposure of Mike Daisey as something of a fraud isn't resonating more on the right.

That may sound odd, but bear with me.

The discrediting of NPR has been an odd hobbyhorse of the right's most ardent screechers, something about the confluence of soothing voices, liberal boilerplate, and perceived objectivity, from what I can tell (roll that all up in a ball and you get... Nina Totenberg). James O'Keefe, in one of his more amusing sideshows, helped take out the head of fundraising at NPR with a tape of a conversation with a fake Middle Eastern investor, which led to a stunning series of off-point comments from senior officials at NPR that mostly made matters worse. NPR was also at the center of the Juan Williams "scandal", in which Williams was dropped as a commentator after telling Bill O'Reilly that he harbored suspicions that Muslims on his flights were possibly terrorists. 

Given all that, surely someone on the right will spend the weekend chortling as This American Life, one of NPR's most popular shows, has had to retract its most popular podcast, an episode recorded with Mike Daisey about Apple's dubious record manufacturing iPads and iPhones in China. Adapted from his monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" garnered a lot of attention, and started a string of modestly bad press for Apple, which has tried to minimize the fallout while trying to beef up standards at its plants (and I say "modestly bad" because none of it has really hurt Apple's sales or profits). 

Daisey's claims - that Apple's plants were rife with child workers and exposure to dangerous chemicals, among other horrendous practices - had been questioned by knowledgable reporters (though the practices were also confirmed by their reporting), but it wasn't until this week that Marketplace, PRI's business show (also on NPR), found Daisey's chinese translator who was with him on that trip, who said much of what Daisey claimed to witness - speaking to child workers, or observing workers injured from chemical exposure - never happened. Daisey calls it "dramatic license", now, and TAL is red faced.

But this isn't really just about This American Life; the New York Times has already had to issue its own correction to an online op-ed Daisey wrote making similar claims, and the Associated Press is looking at retracting coverage they did of Daisey on the topic as well. Others will surely follow. Even New York's Public Theater, where Daisey's show has been running, had to issue a statement generally supporting Daisey, but admitting that the show is not exactly entirely accurate (and that's okay, cause that's how drama works. Or something).

Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this - this is a "Mainstream Media" disaster of large proportions, undermining a popular storyline (corporate malfeasance! Cheap Chinese manufacturing practices! Labor rights!) that the right already can't stand. And this, really, is a classic unforced error: no James O'Keefe fakery needed, no dicey ideologue like Juan Williams to make the scapegoat. This was, as Ira Glass admitted, simply shoddy journalism that tends to undermine the credibility of a show like This American Life - failing to ask basic questions, check primary sources, or to make sure that information was fully confirmed. It doesn't help that TAL often comes off as smug, slightly sanctimonious, and hipper than thou on most topics it covers; this was hubris waiting for a fall.

Conservatives may shy away form this because it is, after all, Apple; on the one hand, an emblem of exactly the kind of capitalism they want to enshrine, while at the same time, a do-gooder sort of firm that liberals love to shop because it seems hip and cool and socially conscious. Embracing the discrediting of Daisey, when Apple still faces unpleasant questions about its corporate actions and conditions in factories, could easily be a two-edged sword, and it may just be that conservatives miss the connections: all that raling against MSM and bad journalism is less potent when there's no obvious political payoff.

On the other hand, it's the very clean spin of the Daisey case that I think should give lefty defenders of NPR through the previous scandals some pause: it's one thing to have been pranked by O'Keefe and his ilk, it's no fun having to defend the notion that Juan Williams didn't deserve all of what he got... but the through-line here is much like the unraveling of the NYT after Jayson Blair: lying to your editors shouldn't be this easy, and it's just arrogance to have missed the signs that this report was seriously flawed. Many lefties will, no doubt, want to take the line that Daisey's real disaster is undermining the efforts to investigate Chinese factories. But this, really, amounts to "he may have stretched the truth, but he wasn't wrong" and that's not true. This wasn't stretching, it was fabrication and falsehoods. Journalism can't let that stand. And NPR, as a whole and not just on one program, probably needs to reexamine its mission and how that mission is pursued. 

Most imortantly, though, is that listeners probably need to also ak more questions, and take less reporting at face value. That's the reality of our current American Lives.

Baghdad Blues... And The Hell of Good Intentions

Since it appears that today is officially The End of The Iraq War, I suppose I could finally do a post on the thing, since I never have, actually, written about it.

I never quite had the same strong feelings as others about the Iraq War; I suspect that my ambivalence, and that of many others, probably plays more of a role in why we went there, and stayed there, than I would probably like. 

It's too soon, really, to fully take apart the decisions to go into Iraq - both in 1992 and again in 2002 - and see how they've touched so much of our nation, our culture and our politics. That's a story we'll be unraveling for years to come, and I suspect what we eventually learn won't be as simple, or easy as one side or another would like it to be. 

As a nation we are, of course, responsible for helping to put Saddam Hussein into power, and for choosing, for a long time, to look the other way about his exercise of power and control. Whether that put us in a uniquely responsible position to have to deal with him when he invaded Kuwait is open to debate. It's less debatable that our decision to invade Iraq after 9/11 was pretty much entirely unjustifiable, a stain we will bear for years to come.

Still, my own ambivalence, such as it was, came from an awareness that someone, at some point, had to figure out how to intervene and remove Hussein; if nothing else, the subsequent events we've seen in the past year, in Tunisia and Egypt and Syria and Libya (and Yemen and Bahrain and Jordan...), are all indications that there probably is no good way, and no easy to define right way, to remove a despot. I'm not saying we did the right thing, invading a sovereign nation to remove its dictator... but in the list of things that shouldn't have happened in Iraq, getting Hussein out of power is not really on it.

The Iraq War was, to my mind, a reminder that American greatness is overstated and poorly understood, by us and by others. As Americans we overvalue the sense of our own good intentions, and try to ignore the nasty brutishness that is part of our true strength - which, on the one hand, enables the warmongers among us, but also warps the opposite pull to reject conflict and seek peace. We are not, necessarily, a pacifist nation. We are the worst of playground bullies, telling people, as we smash things, that its for their own good... and then saying we're really sorry about what got broke. We value freedom and the free exchange of ideas... until people are free to criticize us and offer ideas about how we might be bad actors. We do not have the money, or the soldiers, to be the world's policeman or its peacekeeper... but we're imatient to have others come around to our point of view, and the world does look to us, even while disliking our exercise of power. All of this, really, is what helped get us into Iraq, and made it hard to get out.

So much of the Iraqi conflict, too, had to be bound up in our own complex history, the life we've had as a nation since Vietnam. Did Iraq show that we'd "learned something" out of Vietnam? Probably yes and no: certainly we are not, as a nation, as naive as we were in the early sixties about the costs of war. We have no draft, there was less patience with President Bush, less patience to "wait and see." Yet clearly, some of the lessons we learned were the wrong ones: Having "clear goals" didn't make them right ones, we still seem to have an upper limit of around 3,500 casualties where war simply becomes too much for us, and we still, in some ways, seem tremendously naive when it comes to others seeing us for our good intentions and high ideals. And it's not as simple as what they don't see... it's also about not wanting to admit to what we don't have. Or what we do.

I am not so deeply cynical as to say that the Iraq War was solely about oil; there's a reductiveness to statements like that which tend to reflect back on the people who make the claim. If war is a human tragedy, then the reasons we choose to attack others, to shoot and kill, have a human dimension. This was never just about oil. It was about other things - fear, and prejudices and yes, a sense of justice, however misplaced - and all of them, really, were tragic. And poor reasons to spend 20 years at war with one small nation. I am cynical enough, though, to know that whatever we think we've learned as a result of Iraq, we're all too likely to keep on being the nation that stomps around and breaks things, for the very best of reasons. And really, what other kind of reasons are there?

Honestly, I never believed Barack Obama when he said we would leave Iraq. I figured it would be like Germany, always a base, just in case. I don't think Americans know how to end things - not big things, not small things. Our wars are endless. Our divorces are messy. We talk about "closure" so much because we have no idea what it means. Move on? How?

Of course, we aren't really leaving Iraq - there is that "embassy" we built, a palace all its own, just another way for us to exert power and control and keep, you know, an eye on things. From playground bully to stalker boyfriend... we are the nation that cares, a little too much, and in all the wrong ways. And as long as the Iraqis remain grateful... everything will be just fine. And if the rest of the world will just behave... we'll stay over here in our comfy chair, the bat comfortably at rest at our side. You know how we just hate to have to use the bat. Doesn't that show how we have so many good intentions.

Libya, Liberated

Conservatives said it wouldn't work; for months they've made "leading from behind" into a right side slogan to define all this wrong with the Obama Administration.

Liberals complained that we were opening a front in yet another mideast war, an obvious prelude to the day when our tropps would have to go in, yet again, against an Arab dictator.

Say what you want about the unraveling of Libya in the past 24 hours - and admittedly, the fall of Tripoli is in its early stages, still, with much yet to play out - but can we just step back, for a minute, and acknowledge that part of what we're seeing is actually another example of the President and his foreign policy teamn getting the right thing done in pretty much the right way?

There wer never a lot of good choices when looking at Libya, because of Qaddafi's level of control, the lay of the land, and the uneven power between his Army and a ragtag collection of rebels. As North Africa dissolved in uprisings (this is less an "Arab Spring" then a North African story, given that the real changes have happened in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya), it seemed impossible for the world to just stand by. But the question of how to get involved loomed large.

It helped, of course, that leaders in Tunisia and Egypt saw that trying to hold on to power, to kill large numbers of their own people, was madness. That was never going to happen with Qaddafi (nor, as we're seeing, is it likely to move Bashar al-Assad in Syria), and that left few good alternatives.

While the Obama Administration did a lousy job of explaining the role of the coalition it joined, the general idea of it made sense: use foreign forces to limit Qaddafi's army in a massacre of its own people, and allow rebel forces to keep fighting to overthrow the government. It was, most obviously now, a strategy for taking sides in a Civil War in the name of civilian defense. But the alternative of leaving Qaddafi in power was and is simply untenable. It was long past time for him to go.

And so, we now have yet another remarkable moment. Even as late as last week, it was hard to see how the rebel forces would ever move into Tripoli, challenging Qaddafi on his home turf. And then... they did. A war no one could see ending, is nearing its end. Without US or European troops on the ground. 

None of this is to suggest that what happens next is easy, or even peaceful; as we're seeing in Egypt, simply eliminating one oligarch does not solve every problem. But the last 24 hours are a reminder that change can happen, that it can happen in the right ways, particularly when people work together. And, in terms of American policy and politics, we have yet another reminder that, for all their flaws, this Administration is part of the process of making progress. It's not that I think he's a great President...  but on Libya, he got it right. And that, too, does matter.

Panic On The Streets Of London

In a week where the "big news" has been about America's Financial Meltdown, I said to my mother that the real story, to me anyway, that was being overlooked was London. That ended the next day, when violence in London exploded into a much larger problem of riots and looting than anyone expected.  It only took a day for worrying about the stock market to seem quaint.

To my "connect the dots" mind, the story of the London riots - which still seem somewhat wildly surreal to me - will turn out, I suspect, to be the endgame of the story about phone hacking... which in turn, as we are seeing, is less a story about the press and more a story about London's Metropolitan Police Force.

Stay with me on this for a minute: the real scandal in the phone hacking story - which, one might recall, has led to the resignations of its top leaders just as rioting broke out - is the complicity of police forces in both the hacking and the failure to stop it or investigate it fully. That story, really, is the tip of an iceberg which the rioting, and the failure to police that effectively as well, becomes just another example of how flawed London's policing really is.

It's easy to fall into a familiar left/right argument about the riots - are we worried about root causes, or lawlessness? - but our American biases are really beside the point; the British have a problem that is both about root causes (poverty, injustice, and a sense of powerlessness) and violence and law breaking on a severe scale that a developed society simply cannot tolerate. 

And all of those problems, really, have everything to do with an ineffective, poorly deployed police force.

One of the things that's rarely mentioned when discussing the English (and, in this case, really them and really not us) is just how much of British society is still a deeply entrenched system of class distinctions that are quietly accepted and at times brutally enforced. We Americans are only barely exposed to the issues of "Council Housing", the bifurcated system of education which puts the elites into those tony boarding schools we hear so much about, but shunts the poor and working classes into schools of lesser quality. The list of ills for the poor and working classes in London goes on and on... we quaintly talk of "Dickensian", but we forget that what Charles Dickens described in the interactions of British people between classes is that some of those perceptions never really changed.  The upper class is still separated and superior, and still insulated from the suffering of the masses, suffering that, when it comes to the police, is done, in no small part, to perpetuate the insulation.

London's riots, in fact, are now news - much the way the Rodney King riots in LA became national news - mostly because it's clear, at this late moment, that no one is particularly safe. Your education, wealth, class, and privilege will not protect you when lawlessness reigns. Therefore, some will conclude... we can't have lawlessness.

We can't have lawlessness. And we cannot condone violence. But while Thoughtful People wring their hands over quelling the riots, bringing some sense of order (and justice) back into play... it would be a worthwhile moment if London's elites also took a hard look at the role of the class divisions in their society as a catalyst for revolt. Improving housing, education, opportunities for work and advancement will be crucial to improving a society bacl to a place where violence isn't just condemned, but where it also seems unnecessary.  

In the midst of panic, it's easy to condemn the violence, the looters, the breakdown of civility and order. But the point is, really, that these riots are not, however it seems from a distance, events that came out of the blue. It's why we expect more of police than simply beating back protesters and throwing people in jail. Britain has a choice - are the police merely the enforcers of an established social order, or are they an instrument of helping to establish fairness and a sense of justice for all? Order and a sense of calm, however uneasy, will eventually be restored... but until when? Until the next riot? Or until people believe that, whatever class they come from, all of them have a chance for a decent, positive quality of life? 

What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I promised myself not to write anything about the News of the World "phone hacking" scandal until Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International, resigned. I did that because, ultimately, any piece before she did would amount to " Rebekah Brooks will have to go".

And now she has. And she's been arrested to boot.

I've been following the phone hacking story for months, at least; I kind of remember being interested back when Sienna Miller first filed suit in 2007, claiming her phones had been hacked, messages deleted, and details related to the messages showed up in the News of the World. But since then, watching this story unfold, it's fascinating and truly compelling to see how one minor incident has snowballed  into the calamity that may take down Rupert Murdoch's empire, his livelihood, and possibly his career. 

But if you're lloking for me to join in vocal outrage over the phone hacking details... well, you should know I don't do outrage a lot. Also that I tend not to take the familiar, obvious line; in this case, I'm not especially sympathetic to cries that "reasonable expectations of privacy" are really the story of the phone hacking scandal. Indeed, the unfolding of the phone stories has reinforced a faith I have that the belief in a "right to privacy" is actually kind of a vague all purpose shield that tends to wilt under close scrutiny.

No, what's really unfolding out of the revelations of phone hacking is something much more fundamental, especially for the British, whose culture, after all, is actually quite different from Americans. What's fundamentally unraveling in England, and may drift over to American shores, is a fundamental reassessment of just what constitutes news and what we deserve to know. In some ways, yes, that's the flip side of "privacy", but it's really the more relevant, more controllable question. Just how freely should the press rummage about in people's lives, and what amounts to going too far? 

That's the real question that "phone hacking" has generated. And it's why, really, the phone hacking scandal probably begins and ends with Milly Dowler.

Absolutely Nothing? Say It Again!

Just to stick with the frustrations of the upcoming election cycle (hey, at least I got something), one reason I remain interested in watching the Repubican crack-up is because Republicans - still - don't seem to know that they're in the midst of one.

Never mind, for  a moment, that the GOP is bereft of ideas on so many big issues - healthcare, economic problems, a general sense of how to govern; to me, if you want a good indication, just now, of how Republicans are struggling, it's the curious debate on foreign policy that's already begun to derail their primary contests.

So far, the Republicans have had more or less two full-on "debates" with Presidential contenders. "Debate" in this context meaning some cable news network sends out a signature star (Bret Baier on Fox managing the one in South Carolina, John King doing similar duties in New Hampshire for CNN), vague questions are asked, and bumper sticker generalities offered in return. So far, mostly, we've learned that Tim Pawlenty is bad at bu,per sticker generalities... but then, we knew that.

The debates haven't provided much in the way of interesting output, especially with Washington's political pundit class, who are vaguely part of the Democratic Establishment. But then, we Democrats are not, really, the intended audience. The debates are, after all,m meant to provide insights into the GOP primary process, and that means the real audience that matters is Republican. And on the right, the debates have a somewhat different meaning. 

That doesn't mean Republican pundits are much more enthused than their lefty counterparts - the ennui is breathtaking - but they do hear things the rest of us don't. And that, I think, is why foreign policy suddenly became the news out of the debates that's really throwing people off course.

This all started, more or less, because Mitt Romney pointed out, in offering general opposition to the war in Afghanistan, that Americans can't really fight another nation's war of independence. If the Afghan people want the Taliban gone, he said, that's their fight, not ours.

To many of us, that may seem obvious, if a little remarkable from a Republican. But on the right, it's revealing a deep rift that may highlight why Republicans can't get it together for 2012.

One thing to note is, among Republican Presidential hopefuls, Romney is not alone. Over the two debates, when they're not reminding their right wing audiences about how awful Barack Obama is, there's been a remarkable willingness to question the army-first, warlike propensities of the conservative wing. Getting out of Afghanistan, even out of Iraq, reducing American presence in overseas conflicts are points made by a number of contendes, from Ron Paul to Herman Cain to Romney and Pawlenty as well. 

The blowback after the recent debate was surprisingly strong as well - over the weekend, the lions of the GOP SEnate roared back and insisted that America needed to continue to support military presence on a variety of fronts. John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Liz Cheney and others all cited Roney specifically and called his characterization of Afghanistan incorrect. That's pretty revealing of some pretty deep internal tensions. 

The media has labeled a lot of this "war weariness" with plenty of voices to point out that Afghanistan has lasted longer than Vietnam with less to show for it, which then likens are presence there to the Russian foray into Afghanistan in the seventies and eighties. I don't think either metaphor exactly holds, and I think "war weariness" is a mirage. America's been "war weary" since pretty much its founding. That hasn't stopped us from a lot of pointless killing and bombing of stuff.

What the Republican candidates are noting, really, is that it's fashionable, right now, to appeal to the national desire to see these wars end. That's a position that appeals to both the rural communities of Republicans where many soldiers come from, and the urban liberals who've opposed military intervention on principle all along. It's a rejection of foreign policy notions on the right that date back, at least, to Henry Kissinger. And, as much as anything happening in politics, it's a signal that long-established divisions between "left" and right" are breaking down.

This desire to cater to a national preference against war would be fine, except that as a foreign policy, it's incoherent. Agreeing to the ideas about drawing down troops in Afghanistan is approving of the Obama Administration, though the candidates insist that Obama's foreign policy is lousy, too. The opposition to NATO-led intervention in Libya - which is also a hallmark of the Presidential group - leaves few, if any, options for how American can be a force in the world. 

Republicans are in this place, of course, because the George W. Bush presidency was such a failure on so many levels. Bush's "freedom agenda" - an attempt to codify our policy of "good intentions" as doctrine - suggested a policy having little to do with our actual national interests. Claiming that we encourage "freedom" and "Democracy" everywhere is at odds with what we actually do and what we actually want in our foreign allies. It's why, for more than 30 years, Presidents of both parties quietly looked the other way as Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt with an iron fist. It's why, for God's sake, George W. Bush tried to sell the notion that Vladimir Putin was somehow a good guy. Democracy, even as we practice it, is messy. Oligarchs and Despots may be problematic, but it does make negotiations a lot easier.

The failure of the Bush Administration to create and promote a sensible idea of a Republican approach to foreign policy - one that involved something other than the armed forces - has left Republicans with few real ideas on how to approach a changing world no longer interested in the idea of the US as the world's cop. Virtually all that's left - a Cold War hangover that makes China the last enemy - may have some visceral appeal to xenophobic conservatives, but offers no real answer to the challenges we face as a nation doing business and relating to other wealthy powerful players.

As with so much else about this election cycle, the real shame her is that the President and the Democratic Establishment may well succeed in reelecting President Obama with little real challenge to the status quo, when a robust debate is needed with some real competition among ideas. That Republicans will find themselves voicing discontent with the Afghanistan War, agitating more vocally than the left to end international interventions is both heartening and bewildering. Welcome to the quest to ask "War... what is it good for?" The real shame, though, will be watching them lose because of it.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

I don't think it's at all surprising that conservatives have settled into arguing that "we were right about waterboarding" as a way to deflect having to acknowledge that the President's success in finding and killing Osama Bin Laden has wrecked their "we're the only ones who can fight terrorism" chest-thumping.

It's probably equally unsurprising that progressives have responded yet again with their two favorite responses: "you people are monsters" and "waterboarding had nothing to do with it."

The old and familiar contours of the argument don't mean much to me (even as I come down, firmly, with the progressives on this one: you people really are monsters for wanting to torture people, and waterboarding yielded precisely nothing useful); this debate won't end anytime soon, which I'll get to in a minute. What's been kind of interesting to me are the wrinkles on both sides among some of the key players.

One wrinkle is that some of the Bush players are hedging on just whether "harsh" interrogations actually produced information that led to identifying Bin Laden's compound. While trying to claim credit for working hard to locate him, Rumsfeld, Rove and others were surprisingly cautious in suggesting that things like waterboarding actually led to usable intelligence.

Just as curious, the White House seems reluctant to simply take the idea off the table. Simply saying "no information from 'harsh' interrogations led to Bin Laden" would seem like an easy call, even if it wasn't entirely true. Instead the White HOuse and National Security teams have hedged by saying "no one piece of information" was that crucial. That's hard to dispute... but leaves the door open to suggest that continuing to torture people is somehow okay, if it yields useful intelligence.

As I said, it's not surprising that Republicans want, even now, to make the use of waterboarding and other techniques perfectly reasonable responses to terrorists and their threats. As well, they've continued a thread of trying to make waterboarding and such "not torture" by dressing it up as "harsh" and similar, somehow excusable terms. We don't torture people... we're just looking for answers. And if what we do works... how can it be torture? Or wrong?

More distressing, as the story of the Bin Laden compound raid and assasination unfolds, is the sense that most Americans, including many lefties (and a lot of prominent liberals), are planning to ask no questions about the debatable "right" we had to go into Pakistan in the first place. Pakistan has protested, for years now, about American drone attacks on terrorist and Taliban leaders, and has complained even louder about this foray onto their soverign turf, with no warning and no permission. Further, nothing that continues to drip out about the "fire fight" that night suggests anything like a mission to find Osama Bin Laden and actually "bring him to justice" - that is, actually capture him for the prupose of a trial. Instead, we are learning that the murder of an unarmed man, awoken in the middle of the night, amounts to "bringing someone to justice."

The debates about torture won't go away because, with this raid and this killing, Democrats have, in their way, gone all in to prove themselves as tough as Republicans when it comes to fighting terrorism. And, I'm convinced, probably successfully as well. Even in less than a week, it's clear that savvy conservatives are realizing the power of a successful midnight raid to kill Osama Bin Laden, and just how effectively it may eviscerate their 2012 election plans (what little hope they were clinging to, anyway). And so, now they're trying to shift the discussion back to the kind of extremes that they think make Democrats wilt - torture! Guantanamo! whatever it takes!

Even so, I don't think lefties, or the Democratic Party elite, are tied to an anti-terrorism policy that's exactly like what we've lived through under George Bush. What they, and we, are all tied to, even now, is the mess the Bush team left in their wake - the people who were tortured. The people we still hold at Gunatanamo. The things we did that we probably shouldn't have, and the things we continue to do as a result. These things can't be wished away... and to a considerable extent, they can't be undone. And we're not looking any better as a nation for just how little we wonder about the decency of shooting a man in the dead of night... and calling it justice. Even a man as monstrous as Osama Bin Laden.