Bush lies in memoirs

[lemur]

First of all, we have a system of justice in the US that we consider to be held in high esteem - we consider the high burden of proof to demonstrate guilt a good thing, even if some guilty parties are never found guilty in a court of law.

People who have faith in the courts use the courts to pursue justice. People who lack such faith pursue other means to justice. There is always a dilemma about whether and how to intervene in vigilante social control practices. I don't consider it ethical to use excessive force to repress non-governmental social control, although I certainly think it is valid to consider doing SOMETHING about it, since it violates basic constitutional rights such as the right to a fair and public trial, to have explicit charges named and dropped when insufficient evidence is found etc. People spend years discriminating, retaliating, and manipulating each other without ever going to court or even stopping for a moment to consider that they are effectively governing without representation and/or trying and sentencing each other without a fair trial.

 

So, these "liberators" coming from a foreign land, have to come onto US soil, and trespass on private property to "liberate" this 12 yr old wife against her wishes, against the wishes of her 40 yr old husband, and against the wishes of the child's parents. Once they liberate her, what are they going to do with her? She can't go back to her parents - they'll just take her back to her husband. If she's dropped off in the other side of the nation, she'll find a way to get back to her husband.

I agree with you, and I think people get so carried away in their ideas that they forget that most oppression occurs with consent and even assent of the oppressed. Liberation is a lot more complex than swooping in and making drastic changes in people's lives. Still, I think it is good for people to have an interest in liberating the oppressed and to see this as a more important value than the value of protecting national autonomy.

 

So what are these "well intentioned" liberators to do? You can't break down locked doors of people who under US Federal and State law have not committed any crimes, or even conducted themselves in a manner to justify a search warrant.

Well, one example comes to mind in which airlines and the CIA (i believe I read it was the CIA but I'm not 100%) cooperated to evacuate children from Cuba to save them from communism. Compare this to the Elian Gonzalez affair in the 1990s when a child was returned to Cuba despite the poor economic conditions. Anyway, the point is that all sorts of interventions take place, probably more often covert than openly, and if they would not circumvent corrupt governmental regimes, they would basically be cooperating in those regimes' oppression of the people they seek to liberate, wouldn't they?

 

How could that not end in bloodshed?

Because such bloodshed is a form of retaliation and is simply not necessary. Why is it natural to violently attack anyone who crosses national frontiers just because of their presence? Shouldn't "invaders" have to pose a threat before action is taken against them? Shouldn't the "threat" they pose be held to accountability standards the same way police are accountable for when they use force against a suspect? Doesn't the use of violence always have to be reasonable and not excessive/repressive or it becomes harassment/intimidation?

 

Perhaps you aren't aware of this idiosyncrasy within a subset of the Mormon religion largely limited to areas of Utah: A man in his 40s will "marry" a girl as young as 12 in a religious (non-legal) ceremony, and may take multiple wives in this fashion. Polygamy is still illegal, but unless they get a legal marriage the state can't do anything about the age of the girl or number of wives.

Most of the country finds this to be amoral, but it is difficult to identify and prosecute due to the lack of cooperating witnesses. The parents of the girl consider it not just moral but a duty within their religion, the girls consider it a moral obligation to respect their parents and their new husbands, and the husbands consider it not just moral but their religious duty as well.

If you wanted to intervene in this practice, you would have to identify what the specific ethical problems with this morality are and attempt to inform the people involved of what their rights are and what the ethical problems (abuses) are that are going on. Technically, it seems that it's only illegal if the underage girls are being physically molested or psychologically harassed or assaulted. There would be nothing illegal about holding an information campaign about religious freedom, sexual freedom, or those kids of issues - or just holding local get-togethers to talk about the ethics of polygamy, monogamy, and various approaches to family-building. You could also set up an online discussion forum with information and discussion. The hard question is what to do when people are militantly closed to engaging critics. On the one hand, it is understandable when people feel harassed by such critics, but on the other hand they might be avoiding public accountability because they are up to no-good and they know it. All very tough issues to deal with.

 

You can't expect to hold everyone to be ethically accountable to the same standards when everyone believes they are right. Of course, naturally as all involved are human, it's safe to say none of them are right, but some are more right than others - but who is? The people who are more right and the people who are less right both equally believe they are right, so the weight of their moral convictions can't help.

The whole point is that human subjectivity IS relative, so people hold their own values relative to their culture and experience and they usually believe they ARE right. When people try to keep their morality/culture/values to themselves, they fail. That is simply the reality. People exercise power toward each other in one way or the other. They do not exist in isolation from one another. So the only way to deal with moral/cultural differences/conflicts is to ATTEMPT to get people to engage each other in the least destructive way possible. This is of course a relative moral-value. Your morality may tell you to use as much violence possible to repress others as much as possible when they differ from you. If you do that, however, others with the same value will probably assault you back with the same level of force and intentions. Ultimately, all anyone can really do is to attempt to act as ethically as possible in good faith based on their own best ethical/moral reasoning. And there's really nothing you can do to stop others from doing the same, except try (if your ethics/morals tell you that it is good to do so). Social life is a free-for-all, for better or worse, and all anyone can do to try to change that is engage in that free-for-all with the hope of intervening in other people's processes and actions.

 

Secondarily, who in their right mind would trust someone just because they say they have good intentions? If the police show up at my door I have rights and obligations under US law, but if some people from another country do the same why on Earth would I trust them? They are already breaking US law just being in the country for the purpose of usurping US law. So you have law breakers at my door demanding my compliance under threat (I assume they don't just want to make a polite suggestion, or they would have just emailed me) - but they are assuring me if I cooperate I won't be harmed.

It is hard to assess good intentions vs. deceit but it makes sense to try if you wish to validate legitimately good faith attempts at social benevolence from covert actions to use and abuse others by pretending to be a do-gooder.

 

You think that would go well?

It might if local authorities welcomed the interest and assistance and offered to form a coalition force to address whatever social problem was the issue. If people really come in peace, they would probably not want to fight with local forces given the opportunity to reason and cooperate with them. Of course the situation could get more violent if, as you say, one side feels like the other is being deceitful in order to pursue covert goals.

 

You have to consider the guilty, those who are guilty but don't believe they did anything unethical, and of course those who the "liberators" believe are guilty due to bad information. You have to consider the impact on and risk to bystanders, and the fact that the liberators are breaking international law by taking justice into their own hands.

But who is to say whether international law is ethical or reasonable when it prevents justice from being served? Why would you assume that international law or any other law is valid just because it exists and has a name? Institutions are created by humans and neither the humans nor the institutions are infallible. When either fails, it takes other humans and institutions to conflict with them to remedy the shortcomings. This is called "checks and balances of power."

 

I cannot imagine how you think that would end in anything but violence.

Because it is always up to individuals to resist violence in the situations that they are tempted to exercise it. Violence is never inevitable, just as it is never fully absent.

 

And BTW, if we let people from Country A march into the US to save the 12 yr old girl because of Universal Ethics, who's going to tell people from Country B they can't do the same thing to stone a US citizen to death for drawing a picture of Mohammad? Under their cultural ethics they believe they are just as ethically justified to intervene in crimes against their God as others believe themselves to be for stopping crimes against human rights.

First of all, I continue to disagree with you attributing agency to Countries as collective units. The world exists out of a plurality of authorities, not just nationalist authorities. Second, if you have the authority to allow or intervene in any such interventions, you would do so from your own moral judgment. If you considered the actions of one liberation force ethical, you would allow it. If you felt another liberation force was acting unethically in its activities, you would intervene with whatever power you had to do so. This is basically describing the exercise of decentralized power in a democratic republic, btw.

 

I happen to agree that human rights transcends the issue of borders and local law - but to take will-imposing actions against those violations is an absolute rat nest of trouble, and that's why we have over 175 embassies and consulates on US soil and a whole slew of international treaties and local laws.

There are many institutions and strategies for intervening in others' affairs, but the one thing I'm pretty sure about is that it's impossible to do so without trouble but that to allow people to suffer unduly because it's not worth the trouble to intervene also seems unethical.

 

 

[CharonY]

Yeah, I am. I don't think accusatory rhetoric that isn't substantiated by evidence is good for the discourse. My two bits, anyway.

 

 

 

 

This is incorrect. The United Nations supported the Iraq effort after it started:

 

http://en.wikipedia....Resolution_1483

 

 

And this effort enabled a number of other countries to get involved in humanitarian *and* security actions:

http://en.wikipedia....Mission_in_Iraq

 

Both of those resolutions passed in 2003.

 

Right. in that case Germany could have gotten involved, if they wanted to. Though It would be a tough act after their their resistance to enter the war in the first place (and the resulting falling out with the US). More to the OP, however, at the time of the discussion there was not mandate to invade Iraq. Legally at that point the chancellor could not have provided troops, even if he wanted to. Note that he also supported ongoing inspections by the UN.

[Pangloss]

I don't think accusatory rhetoric that isn't substantiated by evidence is good for the discourse. My two bits, anyway

OK, why are you content with an illegal war, but not a dishonest one?

 

Do not put words in my mouth, please. I know politics is frustrating but that's no reason to take it out on me.

 

I voted for John Kerry in 2004 in part because of my opposition to the war in Iraq. I'm not "okay with" that war.

 

 

Would it have been possible to persuade people to go and die for a foreign country if you started off by saying "this is illegal but we are going to do it anyway."?

 

No, but there are other possible explanations for what happened.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I read an interesting Washington Post article today:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111506015.html

 

It suggests the president did not make a mistake based on faulty intelligence, but made a decision by ignoring more recent contradictory evidence.

[padren]

People who have faith in the courts use the courts to pursue justice. People who lack such faith pursue other means to justice. There is always a dilemma about whether and how to intervene in vigilante social control practices. I don't consider it ethical to use excessive force to repress non-governmental social control, although I certainly think it is valid to consider doing SOMETHING about it, since it violates basic constitutional rights such as the right to a fair and public trial, to have explicit charges named and dropped when insufficient evidence is found etc. People spend years discriminating, retaliating, and manipulating each other without ever going to court or even stopping for a moment to consider that they are effectively governing without representation and/or trying and sentencing each other without a fair trial.

Lemur, you are the one advocating vigilante justice - you are the person who says foreign intervention is necessary due to a lack of faith in the courts to pursue justice. Then you talk about how vigilantism is bad?

 

Of course I agree on the doing SOMETHING about it, but if that SOMETHING requires illegal vigilantism I wouldn't fool myself into believing that violence won't be factor. I would wish to avoid it, I would hate it, but if I decided to use illegal methods to hinder the freedoms of another, I have to acknowledge they do have the right to defend themselves against such illegal assaults. All it would take is for them to call the police, at which point I can either abandon my liberation mission and go to jail, or I can shoot it out with the police in hopes of carrying out my mission.

 

How would you deal with that, if you were one of these liberators?

I agree with you, and I think people get so carried away in their ideas that they forget that most oppression occurs with consent and even assent of the oppressed. Liberation is a lot more complex than swooping in and making drastic changes in people's lives. Still, I think it is good for people to have an interest in liberating the oppressed and to see this as a more important value than the value of protecting national autonomy.

I'm all in favor of more aggressive international cooperation in preventing human rights abuses.

 

I even agree (as I said before) that human rights is an issue that transcends borders. What I disagree with is the idea that you can use force without an expectation of justified, violent resistance. Hence, I consider military intervention a last resort and expect it to be bloody, with diplomacy being the preferred method to promote human rights.

Well, one example comes to mind in which airlines and the CIA (i believe I read it was the CIA but I'm not 100%) cooperated to evacuate children from Cuba to save them from communism. Compare this to the Elian Gonzalez affair in the 1990s when a child was returned to Cuba despite the poor economic conditions. Anyway, the point is that all sorts of interventions take place, probably more often covert than openly, and if they would not circumvent corrupt governmental regimes, they would basically be cooperating in those regimes' oppression of the people they seek to liberate, wouldn't they?

I am not familiar with the Cuba evacuations, but I assume those kids and probably their parents were willing participants? As for Elian, that's a pretty big side-topic considering all the factors. With regards to the CIA/airlines deal: you realize if the Cuban government had found out, those involved would have to shoot and kill people to get out of that country alive, right?

 

Violence may not always occur, but you have to be aware of just how quickly the stakes go up when you engage in such missions - you have to be sure the ethics are still defensible within the scope of the risks you create. If you create a severe risk for violent confrontation in which the violent parties are justified in using violence, you have to be sure you are morally okay with those potential consequences.

 

Because such bloodshed is a form of retaliation and is simply not necessary. Why is it natural to violently attack anyone who crosses national frontiers just because of their presence? Shouldn't "invaders" have to pose a threat before action is taken against them? Shouldn't the "threat" they pose be held to accountability standards the same way police are accountable for when they use force against a suspect? Doesn't the use of violence always have to be reasonable and not excessive/repressive or it becomes harassment/intimidation?

It's not natural to attack anyone who crosses national borders just because of their presence (we have very open borders!), but it is natural if those people have some idea about how you are living your life wrong, they want you to change that, and they won't take no for an answer.

 

If someone came to your home and tried to abduct your child to save them from "the evil corrupt capitalist machine" to be hidden away in China - wouldn't you call the police? You know the police will use lethal force if necessary to prevent the abduction, and you know the abductor didn't come all this way to give up and spend their life in jail.

 

Bloodshed isn't merely retaliation - it's self defense. How would you handle that situation?

If you wanted to intervene in this practice, you would have to identify what the specific ethical problems with this morality are and attempt to inform the people involved of what their rights are and what the ethical problems (abuses) are that are going on. Technically, it seems that it's only illegal if the underage girls are being physically molested or psychologically harassed or assaulted. There would be nothing illegal about holding an information campaign about religious freedom, sexual freedom, or those kids of issues - or just holding local get-togethers to talk about the ethics of polygamy, monogamy, and various approaches to family-building. You could also set up an online discussion forum with information and discussion. The hard question is what to do when people are militantly closed to engaging critics. On the one hand, it is understandable when people feel harassed by such critics, but on the other hand they might be avoiding public accountability because they are up to no-good and they know it. All very tough issues to deal with.

You could do all those things without the need for foreign liberators - they could just come and visit the way missionaries often do in other countries, and have a polite chat. Of course, since these people tend to be highly isolationist and distrustful of anyone outside their communities, no one will be using your online forum or going to these get-togethers.

 

You are missing the "third hand" that is most important: "they might be avoiding public accountability because they are believe the public is up to no-good and they know it are absolutely certain.

 

What to do then?

The whole point is that human subjectivity IS relative, so people hold their own values relative to their culture and experience and they usually believe they ARE right. When people try to keep their morality/culture/values to themselves, they fail. That is simply the reality.

I am not disagreeing with that - my point is we settle our disagreements about ethics and morality through a legal framework to avoid out-of-control vigilantism.

 

When you send people over national borders (where laws change) to bypass the legal framework you rob people of anything but the most basic tools to work out their differences - arguing and violence.

People exercise power toward each other in one way or the other. They do not exist in isolation from one another. So the only way to deal with moral/cultural differences/conflicts is to ATTEMPT to get people to engage each other in the least destructive way possible. This is of course a relative moral-value. Your morality may tell you to use as much violence possible to repress others as much as possible when they differ from you. If you do that, however, others with the same value will probably assault you back with the same level of force and intentions. Ultimately, all anyone can really do is to attempt to act as ethically as possible in good faith based on their own best ethical/moral reasoning. And there's really nothing you can do to stop others from doing the same, except try (if your ethics/morals tell you that it is good to do so). Social life is a free-for-all, for better or worse, and all anyone can do to try to change that is engage in that free-for-all with the hope of intervening in other people's processes and actions.

The whole reason we have better lives today than we did 10,000 years ago is we have more options available - civilized options. We still have all the barbaric options at our disposal of course, but the civilized ones are far more appealing to most, the odd back-alley mugger not withstanding.

 

When you work to subvert someone's will by means outside those civilized options, you reduce the options left to them. You may do so out of a sense of ethical obligation, but don't kid yourself that that is what you are doing.

It is hard to assess good intentions vs. deceit but it makes sense to try if you wish to validate legitimately good faith attempts at social benevolence from covert actions to use and abuse others by pretending to be a do-gooder.

Honestly its the ones that believe they are do-gooders that bother me more than the ones who are just faking it. Fakers have ulterior motives and if you push the right buttons they may give up, because they don't really care about the morality. How much effort do I have to make to validate these guys? If I get 10 well intentioned people a day show up at my house, dead set on usurping my rights due to some backwards morality they have - how many hours of my life do I have to dedicate to them? When do I get to say "Look, I get 24 hrs of life today, not a minute more, I gotta spend 8 of those working, and I am not interested in dying slowly here for a few more hours to convince yet another misguided fool to leave me alone" when the person has no legal authority to demand my attention?

It might if local authorities welcomed the interest and assistance and offered to form a coalition force to address whatever social problem was the issue. If people really come in peace, they would probably not want to fight with local forces given the opportunity to reason and cooperate with them. Of course the situation could get more violent if, as you say, one side feels like the other is being deceitful in order to pursue covert goals.

If you are helping local authorities, that is called rendering assistance and we do that all the time on humanitarian missions, and the occasional involvement in a civil war. IIRC, we went into Vietnam to help the local authorities stop communist forces from forcing their will on the people there. Again, it's not deceit that is the big concern - it's people that believe they are right and will die for it that really makes things messy.

But who is to say whether international law is ethical or reasonable when it prevents justice from being served?

Aside from vigilantism, what other tools besides international law do we have to aid justice? So far, all you've done is try to justify vigilantism, and I've agreed that at times it is necessary but as a means to achieve justice it's an exceptionally brutal tool with a very high cost.

Why would you assume that international law or any other law is valid just because it exists and has a name? Institutions are created by humans and neither the humans nor the institutions are infallible. When either fails, it takes other humans and institutions to conflict with them to remedy the shortcomings. This is called "checks and balances of power."

If a legal framework exists and is given time to remedy the shortcomings then yes - those are checks and balances. If international law is violated then it's vigilantism or all out war, period.

Because it is always up to individuals to resist violence in the situations that they are tempted to exercise it. Violence is never inevitable, just as it is never fully absent.

When someone who has no legal authority to impose their will on you, and yet attempts to - how do you resolve that? During a heated confrontation? If the issue hasn't been resolved diplomatically, what makes you think a direct confrontation will get better results?

First of all, I continue to disagree with you attributing agency to Countries as collective units. The world exists out of a plurality of authorities, not just nationalist authorities. Second, if you have the authority to allow or intervene in any such interventions, you would do so from your own moral judgment. If you considered the actions of one liberation force ethical, you would allow it. If you felt another liberation force was acting unethically in its activities, you would intervene with whatever power you had to do so. This is basically describing the exercise of decentralized power in a democratic republic, btw.

Civility works because we have rules we all agree to, that gives us additional options to us beyond simply acting like animals. When you cross national borders as a vigilante (even a non-violent vigilante) you are engaging those individuals without the benefit of those common rules that allow civility. You leave people to defend their own with the only tools left - as animals. Animals with some decent communication skills, but as I said before, if communication could resolve the issue, it would be better achieved through diplomatic channels.

There are many institutions and strategies for intervening in others' affairs, but the one thing I'm pretty sure about is that it's impossible to do so without trouble but that to allow people to suffer unduly because it's not worth the trouble to intervene also seems unethical.

It's not that it's "not worth the trouble" its that in the real world you have to ensure your efforts to intervene do not create near-inevitable conflicts with a higher ethical toll.

 

Hence, it is often more ethical to use slower methods such as diplomacy that does allow some suffering because direct and immediate force-of-will intervention will cause greater suffering in the big picture. In our "liberation" of Iraq you have to imagine just how many parents couldn't even get water to their children when sick, who had to struggle to just get food - that is a huge toll of suffering on people who technically you are there to help. It's hard to get someone to accept that you are making them suffer "for their own good" when it endangers the lives of their children and all good intentions aside, it creates the scenarios that lead to violent resistance, no matter how good your intentions are.

 

Sometimes it is necessary, but it's very naive to think in this world people will just trust each other when all social rules and commonality is thrown out the window.

 

Side note: Perhaps the discussion between Lemur and myself should be broken down into a "Ethics of international intervention" thread, it seems to be getting bigger and it's really on topic to the Bush memoirs.

[jackson33]

Looking at the same information available to the Bush Administration, the Senate Voted 77-23 basically saying they agreed with THAT information.

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a major victory for the White House, the Senate early Friday voted 77-23 to authorize President Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions. [/Quote]

http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/iraq.us/

 

Agreeing with Pangloss, in his original comment, this thread, that Schroder also had a vested interest in selling books and likely fudged the truth. As for Germany they were doing a great deal of business in Iraq and somehow convinced themselves the US would do nothing, then Hussein followed by not responding to certain request, a possible motive.

 

Without defending my viewpoints further on this issue, I have a different outlook for the lead up, execution and resulting problems. Israel in 1981 had attacked the French built Osirak reactor, basically a pre-emptive action, indirectly stabilizing the Middle East without question an accomplishment IMO*. No doubt when Bush 41, took his action protecting Kuwait "OIL FIELDS" (Kuwait opposed Israel), it was an intended stabilization of the area. In the same vein, whether WMD (of any sort) were found, was not the sole purpose for Bush 43's actions.

 

Israel absorbed the world's hatred and scorn for its attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981. Today, it is accepted as fact by most arms-control experts that, had Israel not destroyed Osirak, Saddam Hussein's Iraq would have been a nuclear power by 1990, when his forces pillaged their way across Kuwait[/Quote]

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2071670/entry/2071900

 

Personally I do believe, Bush/Chaney/Powell/Blair/Congress and many other really felt something incriminating would be found (was not or moved from Iraq) and the entire effort would have been seen in a different light, regardless the true value of the evidence. Further, I believe these same people and many advisors, overlooked both the internal difference in Iraq (revenge) or the potential for an insurgency, which made a two year war, clean up and get out impossible. The Middle East was again stabilized however and if Iraq keeps on it's current path, can somehow maintain anything close to a free Islamic Democracy, with three major warring groups, with centuries of history as such, Bush will be vindicated by future historians.

 

 

OK, why are you content with an illegal war, but not a dishonest one?[/Quote]

 

John Cuther; As for "dishonest" would you have accepted the war if the purpose was simply to maintain some sense of Middle East stability, with the idea of oil flow from the area, if that was one reason for the overthrow of Hussein, IMO was...

 

 

Pangloss, same question on "Illegal"??? Under US Law and the powers available to any Executive, where was it illegal...it was and remains financed by Congress.

[Pangloss]

I read an interesting Washington Post article today:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111506015.html

 

It suggests the president did not make a mistake based on faulty intelligence, but made a decision by ignoring more recent contradictory evidence.

 

This has come up before, most notably in the Bob Woodward books. The Woodward books, incidentally, were frequently criticized during their tenure on the bookshelves, but many of their more controversial aspects were confirmed by the Bush memoir.

 

My general impression from those books was the same -- that it wasn't a matter of "faulty intelligence", so much as it was a very complex question with nobody (not even Hans Blix, as that article points out) precisely sure what was going on.

 

There was, of course, one absolute certainty: Hussein didn't comply with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441.

 

Resolution 1441 stated that Iraq was in material breach of the ceasefire terms presented under the terms of Resolution 687. Iraq's breaches related not only to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but also the known construction of prohibited types of missiles, the purchase and import of prohibited armaments, and the continuing refusal of Iraq to compensate Kuwait for the widespread looting conducted by its troops during the 1991 invasion and occupation. It also stated that "...false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations."

 

I don't claim that that justifies the war, just that if you're the UN and you're not going to enforce a resolution like THAT one, then what resolution are you EVER going to enforce? Seems like a legitimate question to me. But of course they couldn't get it together, and that's why I opposed the war -- not the "blood and treasure" (the stupidest phrase in politics, IMO), but the sheer, realpolitik problem of going in without international agreement.

 

Pangloss, same question on "Illegal"??? Under US Law and the powers available to any Executive, where was it illegal...it was and remains financed by Congress.

 

You're asking me? I don't call it "illegal".

[lemur]

Lemur, you are the one advocating vigilante justice - you are the person who says foreign intervention is necessary due to a lack of faith in the courts to pursue justice. Then you talk about how vigilantism is bad?

What this really boils down to is whether people define power in terms of legitimate/illegitimate authority, or whether you approach the legitimation of power as itself a form of power. Whether governmental action is defined as vigilantism or legitimate police action depends on whether you recognize the governmental authority as legitimate or rogue. If you view it as rogue, then all action taken under the auspices of that authority are vigilantism. If you validate the authority as legitimate, all authority in opposition to it is the vigilantism.

 

Of course I agree on the doing SOMETHING about it, but if that SOMETHING requires illegal vigilantism I wouldn't fool myself into believing that violence won't be factor. I would wish to avoid it, I would hate it, but if I decided to use illegal methods to hinder the freedoms of another, I have to acknowledge they do have the right to defend themselves against such illegal assaults. All it would take is for them to call the police, at which point I can either abandon my liberation mission and go to jail, or I can shoot it out with the police in hopes of carrying out my mission.

I would probably take the route of seeking cooperation of local authorities, but the question is at what point do you give up on local authorities as being corrupt and decide to act in spite of them?

 

I'm all in favor of more aggressive international cooperation in preventing human rights abuses.

Then why wouldn't you be critical of the insistence on coalition decision-making instead of unilateral action? Don't you realize that requiring coalition makes it possible for any government to refuse to cooperate and block the rest from cooperating to intervene?

 

I even agree (as I said before) that human rights is an issue that transcends borders. What I disagree with is the idea that you can use force without an expectation of justified, violent resistance. Hence, I consider military intervention a last resort and expect it to be bloody, with diplomacy being the preferred method to promote human rights.

I expect global authorities to cease to be ethnically-territorial and violently reactive when it comes to "foreign" interventions. It is one thing when someone breaks into your house, i.e. private property. It is something different when foreigners, whether they are dressed as soldiers or civilians, show up in public areas and respect local laws. What is the purpose of killing people for no other reason than xenophobia?

 

Violence may not always occur, but you have to be aware of just how quickly the stakes go up when you engage in such missions - you have to be sure the ethics are still defensible within the scope of the risks you create. If you create a severe risk for violent confrontation in which the violent parties are justified in using violence, you have to be sure you are morally okay with those potential consequences.

I don't like it when people blame the victim for the violence they "instigate" on the part of perpetrators. Would you tell an abused spouse wanting to move out of their house that they are responsible for the risks of fleeing with their children? Granted, you might advice them to leave at a time that would avoid confrontation if violence was truly expected. Either way, you would (or should) expect the spouse to allow the fleeing spouse to leave unharmed and unimpeded. Of course, if the spouse believed they were protecting the leaving-spouse from making a mistake, you would have an ethical conflict to deal with.

 

It's not natural to attack anyone who crosses national borders just because of their presence (we have very open borders!), but it is natural if those people have some idea about how you are living your life wrong, they want you to change that, and they won't take no for an answer.

I really don't know how "open" the borders are or not. All I know is that a great deal of ideological work is done to promote the idea that there are borders and that there is a lot of hostility toward "illegals." This works like a form of intimidation that makes people feel insecure about the US if their citizenship is not US citizenship.

 

What I think is wrong with your position is that you fundamentally differentiate between people as being either domestic or foreign. My whole point is that people's actions are what they regardless of what their ascribed national identity is. You should judge people on their character and actions instead of on their national identity.

 

If someone came to your home and tried to abduct your child to save them from "the evil corrupt capitalist machine" to be hidden away in China - wouldn't you call the police? You know the police will use lethal force if necessary to prevent the abduction, and you know the abductor didn't come all this way to give up and spend their life in jail.

Yes, but the issue would be that I'm being abducted by force - not whether the abductors were communists or hippies or whether they were taking me to China or Vermont.

 

Bloodshed isn't merely retaliation - it's self defense. How would you handle that situation?

Violence should not exceed what is reasonable in a particular situation. Excessive violence for the sake of intimidation/repression gets too close to terrorism, imo.

 

You could do all those things without the need for foreign liberators - they could just come and visit the way missionaries often do in other countries, and have a polite chat. Of course, since these people tend to be highly isolationist and distrustful of anyone outside their communities, no one will be using your online forum or going to these get-togethers.

You really can't assume, but you're right it is a possibility. My point is that if someone is drawn to a liberation project that just happens to be in a national territory other than their country of citizenship, they shouldn't be dissuaded by ideology like, "that's their country and their problems, not yours" or "you have no right to intervene in their affairs, you imperialist." Both ideologies are just tricks to isolate victims from ethical intervention in their abuse.

 

I am not disagreeing with that - my point is we settle our disagreements about ethics and morality through a legal framework to avoid out-of-control vigilantism.

Again, to define it as vigilantism you have to address the legitimation of the governed. It gets even more complicated when you realize that people oppressed by corrupt governmental authority tend to legitimate and support that authority out of fear for the consequences of opposing it. So, when you are defining some authority as "vigilante," you might be cooperating with an oppressive government trying to preclude ethical intervention in its abuses.

 

When you send people over national borders (where laws change) to bypass the legal framework you rob people of anything but the most basic tools to work out their differences - arguing and violence.

Are you assuming the legitimacy of official governments by the fact that you recognize them as official?

 

The whole reason we have better lives today than we did 10,000 years ago is we have more options available - civilized options. We still have all the barbaric options at our disposal of course, but the civilized ones are far more appealing to most, the odd back-alley mugger not withstanding.

Who is to say that military/soldiers are only capable of barbarism?

 

When you work to subvert someone's will by means outside those civilized options, you reduce the options left to them. You may do so out of a sense of ethical obligation, but don't kid yourself that that is what you are doing.

I agree, and I believe in the ethic of respecting the will of others to the extent that it doesn't allow for ethical abuses that outweigh the ethical abuse of undermining individual self-determination. I think you would be surprised how much people try to undermine each other's self-determination in everyday life, though.

 

how many hours of my life do I have to dedicate to them? When do I get to say "Look, I get 24 hrs of life today, not a minute more, I gotta spend 8 of those working, and I am not interested in dying slowly here for a few more hours to convince yet another misguided fool to leave me alone" when the person has no legal authority to demand my attention?

You have to overweigh the ethics of self-sacrifice (sacrificing your own time and energy) for helping others. Personally, I think people already sacrifice too much of their time and energy to employers because they are more or less economically manipulated into doing so. Imo, it would be more ethical to free up as much time for all individuals as possible so that they had more options for self-determining how to devote their own time and energy.

 

If you are helping local authorities, that is called rendering assistance and we do that all the time on humanitarian missions, and the occasional involvement in a civil war. IIRC, we went into Vietnam to help the local authorities stop communist forces from forcing their will on the people there. Again, it's not deceit that is the big concern - it's people that believe they are right and will die for it that really makes things messy.

Because of ideology/propaganda that has convinced them that it is rational and/or ethical to do so. The question is how to intervene in that ideology/propaganda at its source.

 

Aside from vigilantism, what other tools besides international law do we have to aid justice? So far, all you've done is try to justify vigilantism, and I've agreed that at times it is necessary but as a means to achieve justice it's an exceptionally brutal tool with a very high cost.

Vigilantism has strong connotations that divert from neutral evaluation of a particular action. When a manager catches an employee stealing and offers the employee the choice to accept demotion or be turned into the police, is that bad just because the manager took the matter of justice into their own hands, didn't offer a fair and public trial by jury, etc.?

 

If a legal framework exists and is given time to remedy the shortcomings then yes - those are checks and balances. If international law is violated then it's vigilantism or all out war, period.

I take "check and balance" to refer to a state in which multiple powers intervene in each other's affairs in the interest of correcting them. This can occur through institutionalized government or in other ways. The key distinction is that there is resistance to monopolization of power by a central authority. "Checks and balances" basically means "anti-centrism" through plural, interacting powers.

 

When someone who has no legal authority to impose their will on you, and yet attempts to - how do you resolve that? During a heated confrontation? If the issue hasn't been resolved diplomatically, what makes you think a direct confrontation will get better results?

You attempt to reason with them and if they are unreasonable you attempt to interrupt their use of force with your own. You try to remain reasonable yourself and not allow yourself to overreact based on your emotions, but your ethic of self-protection will probably win-out over your will to act ethically toward others. Ultimately, people often either violently attack others who exercise force to dominate them or they submit peaceably, if only out of fear that they will be abused more harshly if they don't. Actually feminism and women's studies on rapism and other forms of male-domination is probably where the most has been written on this topic of having others impose their will on you against your own will.

 

Civility works because we have rules we all agree to, that gives us additional options to us beyond simply acting like animals. When you cross national borders as a vigilante (even a non-violent vigilante) you are engaging those individuals without the benefit of those common rules that allow civility. You leave people to defend their own with the only tools left - as animals. Animals with some decent communication skills, but as I said before, if communication could resolve the issue, it would be better achieved through diplomatic channels.

That's nonsense. There is nothing about crossing a national border without a visa that makes someone into an animal. Oftentimes people simply don't validate the border authority because they think it only represents xenophobia and no legitimately reasonable authority, and it probably does most of the time, no matter how many xenophobes argue that border control is reasonable.

 

It's not that it's "not worth the trouble" its that in the real world you have to ensure your efforts to intervene do not create near-inevitable conflicts with a higher ethical toll.

Maybe, but the question is how long you go on accepting responsibility for a violent reaction that is not your own. Isn't it ever reasonable to stand up to abusive power/authority?

 

Hence, it is often more ethical to use slower methods such as diplomacy that does allow some suffering because direct and immediate force-of-will intervention will cause greater suffering in the big picture. In our "liberation" of Iraq you have to imagine just how many parents couldn't even get water to their children when sick, who had to struggle to just get food - that is a huge toll of suffering on people who technically you are there to help. It's hard to get someone to accept that you are making them suffer "for their own good" when it endangers the lives of their children and all good intentions aside, it creates the scenarios that lead to violent resistance, no matter how good your intentions are.

But it may be someone else's bad ethics that want to you to use diplomacy b/c it buys them the time to strategically manipulate the situation to their own advantage. You have to dissect the microphysics of power in any situation you're dealing with. Don't assume that the reason people were denied access to water had to do with the US invasion only. Ask how they were getting water before, why/how that access got interrupted, and who was blocking access to alternative sources and how.

 

Sometimes it is necessary, but it's very naive to think in this world people will just trust each other when all social rules and commonality is thrown out the window.

What you should understand is that nationalism itself was/is an extremely violent form of intervention in local authority/autonomy. Nationalist power is beneficial to the extent that it checks/balances local monopolization of power and territorialism but it is detrimental when it becomes a servant to repressive monopolies. Today, nationalism has become normalized but as global transit has evolved, it has become a barrier to the natural ability of people to move and live where and how they want. In other words, it has become a new form of territorialism/monopoly instead of being the force to counteract such territorialism/monopoly in the pre-modern world.

 

 

 

 

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

There's some pretty nasty commentary about Bush's memoirs in today's Washington Post.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/29/AR2010112903248.html

 

This is the world George Bush left us. It exists everywhere but in his book, where facts are either omitted or rearranged so that the war in Iraq seems the product of pure reason. As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

 

Reading Bush's book, seeing him in his various TV appearances, I keep thinking of Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister. In 1982, Begin took Israel to war in Lebanon. It cost Israel as many as 675 dead, 4,000 wounded and its image as invincible on the battlefield. Begin took responsibility. He resigned and became a recluse, a depressed and beaten man.

 

I suggest no such course for Bush -- only that he read the WikiLeaks documents and, for the sake of history and the instruction it offers, reassess his vaunted decisions. His jejune approach to decision-making - know yourself but not necessarily the facts - is downright repellent. On the book's dust jacket, Bush is shown in a ranching outfit. A Peter Pan outfit would have been more fitting. Like him, Bush has never grown up.

 

 

[lemur]

There's some pretty nasty commentary about Bush's memoirs in today's Washington Post.

 

http://www.washingto...0112903248.html

What's funny to me is that so many people have unified into the same patterns of critique for the decision to pursue war. I don't believe there is anyone independent or brave enough to actually question the assumptions and reasoning circulated in the media and other public discourse that demonize Bush. No one seems to remember that while Bush was viewed as the responsible individual for initiating war, as "commander-in-chief," almost everyone asked supported the decision to pursue war. Now it is easy to claim that Bush lied and misled people into supporting him, but the fact is that the very same people who claim to be upset about being misled are people who would have criticized anyone who suggested questioning Bush's authority at the time as being dangerously unsupportive of a war-effort that was viewed to be a life-or-death matter. My question is that if the same situation were to be repeated, would people this time choose to disobey, undermine, or just question the "commander-in-chief" or would they once again engage in either bullying those who dissent or themselves failing to dissent out of fear of being bullied by war-supporters? I believe that few people would behave any differently if the situation happened again, so why do they find it relevant to try to do now in retrospect what they couldn't when it would have made a difference? Guilt for cooperating with authority they now view as corrupt? Why can't people just recognize that their support of security-measures at the time makes them just as responsible for the war as was GW Bush, if not more so since Bush was actually making an effort to control and temper the fear-driven aggression widely dispersed at the time. The actions taken by the administrations may not have immediately and completely controlled the public outburst, but I think they did a lot to channel them into relatively less damaging expressions and helping people overcome the intense fear and hostility they were experiencing. And in fact, it seems like the only two people that seemed to manage to stay calm through the whole period were Bush and Bin Ladin. I remember seeing a photo of Bush on an aircraft carrier and one of Bin Ladin with a machine gun lying calmly in his lap and thinking that these were both men who could have deadly force at their disposal and resist using it. I don't know how many other people in that period had their emotional reactions under control.

[Pangloss]

I don't think we know enough about Osama bin Laden to draw conclusions about his temperament. And "emotional reactions under control" is just about the last phrase I would associate with Al Qaeda, lemur. I think there's a valid point above, but personally I would just as soon leave any and all self-proclaimed terrorists out of any discussion about civil behavior. (My two bits, anyway.)

[lemur]

I don't think we know enough about Osama bin Laden to draw conclusions about his temperament. And "emotional reactions under control" is just about the last phrase I would associate with Al Qaeda, lemur. I think there's a valid point above, but personally I would just as soon leave any and all self-proclaimed terrorists out of any discussion about civil behavior. (My two bits, anyway.)

The only person that doesn't look at peace in these pictures is bert and that is because the person who set up the doll for the picture wanted to try to project a certain disposition onto the picture of Bin Laden. I did a google image search on both Bin Laden and Bush and I could not find any pictures that looked as hostile as pictures of soldiers associated with their respective military movements.

 

Do you remember discussions either slightly before or after the 9/11 attacks where the issue was having disciplined military organization to avoid rogue bands of militias? Isn't it possible that these CIA-associated leader-figures such as Bush, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are used as figure-heads in propaganda campaigns to convince potentially militant people that there are organized factions whose authority they must assent to if they want to effectively fight an enemy? Whether or not this is a viable (conspiracy) theory, the fact remains that the public images of these men do not evoke aggression and hostility as much as the media commentary about them does. Even their own words/speeches are very calm and non-provocative compared with the media scripts, sound-bites, and discussion. The conclusion I draw is that if anyone is riling people up into a frenzy, it must be the media because it can't be these men and their speeches.

 

You can attribute all sorts of totalitarian coercion to them but all the evidence I have directly available to me of the men and their speech-acts, I don't see any brutal domination. Sure, I could read reports, leaks, and other second-hand information about them that leads me to other conclusions, but why would I trust those sources? What evidence do I have that such sources are not simply paid to propagate negative imagery for the sake of riling up people into a frenzy to stimulate hype/controversy and generating ratings? Believe me I'm not just an apologist for anyone. It's just that I think the media have more power than government and individuals acting individually, and I think part of the media's power is to render the textuality of the representations transparent and shift attribution of perceived effects to the people in the spotlight. This is why I resist jumping on the bandwagon of playing "blame the leader."

Edited December 1, 2010 by lemur

[Pangloss]

Your pic didn't work. I looked it up to see if I could fix it but I couldn't locate it from that URL.