Glenn Greenwald Defines Terrorism

Greenwald seems to be saying that killing Iranian nuclear scientists is exactly as bad as blowing up pizzerias with Israel teenagers, slaughtering Christians in Iraqi or Pakistani churches, exploding cars in markets full of Muslims, mowing down passengers in Indian British or Spanish train stations, or destroying night clubs full of Australian tourists. Not to mention toppling towers full of ordinary New Yorkers. He's an odd fellow, is Greenwald, but he has a devoted audience; I don't think there's any other way to read this missive of his.

The Hatreds of Greenwald and Weiss

Benjamin Kerstein analyzes Glenn Greenwald; Ron Kampeas looks closely at Philip Weiss. All four are Jews, of course, which makes the entire story faintly weird. The more you follow these things, the stronger the impression that absent the Jewish anti-Zionist brigades, in Israel and beyond, the potency of the anti-Israeli legions would be markedly weaker, at least in Europe and North America.

Kerstein makes the plausible comment that Greenwald's methods are the same used by the Holocaust deniers: if the Jews make a claim it has to be false and discounted. Automatically, since their entire narrative is an evil hoax, and everything they say is part of the evil. Kampeas says the hatred shoveled out by Weiss and his ilk is endangering the lives of journalists in the Muslim world. The first allegation is clearly true; the second I'm not in a position to judge.

Ministry of Truth

George Orwell must be dancing in his grave.

Glenn Greenwald today compared the Nazi invasion of Austria, the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, with the American invasion of Iraq. By the end of the same post he hedges his bets, and adds that he's not really making the comparison, unless he is but he isn't. Having seen the firestorm of protest he ignited, he than adds three times that he didn't make the comparison.

Joe Klein tears into him here,and the whole thing started with an argument with Jeffrey Goldberg.

Here's my input, on a point no-one else seems to be noticing: There was no Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland, no invasion of Slovakia, hardly one of Austria and even less of Bohemia. Nazi Germany brutally invaded many countries, but those weren't among them. Go check the history books and see if I know what I'm talking about. Glenn Greenwald surely doesn't.

Update: somewhere down in the comments I've responded with additional facts.

More on Country vs. Citizens

A reader named Joe writes about to the previous post.

Greenwald has responded, without mentioning you, in an update. I wonder what
your response to that update is.

So here goes.

First, I doubt Greenwald read me and decided to argue without attributes. That would be petty, and I don't have reason to think him petty. More likely, to my mind, is that he noticed how very flimsy his arguments were, and tried to fix things. Not very convincingly.

Second, Greenwald has no facts. Indeed, he has dug up a quotation, but it doesn't say what he says it does. Iran is a largish country, about four times the size of France with less than twice the population, so there must be substantial areas (many of them desert) where there are no civilians to be killed in bombing raids; it may well be that's where the Iranians have put some of their nuclear installations. (I don't know this for a fact, but Greenwald doesn't know the opposite). The quote he brings says that if Iran was bombed, and if its regime tried to fight back, things could get ugly. Which is probably true, but brings us to the main point.

The idea behind using military means to stop a nuclear weapons program is to block horrendous loss of life even at the cost of limited loss of life.

Michael Walzer, probably the best-known teacher of Just War theory in our generation, addresses this question directly when he tells of deliberations confronting the Allies during World War II. According to their information, the Germans were transporting heavy water from Norway to Germany, and the only way to stop the shipment entailed the certain killing of all the Norwegian civilians on board. With hindsight we know that the Germans didn't even have an active nuclear program, but the Allied decision makers operated on the data they had, not the full story we have. So they killed innocent Norwegians to block a German nuclear program which they were convinced would have caused vastly greater suffering.

I have no doubt that an attempt to block an Iranian nuclear program will indeed cause some death of innocents. If one assumes that the Iranians will retaliate wherever they can, some of the innocents will be Israelis, others will be Europeans, some will be Argentinians, and probably some will be Americans. Almost all will be civilians, because unlike whoever attacks them, they will never have the intention to hit military targets; civilian ones are so much easier. Remember, the Iranian Mullahs and their proxies have been killing innocents ever since they reached power in 1979; many of them at the behest of one Mir Hossein Moussavi, who was the prime minister.

Unlike the Iranian Mullahs who kill indiscriminately, and used to send tens of thousands of their own children to die storming Iraqi troops, the Americans and Israelis, the only two countries which might conceivably attack Iran, never aim intentionally at civilians; should the need arise to attack Iran, they will certainly not be aiming at those demonstrators in Teheran. Not.

Readers of this blog will attest that I have never called for an attack on Iran, not once. Nor am I now. The best option, I've always thought, is for the Iranian people to change their ghastly government; this may be about to happen but probably isn't. The second best option is for the Iranians to change their minds as the result of negotiations. This will not happen, alas. The third option is for the rest of the world to enforce such harsh sanctions that the Mullahs back down: but this will have to hurt the Iranian populace, and is very unlikely to work anyway. The fourth option is to negotiate with the Mullahs with drawn weapons. The experience with Saddam in 1991 indicates that won't work either. The fifth option is to use military force.

It's a bad option, and it might not even work. But is allowing those murderous Mullahs to wield nuclear weapons preferable?

Distinguishing Between A Country and its Citizens

Mondoweiss yesterday slammed Netanyahu for his willingness to countenance an attack on Iran to foil its nuclear ambitions. Look at all those brave Iranians facing their ugly government! Netanyahu wants war against them!

Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, castigates American hawks who call for force in halting Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Matt Yglesias, in a recent post about the administration's "debate" over whether
to bomb Iran, wisely included a random photograph of an Iranian street with
civilians walking on it. These are the people Norm Podhoretz and his comrades
want to slaughter.

I can't speak for the American hawks, but to the best of my understanding, the situation is diametrically the opposite of what Mondoweiss and Greenwald make it out to be.

First, there's an obvious distinction to be made between a government and the totality of its populace. The government makes the decisions, sometimes supported by parts of the populace, rarely by all of it, and often by a minority of it. One can act against a government without wishing to harm its citizens - in fact, that's how wars are supposed to be waged. That's why the Hezbullah and Hamas way of war is so profoundly wicked: it aims at all civilians, and not at the IDF at all. (Need I mention that Hamas and Hezbullah are both Iranian clients? That means, clients of the Iranian regime, not each Teherani protestor).

Second, people calling for the Iranians to be stopped with military forcewould all prefer the goal to be reached with peaceful means - but so far these haven't done much good.

Third, a military option, were it to be chosen, would not target civilians in Teheran but rather the military targets in places like Nantaz.

Fourth, the reason there is urgency in stopping the Iranian nuclear program is exactly because no-one wants to hurt the Iranian population. So long as the Iranian nuclear program has not yet reached fruition, it may be possible to halt it with very limited loss of life. Once the Iranians have nuclear weapons, attacking them would mean tremendous loss of life, on all regional sides - though not in the United States. The Iranians can't reach the Americans yet.

I have no explanation why these simple self-evident considerations are so far beyond the comprehension of educated people such as Greenwald or Adam Horowitz, who loudly and frequently pride themselves for their acumen.

Victimhood

Glenn Greenwald seems not to like Israel much. It's not a major theme for him, at least not in the month or two since I started watching him, but it slips through from time to time. The other day he posted some comments which are useful for the insights they offer into his own Weltanschauung, even while not saying much about Israel or America's Jews. His title was The need of the most powerful to turn themselves into victims, and it was a critique of, in this order, Jeffery Goldberg, AIPAC, Israel, Republicans in general, and AIPAC.

His post purports to be about the dropping of criminal charges against two former AIPAC employees, but it's actually about a much more fundamental subject, which is why it's interesting. First, he sets up his argument by quoting Jeffry Goldberg's post on the matter:

The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to dismiss all charges against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman in the AIPAC leak case. It's about time. It was an idiotic case to begin with; the men were being prosecuted (under an ancient, seldom-used law) for receiving classified information passed orally -- not even on paper -- from a government stooge, and then passing it on to a reporter and to an official from the Israeli embassy. I'll gather up some reaction later, but suffice it to say that this day was long overdue. Rosen and Weissman did what a thousand reporters in Washington do everyday, hear about information that's technically classified. The only difference is that these two worked for a demonized lobby.

It's a sad day for the Walts and Mearsheimers of the world, who believe that AIPAC is a treasonous organization, and it's a sad day for AIPAC too, because it abandoned the two men to the fates when it should have stood by them. More to come.

The italics are Greenwalds', and straightaway he launches into Goldberg (another one of his pet dislikes):

The idea that AIPAC is a "demonized lobby" that is treated unfairly in the United States generally -- or by the Bush administration specifically, which commenced the prosecutions -- has to be one of the biggest jokes ever to appear in anything having to do with The Atlantic. What other lobbying organization can boast of summoning to its Conference half of the U.S. Congress -- as bipartisan a cast as possible -- along with the Vice President, following the visit last year by Obama, who read faithfully from the organization's script? With rare exception, Congressional action that AIPAC demands -- even on as controversial matter as the Israeli attack on Gaza -- not only passes the Congress, but often with virtual unanimity. Is there anyone who disputes that AIPAC is one of the most influential and powerful lobbying groups in the U.S., if not the most influential and powerful?

It's easy to point out two problems with Greenwald's argumentation. First, the assumption that being powerful contradicts being demonized, which is of course tosh. Logically there is no necessary connection one way or the other; factually, the powerful are often also demonized. Someday Greenwald might wish to learn a European language - German, say, or French, or British - and travel incognito through a land where it's spoken, and experience the extent to which his extremely powerful country is demonized irrespective of who its president is. The second is that being demonized can be objectively measured. I don't have the time patience or motivation, but it would be easy to pick a definition of demonization, and then use it to test if AIPAC is or isn't, if Israel is or isn't. (The former is easy, the latter is a no-brainer). Meryl Yourish sometimes does little research projects like that: be my guest if you wish, Meryl.

Greenwald continues:

Just ponder the depths of irrationality and pathological persecution complex -- the desperate need to self-victimize -- necessary to claim that AIPAC, of all entities, is "demonized" and treated unfairly by the U.S. Government. AIPAC. But that's the self-pitying, self-absorbed syndrome that drives so much of our political discourse (an amazingly high percentage of right-wing political dialogue in particular adheres to this formula: "I am X and X is treated so very unfairly" -- where X is virtually always among the groups wielding the most power: American, white, Christian, Republican, male, etc. etc.). It's the same mentality that leads people to insist that the true victim in the Middle East is the same country that, by far, possesses the greatest military might and uses it most often. It's a bizarre process of inversion where those who are most powerful insist on claiming that they are the weakest, most vulnerable and most oppressed.

Again, two comments. The first is that he seems to have his causes and effects reversed and his chronology backwards. I can't say about his vaguely described Republicans, but the Jews, who eventually invented both Israel and later also AIPAC, did so only after millennia of well documented persecution and demonization, and as a response to them. The real question is why it took them so long, far longer than most nations have existed, to decide that a bulwark against persecution might be to have power. First came the demonization, then the persecution, and only much much later the power to combat them.

The real reason I'm writing this post, however, is to comment on his extremely illuminating formulation "Just ponder the depths of irrationality and pathological persecution complex -- the desperate need to self-victimize". This is one of the more powerful themes of our age: the weak are victimized, victimhood commands the moral high ground, so everyone competes to have it, while pushing aside everyone else in their mad charge for its throne.

The response to which is that victimhood is not a moral category. Morality is a function of the decisions we make, which is why being perpetrators of crimes is evil, and choosing to be inactive bystanders can also be, but being a victim doesn't automatically convey anything. The only way being a victim can carry moral weight is when the victims can choose how to respond - and the ones who choose wrong are... wrong. Not right.

In Greenwald's Weltanschauung, however, choice isn't the issue; one's identity is; the group one belongs to; and the degree of blame that can be apportioned to it. Victims are right by virtue of belonging to the correct group. Moreover, since he sees the world this way, he assumes we all do. Since being victims is so positive, he's convinced we're all striving for the victim's mantle.

We're not. I can't speak for all Israelis nor all AIPACians, but I think most of them would agree with me that Israel is indeed powerful and will remain so, while facing diverse enemies some of whom are obscenely evil because of their decisions. We're not victims, we're at war, and what makes us right isn't our status on some non-existent scale of victimhood, but rather the decisions we make.

In Hebrew we've got a saying that al rosh haganav boer hakova, which can be roughly translated to mean that too much protesting indicates a bad conscience. When Greenwald and his ideological comrades protest loudly about our striving for victimhood, they tell nothing about us, but speak volumes about themselves and their understanding of morality.

Can There Be Any Benefits to Torture?

The New York Times nails the matter: It depends. If the torture of a few terrorists saves the lives of thousands of innocents (and you know they're terrorists when they divulge valuable information about terrorist activity), the case is stronger than if no actionable information is acquired. Scott Shane doesn't know if this is what happened, one way or the other, in spite of trying to find out; the public evidence is inconclusive.

The distinction is important, since it indicates that statements such as "torture is the end of democracy", being bandied about these days, are not necessarily true.

Israel calls this scenario "the ticking bomb", when you know you've got a terrorist who knows the whereabouts of a ticking bomb in a civilian area, or the identity of a suicide bomber who's already on his way. It doesn't refer to a band of terrorists with murder in their eyes but no bomb yet constructed, the assumption being that if you've got one of them, intelligent interrogation methods will extract his knowledge in time to thwart his colleagues' plans even without torture; with the ticking bomb, however, you may need to beat him up now in order to acquire the crucial information now. Which of course then begs the question when a gang of Islamists intent on destroying more tall buildings in the US become ticking bombs: when they're on their way to the airport? Earlier in the plan? When?

Since Israel has been facing these questions without respite for generations, it has had the time for the discussion now being had in the US; over time its answers have changed; there has been a steady distancing from the use of torture in favor of tricky tactics that are even more efficient. But then, if you follow that NYT article all the way to the final sentence, you'll see the advantage - if advantage it is - that Israel has over the US:

Mr. Obama paid his first visit to the agency this week, and his reference to the interrogation issue made for an awkward moment in which he sounded like a teacher gently correcting his pupils.

“Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”

The process of learning is the hallmark of democracy, far more than the measures taken during the process are the demise of it.

Learning to Wage War?

You've got to feel for these fellows, the Juan Coles and Glen Greenwalds of the world. Back in 2001, when the Islamists finally managed to catch the attention of the Americans after years of unsuccessful attempts, it just so happened there was a Republican in the White House. How much difference this made to thousands of professionals in the various security and legal branches of the American government I have no way of knowing, but since the Cole-Greenwald brigade disliked many of their actions, they attributed them to the Bad Man at the top. (As did Andrew Sullivan, after a while). Their delirious expectations of Obama were fired partly by his different rhetoric on such matters as waging wars, and interrogating and jailing Islamists.

Alas, it appears the professionals had reasons for doing what they did, irrespective of whether an election had been stolen in 2000; now that Obama is at the top, they're still doing them. So you have Cole who can't understand why American forces are killing civilians in Pakistan, and Greenwald is getting ever more strident about the incarceration issues.

Personally, I can empathize with both of them. Killing innocents is awful, though in some contexts it is inevitable; jailing people without due process seems wrong to me, no matter who's in the White House. Yet they're refusing to see the threat to which those professionals are responding. The enemies of the West these days play by different rules than the enemies of previous generations; while the fundamental rules shouldn't change, applying them is a constant, never-ending deliberation. Israelis have known this for decades, as we've been facing the same enemies for that long; the derision that has been meted out to us for trying to find the correct balance looks ever more hypocritical.

Actually, it seems to me the Americans have not yet found the correct balance - a point on which I may say more later; but at least they're trying. Lots of others aren't, probably secure in the knowledge the Americans are.

Greewald: Ad Hominem as The Method

There's this story going on about Chas Freeman, who has been appointed to some highfalutin advisory position somewhere within the Obama Administration. Lot's of people are cheering, others are groaning and kvetching. I haven't been following it too closely. My understanding is that it's not an executive position, nor is it top-tier. If here and there in the Administration there are people with nutty viewpoints, the United States of America is a big enough place to contain them. If the fellow challenges any potential groupthink, that can't be bad, either.

One of the advantages in being deeply and fundamentally right is that you can afford to be questioned by skeptics, contrarians, fools and snakes, all. So long as the the decision makers themselves are rational, there isn't much to be fearful of. In the long run, the skeptics may make some legitimate criticisms here and there, but they won't be able to cast serious doubt on a position that's fundamentally correct.

So far so good. Now you might want to cast a glance at Glenn Greeenwald's thoughts on the matter. They're long and wordy: Greenwald's like that. My understanding is that the central objective problem with Freeman is that he has been in the pay of the Saudis, who have a record of knowing why they pay nice sums to former American diplomats. In spite of everything Greenwald and others will imply, the vocal friends of Israel in Washington haven't been on Israel's payroll. They've made up their minds for whatever nefarious reasons, but being paid for them wasn't one. Greenwald, however, has this revealing comment to make:

There is, by design, definitely a chilling effect to these smear campaigns. Freeman is being dragged through the mud by the standard cast of accusatory Israel-centric neocons (Marty Peretz, Jon Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary, The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, etc. etc., etc.), subjected to every standard, baseless smear, as a warning to others who think about challenging U.S. policy towards Israel in a similar way...
Ultimately, the greatest weapon to defeat these campaigns is to highlight the identity and behavior of their perpetrators. Just consider who is behind the attack on Freeman; how ugly and discredited are their tactics and ideology; and, most importantly, how absurd it is, given their disgraceful history, that they -- of all people -- would parade around as arbiters of "ideological extremism" and, more audaciously still, as credible judges of intelligence assessment.

The argument, in other words, must be resolved by "highlighting the identity" of the discussants saying things we don't like. Not "let's refute their claims", but "let's paint them in garish colors".

PS. And no, I hope I don't do the same. Follow the tags and you'll see that when the Guardian or Juan Cole (rarely) say thoughtful or valuable things, I've taken note. They don't do it often, true, but it can happen. What's wrong with them is how they use their cognitive facilities, not the fact that they are who they are.

Glennwatch 2

In the week or so I've been regularly visiting Glenn Greenwald's blog I've noticed he's a very wordy fellow. I'm one, too, but he far outstrips me. He also uses parenthesis in parenthesis, not a sign of a fine writer.

Today he has posted on Israel, or actually, on the hope the Obama administration will put lots of pressure on, and distance itself from, Israel. Personally, I think if Israel ends up with a coalition dominated by our far right, Netanyahu will deserve a modicum of pressure, and for that matter, so will we, so as to force us to decide if settlements are important enough to face down our American friends over. But there are various "ifs" in that scenario. And either way, it has little to do with peace, since our war with the Palestinians isn't about settlements, of which there are none in Gaza.

In the meantime, Greenwald's main thesis, it seems to me, is that the Obamaites must put lots of pressure on Israel; the Palestinians, if I read correctly, don't even get mentioned. The implication being that the lack of peace is mostly the fault of Israel, and marginally the fault of the Bush administration for allowing this.

it's hard to believe that George Mitchell was willing to take on this assignment unless he has the authority to apply the pressure on Israel which is an absolute pre-requisite for any hope of success. For now, those who desire a serious change in U.S. policy towards Israel should welcome any signs -- even limited and preliminary ones -- that the U.S. is willing to forcefully and, when necessary, publicly oppose and condemn Israeli actions (as we do with all other foreign countries).

Glenn Greenwald: Next Target?

Regular readers of Ruminations will be aware that one of my main themes is the attempt to figure out what makes Israel's harsher critics tick. Yet I do make a distinction between individuals with blogs, and establishments such as The Guardian, which has been around for generations, has some 700,00 subscribers and a larger number of readers, and can plausibly be seen as representing a segment of society. The individual bloggers may reflect corners of society, but I don't think they're as significant for outlining social or historical trends. Or better, they are, perhaps, in the aggregate, but not individually. Which means I've got to look at a diversity of them.

So, here's hoping, Insha'allah, that I have the character not to waste any more time on Juan Cole, about whom I've satisfied myself that he's an ideologically-driven misrepresenter of facts and an embarrassment to rational intellectual inquiry, in addition to offering a haven to antisemties in his moderated comments section. Previously to him I had looked at others and then moved on; it's time to move on from him also.

A possible new candidate is Glenn Greenwald, who blogs at Salon. His present post is shrill and repugnant, but perhaps he had a bad day and got carried away, something that can happen to anyone; even I've had such days. Greenwald is a lawyer and author; I don't think I've focused on any lawyers so far. He's noticeably Jewish, by name, picture and content; I don't remember having focused much on anti-Israeli Jews so far, assuming that's what he is. Or isn't: let's follow him for a while.