Review: The Better Angels of our Nature

In spite of the fact that this blog is mostly dormant and its once thriving comments section is dry, not long ago a reader responded to something I wrote with a warm recommendation that I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. You keep on wondering about violence in military contexts, Yaacov, and about Israel's wielding of it; you really need to read Pinker, who'll tell you lots and lots of really pertinent stuff. So I did. And yes, it is a very interesting book; and yes, it is very very well written; and yes, it is very informative in that once you finish reading it you'll know lots of things you didn't know before.

Sadly, however, it didn't do for me what it apparently did for that reader. It wasn't much of an eye opener; in some ways, it wasn't even particularly convincing.

Before I explain, however, a short diversion. A year or two ago I read Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Vintage), and even referred to it once or twice here on the blog, but then I never got around to reviewing it, the new job came along, I stopped blogging, and then Pinker's book offered a way of reading Sebag Montefiore's book which I hadn't noticed - so here goes. A three-sentence review within a review.

Jerusalem's story, in Sebag Montefiore's telling, is one of ancient and unrelenting violence and horror. Mass crucifixions, eye-gouging, beheadings, disembowlings, assassinations: century after century, millennium after millennium (Jerusalem really is a very old place). Only quite recently, in the 17th or 18th century, did things calm down, and while the wars went on and still go on, much of the gore was toned down. And that, says Pinker, is the story of humanity. Had he read Sebag Montefiore's book, he would simply have noted that it's a typical instance of the general rule. The history of human violence is the tale of a steep and mostly consistent decline of violence, from all pervasive in pre-history, through pervasive in early history, common and repulsive until a few centuries ago, ever more tamed in recent centuries, mostly tamed and perhaps even an endangered phenomenon in our day and age. And yes, he's heard of Nazism and Communism, thank you for mentioning them.

To sum up his historical presentation, the first 500-odd pages of the book, humans in the wild were violent by nature; civilization enabled ever larger groups to work together while being violent towards other groups and anyone who peeved them; Leviathan reduced the violence within society without ever reducing it between groups or from the hegemon to the individual; the Civilizing Process (he capitalizes it) created an ever growing sphere in which violence was forced aside; there was a Humanitarian Revolution in the 18th century which abolished torture and vicious executions; and then in the latter 19th century, and in full force in the second half of the 20th, individual homicides and communal and international wars took a nosedive; today, even rough games among boys are forbidden by boards of educational curmudgeons.

He demonstrates this all with dozens and dozens of charts, all of which show lines of violence which begin in the upper left corner and end in the lower right corner.

Charts are a good thing, by the way. Historians don't use enough of them, and literature professors probably never use them. They demonstrate an ability and willingness to bring quantifying discipline to prose narratives which is refreshing and useful. Pinker even has a section on this near the end of the book, when he tells that people are vastly more intelligent today than they used to be, which is of course nonsense unless you qualify the statement to mean that contemporary folks are much better, in general, at scientific and numeric argumentation. That's probably true.

Having spent 500-odd pages doing the history, his final 200 look at the science. If nothing else, here he displays an impressive cross-disciplinary erudition. Not only has he read a lot about violence, he also knows about diverse fields of scientific scholarship, from philosophy (which is what science used to be) through lots of psychology, statistics, neurology and more. Not only does he write better than almost all academics, he's also got much broader horizons. So in this section he tells all about how scientists like to watch people's brain scans while provoking them into all sorts of behaviour, so as to identify the parts of the brain that light up when we do natural things such as be angry, sad or bad. Then, having demonstrated that being bad has neurological existence, he tells how other social behaviours - or shall we call them conditions? - also have neurological existence. The idea being that if we could strengthen the positive urges we could change our individual and communal chemistry, and reinforce us in being gentle and reasonable.

One of the notable sections in this part of the book, for me, was his discussion of empathy. Those of you who were boys roughly at the time Pinker and I were (he's a few years older than me but we both grew up on Tom Lehrer satires), must have read and remember Clifford D. Simak's magnificent City (Sf Masterworks), published in 1952 and still in print. In that book Simak has an invention which enables people effortlessly to understand the perspective of other people - and it's the end of squabbling humankind as we know it. Well, 60 years later, according to Pinker and the researchers he cites, the Age of Empathy is upon us, and it isn't the end of history, it's the beginning of a better one.

Near the very end he talks about rationalism as a force for improvement of the human story, and his discussion also passes the topic of classical liberalism versus contemporary American-style liberalism. It was around then that it became clear to me that Pinker seems to be arguing with a type of left-wing American liberalism which would have us accept that human history was mostly benign until the Europeans came along and screwed up, the Enlightenment spawned Communism and Fascism, and the US was horrendous to lots of colored folks abroad while its white elites were nasty to the minorities at home. (My formulation). The whole enterprise of his book, in an over-simplification, was to show those believers that actually, no. It was always a lot worse, it has gotten much better, and rationalism is the keystone to making it ever better. And the funny thing is that that's the thesis, more or less, of J.B. Bury's 1920 classic The Idea of Progress (which is also still in print, I'm pleasantly surprised to report). (Or anyway, I think that's the thesis of the book. I read it when I was much younger and foolish).

So that's the first reason I was disappointed by the book: it states the obvious, even if many people today would prefer not to accept the obvious because of all sorts of political fashions. The cumulative actions of centuries of dead white European men, most of them Christians though with a strong influence of Jewish ideas and a smattering of Jewish men among them, have made the human story vastly better than it was. They didn't do it alone, and in the past few generations they have been joined by lots of all the rest - women, non-whites, non-Christians - but the facts remain, and accepting them is no shame. (And yes; there are facts. Really. They aren't constructs of confused thinking. But that's a different book).

The second reason I was disappointed is Pinker's preference for scientific universalism over historical specific knowledge. Scientist seek overarching laws of nature, and they think in categories of replicable demonstrations of phenomena. Historians (or at least the good ones) know that in the human story, unlike in the world of physics, nothing can ever be replicated, because each specific situation, event and condition is the result of a fiendishly complicated chain of unique vectors and actors. The task of the historian isn't to identify universal rules; at its most daring, the best it can hope to do is demonstrate viable potentials. If it can even do that, since the conditions which brought about the earlier results aren't replicable.

Pinker's eagerness to find the laws irked most when he dealt with the single biggest problem with the theory of consistent decline of violence: Nazism and Communism and their many dozens of millions of dead. If the inertia of history is so strongly active in one direction, how to explain the first half of the 20th century, even if things went back on track thereafter. (Assuming they did). His explanation, which boils down to a statistical fluke, is simply too silly to argue with, even if he spends an entire section on it, replete with more charts and an otherwise interesting disquisition on the nature of statistics and flukes.

Then there was the annoying underlying political agenda. It was underlying, in that Pinker pokes fun at political spinmeisters of all stripes; but his own preferences, of a mildly-left-leaning Liberal Democrat such as densely populates the Boston area where he lives, were woven into the text as if they are obviously true - when they're not. They're merely one political persuasion amongst many. To cite one random example from dozens: The American reaction to 9/11 to go to war in Afghanistan could perhaps have been an emotional response motivated by fear or revenge or whatever; then again, it could have been the cool and calculating result of a reading of the facts. There a big difference between the two, and someday the historians may reach agreement which it was (or what the combination was), but then again, they may not, because too many of the relevant facts are hard to get at, such as the internal frame of mind of many of the individuals who formulated the response.

Did I mention that I was wearied by the insistence on explaining every form of human behaviour in terms of its Darwinian justification? As in, people do this sort of thing because their ur-ancient ancestors found it useful for survival in those caves? Enough already! It's all speculation, I don't see how it could be seriously proven (or disproven, which is a requirement for proof), and why should those speculations be so important anyways? Might not the immediate, historical, motivations and explanations be more important? Similarly, I'm unimpressed by all those lightings sighted in folks' brains. Clearly, humans have a very wide range of emotional and cognitive options; the fact that some of them light up this section of the brain while others light up a different section, while it may well be true, doesn't seem to explain why some unique individuals have this section light up one way while other nearby unique individuals set off different sections. And is it irrevocably proven that the lighting up of some switches causes the behaviour, and not the other way around?

Finally, I had my problems as a Jewish reader, and as an Israeli. The Talmud has repeated discussions about the sanctity of human life, the eternal unacceptability of torture, and the abolishment of capital punishment, more than a thousand years before those great enlightened Christian white men stumbled across the ideas (and some of them were antisemites even as they enlightened the world). The talmudists - thousands of men over a span of some four or five centuries, and their followers in later centuries - had a power of reasoning, some of it abstract, which is non-existent today. They even seem to have lived according to their ideals, more or less. None of this fits into those charts, and it didn't much influence them either, but if the sentiments are so modern, where did they come from ten centuries before modernity?

Then there's Pinker's need to overstate his case. At one point he goes out onto a branch: "Oh all right. How likely is it that there will be a massacre of 100,000 people in a year, or a war with a million casualties? 9.7%. Why that number? Because it is conceivable, but it's highly unlikely." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he wrote). Well, in spite of the media's insistence these past three months that there have been 70,000 casualties in Syria over the past two years, a stable and unmoving number even as hundreds are killed daily, we all know that Syria is quite close to 100,000 casualties in little more than a year. And getting worse. My point being that all the talk about the disappearance of war, and the dwindling of violence, and the disappearance of torture, and the acceptance of rationality and universal norms and so on and on and on: well, seen from Jerusalem they look like a wistful pipe dream. Something you'd love to have, and some other folks maybe even do have so long as they don't look around them, but a pipe dream nonetheless. Hatred of the Jews in civilized cultivated gentle Europe is alive and growing, it's roaring across the Muslim world, the Arab Spring is getting colder by the week as some of us expected it would even as it was being feted by fools worldwide - Sorry. The end of warfare and violence and torture and pain and man-inflicted pain and suffering is not here, and it's not near, either.

Which brings me back to that history of Jerusalem with which I started. In the long history of this ancient city there have repeatedly been permanent, multi-century-long chapters of stability, in which the order of things was clear and immutable and seemingly final. And then there was another, different one. And then another. And another. And another....

Guardian: International Law has Created World Peace

Norm pokes fun at a Guardian leader here. Always a worthy pastime, even if it's not a hard one. So I went and read the piece he finds so sloppy, and noticed an additional oddity in the article:

The current attorney general would do well to remember the damage done during the Iraq affair, when dubious interpretations of resolution 1441 were used to license the course the superpower was already set on. This created the sense that the UN's role was a fraud. Whether it has been right or wrong on Libya, it has proved capable of shared resolve, and shown it can have teeth. The new language of regime change may leave the council descending into accusations of bad faith – and the planet slipping back into a more lawless world. [my emphasis].

If I understand the argument, it seems to be saying that the rise of the UN and international law have made the world a more lawful, and thus more peaceful, place. I suppose this might seem compelling to an egotistical ignoramus in Europe, but does it bear any relation to the human condition? I didn't think so, and did a spot of digging around - well, about 30 seconds of digging, to be precise. Google directed me to this list of the wars of the 20th century, which seems to be hinting that there were more than twice as many wars worldwide in the half century since the foundation of the United Nations as in the half century preceding its creation.

This seems to indicate that abolishing the United Nations and discarding international law might dramatically reduce human suffering. At any rate, that's the plausible outcome if you concur with the Guardian that there's any connection whatsoever between the UN and international law on the one hand, and the human propensity to warfare on the other.

It's Nice to be Safe and Powerful

The New York Times has a report by a group of its journalists who were arrested by Gaddafi forces a few weeks ago and treated badly before they were released. It's well worth reading, for what's in it - and what isn't. Mohammed, the driver, isn't. Or rather, he is, briefly, until at the first encounter with Libyan troops he get's killed, mourned for two sentences by his American charges, and forgotten. Of course he isn't mentioned in the title. "Four Times Journalists Held".

The journalists suffered during their days of captivity, they were roughed up, sometimes seriously roughed up, and the woman among them was repeatedly groped. The worst part, in their telling, was that they didn't know what lay ahead of them, though they apparently knew rather early on that their captors were taking their American citizenship seriously. It's an easy bet that 99%-plus of their readership has never been treated as badly and never will. Sadly, it's also the case that 100% of the locals, had they been in the same predicament, would have ended much worse - as Mohammed did.

I've been watching the frenzied discussions in the US and Europe about military interventions, when are they allowed, when advisable, what may legitimately trigger them, what about them is all wrong. The more I watch, the more I grow envious. It must be a wonderful thing to be able to deliberate when you'll use force and when you'll lean back, shrug your shoulders, perhaps utter a few words of deepest regret, and then get on with your daily life secure in the knowledge that your daily life won't be much impacted by the whole deliberation one way or the other. It must truly be wonderful to live your life that way.

This isn't new, of course. I remember the evening we first arrived in Israel, in the summer of 1967. My parents, both of whom had lived as high-school students through World War II, and then had lived a number of years in post-war Germany where my father was an American officer, were as well educated as anyone, and were probably more aware than many Americans of what the world was like. And yet, in the cab up from the airport one of them asked the cab driver "if he knew anyone who had been in the recent Six Day War. "I was in it" he responded. Gasp. Half an hour later we reached Jerusalem and the cabbie needed directions. So he pulled over by a group of people dancing around a fire on an empty lot. A young teenager came over exuberantly and chanted "we won! we won!"

Apparently it had been a very immediate experience, not the "Middle East Crises" the media had been blabbering about for two months.

I'm not being facetious, or even particularly cynical or bitter. I'm simply pointing out a basic dynamic: the citizens of rich and powerful nations (or, in the case of most of Europe, rich and purposefully not so powerful) don't really have anything existential to worry about on the national level. True, there are rare cases of terrorism, but how many of those citizens knows anyone to the third degree of separation who was present at a terror event? And anyway, terror events don't threaten the national existence or anything like it. Unless hassles at airports can be tagged as a threat.

The rest of us live in a different world. Here's Sylvia, a regular reader and sometime commenter on this blog, in a comment she posted here about half an hour ago:

A rocket just hit I would guess maybe 20 meters or less from my house in Sderot a few minutes ago (I don't have a shelter yet).
This afternoon Grad rockets hit Ashdod the impact was heard in Kiryat Gat. This in addition to Beer Sheva and Ashkelon in the past 24 hours.
Although the area has been regularly hit by rockets from the Gaza strip in the past year, little attention has being paid to those Palestinian crimes, as if it's not worth our time, or as if those people don't count since it is neither Jerusalem nor Shenkin.
Instead we all engage in endless mental masturbation over which radical yoyo said what and how. Of that I plead guilty myself.

Yet, we should look at the lessons from the past. The world was shocked by Cast Lead because it was unaware of its context: eight-years of brutal, daily rocket assaults inflicted on unarmed civilians by the Palestinians of Gaza. And it was unaware because it didn't look sexy enough to the media including the blogging community.

Today, we are repeating that history and engaging ourselves in the same process of banalization of Israeli suffering. These things should be often, thoroughly and specifically discussed, not just mentioned in passing at best or else ignored. Context.

Newsflash 2: Life is Still Messy

Leon Wieseltier, who's got a way with words one can only weep about it's so good, explains at some length exactly how life's messiness plays out. Here's a snippet:

The president is exactly right. His decision to use force to prevent all those horrors is justified. The situation was even worse, and more urgent, than he allowed: left unchecked, Qaddafi already had committed atrocities against his people. But why do some atrocities have a claim on our conscience and our resources, and others do not? No sooner had Obama explained his decision to use force to rescue the Libyan rebels than the progressive bloggers went to work. This was Ezra Klein’s gloss on Obama’s sentences: “Every year, one million people die from malaria. About three million children die, either directly or indirectly, due to hunger. There is much we could do to help the world if we were willing. The question that needs to be asked is: Why this?” And Andrew Sullivan cleverly objected, about Obama’s view that “the U.S. cannot stand idly by while atrocities take place,” that “we have done nothing in Burma or the Congo and are actively supporting governments in Yemen and Bahrain that are doing almost exactly—if less noisily—what Qaddafi is doing.”

These are debater’s points made by people who have no reason to fear that they will ever need to be rescued. It is important that this “logic” be exposed for what it really is, because it sounds so plausible. Is it hypocritical of the United States to act against Qaddafi and not against Al Khalifa? It is. But there are worse things in this suffering world than hypocrisy. Are we inconsistent? We are. But should we abandon people to slaughter, should we consign freedom fighters to their doom, for the satisfaction of consistency? Simone Weil once remarked that as long as France retained its colonial possessions it was morally disqualified from the struggle against Hitler. It was a breathtakingly consistent and stupid remark. We should be candid. All outrage is selective. Nobody cares about everything equally. Nobody can save everybody, and everybody will not be saved. If everybody who deserves rescue will not be rescued, should nobody who deserves rescue be rescued? If we cannot do everything, must we do nothing? The history of help and rescue is a history of triage. There are also philosophical and moral and political preferences that determine the selectivity of our actions, and those preferences must be provided with valid reasons. Maybe we should be intervening in Burma or Bahrain: let the arguments be made, the principles and the interests adduced. But of course it is not the expansion of American action that interests these writers. What they seek is its contraction. Klein’s point is especially lousy. Did our inaction in Rwanda reduce the frequency of malaria in Africa? Blogging is a notoriously time-consuming vocation. Surely there is a kitchen for the homeless where Klein lives. If he were to tear himself away from his laptop, he would not solve the hunger problem, but it would help.

Jonathan Foreman has done some useful fact-finding, and has learned that the French are not pacifists, not idealists, not internationalists: they're in favor of France. Which mean's they're pretty regular.

Finally in a related matter, Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, is setting up a new organization, Advancing Human Rights. Since the previous attempt to address human rights degraded into an anti-Israeli propaganda machine, he would like to refocus on regimes which violate human rights with impunity, i.e not the messy life of a democracy, but the tidy cruelty of dictatorships. Ben Cohen has the story.

Newsflash: Life is Messy

Just like everyone, I don't pretend to know what's the story with Libya. First the relevant nations spent a month dillying and dallying, then they suddenly passed the international decisions, and the next thing we knew they were bombing Libyan tanks and camps, well beyond a no-fly zone which they'd just spent weeks explaining they couldn't implement because it would be too complicated. Along the way they seem to have thrown out 15 years of chatter about war, intervention, exit strategies and much else.

I have every expectation that whoever comes out on top - whenever - will be an enemy of Israel. Even so, however, I haven't been hiding my position that someone ought to do something to stop Gaddafi from massacring his people. Libya in 2011 is an unusual case of black and white: the dictator has had almost half a century to demonstrate his evil, and the people facing him want liberation from him; it seemed to me (and still does) that it needn't require a bloody land-campaign gamble to protect the Libyan populace in the areas that have already liberated themselves.

Interestingly, everyone with access to a keyboard has an opinion,and many of them are topsy-turvy with frustration. Years from now, when someone with perspective and access to archival documentation tries to piece together what really happened, they'll also need to figure out who was decrying what and why. In the meantime, however, there are a number of immediate responses of interest. Take Phil Wiess, the Jewish antisemite of Mondoweiss: he admits he's confused like we all are, but he's in favor of the attempt. Of course, he intends to use the precedent to call for the UN to bomb Israel next time around, and doesn't even hide his excitement, but at least he's willing to save some Libyans on the road to deliver the Palestinians.

Not far from him on some issues, Andrew Sullivan is furious, furious furious. And also unhappy, and angry. In all his endless verbiage on the topic, he has this revealing nugget:

I watched the president stand idly by as countless young Iranians were slaughtered, imprisoned, tortured and bludgeoned by government thugs by day and night. I believed that this was born of a strategy that understood that, however horrifying it was to watch the Iranian bloodbath, it was too imprudent to launch military action to protect a defenseless people against snipers, murderers and torturers.

Morality, you see, is foremost about prudence. This, then, is the answer to Phil Weiss: the UN won't bomb Israel, not because it will accept it's right to defend itself, but simply because Israel would bomb back. (Which brings me back to my position that the only real defense in this world is to be armed, trained, and dangerous).

Silliest of all in this little roundup, we've got Juan Cole, issuing marching orders. He really is a gag.

Terrorism: Glenn Greenwald vs. Michael Walzer

The comments on my post yesterday about Glenn Greenwald were interesting, and seemed to indicate a bit of confusion between different matters. So here's a quick lexicon of relevant terms:

Manslaughter: the unintended killing of a person. In all systems of law I've ever heard of, manslaughter is less serious than murder, even though the consequence for the victim is the same: death.

Murder. The intentional taking of an innocent life. It's the intention that makes the difference, not the result. In Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars I pointed out that the Sixth of the Ten Commandments is not "thou shall not kill", as often mistranslated, but rather "thou shall not murder". Judaism recognizes that killing sometimes happens, such as in self defense or in war.

Self defense. Protecting oneself may sometimes include killing. When evaluating the act, it's not the result - the death of a person - which is important, it's the intention. Of the attacker. The court or the police may decide that killing the aggressor was justified by the intention of the (dead) aggressor.

War. This is the most common way for people to kill large numbers of other people. The mere fact of being at war tells very little about morality, since some wars avert worse things, such as genocide, others promote genocide, and many wars happen for complicated reasons which do not immediately lend themselves to moral deliberation. I have written about this at greater length here.

Terrorism. Initially, this wasn't a moral category at all. It was a tactic of random murder, intended to terrorize a society into changing its behavior in a significant manner, contrary to its will, perpetrated by an otherwise small or weak group. The phenomenon first appeared in the 19th century. Then a double twist occurred.

The first was in the 1980s. At the time the most famous terrorist group was the PLO (alongside the IRA). Lots of people were reluctant to use such a pejorative word to describe Arabs killing Jews: The Arabs had oil, they were supported by the Soviets and thus also by Western Useful Idiots, the Jews were, well, Jews. So the term was dropped, replaced by the term 'militants'. So cynical was this ploy that for years the international news of the BBC called the PLO militants, while the local news of the same BBC called the IRA terrorists. (I'm not making this up). The English language lost the word to describe the people who had once been militants, but this seemed a worthy price to pay for political correctness.

Then, after 9/11, suddenly there was an urgent need for a clearly pejorative word to describe the perpetrators of random murder committed by a small group with the intention of terrorizing an entire society. At the time I remember watching the agonizing, but it didn't take long for the American media to go back to the obvious word, 'terrorist'. Once the terrorists began exploding bombs on European trains, the word was accepted worldwide. (Interestingly, this was happening parallel to a steep decrease in Palestinian terrorism, forced by the IDF and the security barrier, so the dilemma of using the word for everyone except the Jews was blunted).

Yet there was a problem: lots of people didn't like the ensuing wars, nor the regrettable fact that Western troops were now killing Muslim civilians. So they started applying the terrorist word to them, too. There was no need, of course, since armies killing civilians as a result of the messiness of war were never previously called terrorists. Armies aren't small groups; the Western ones were not randomly killing innocents so as to terrorize them. It would have been better to use a different term, one that would do what language is supposed to do, namely describe reality with useful preciseness. But preciseness was the last thing the wielders of the term were seeking; their goal was to bludgeon the political discourse in their ideological direction.

And so we've come full circle and kept on going. Not only is the word terrorism back in vogue, it's now applied with a gusto to anyone who kills non-combatants, unless they're Islamists killing Muslims, in which case they're called insurgents. (And the Palestinians are still militants).

Glenn Greenwald's argument demonstrates how radical this is. Back in 1976, when Michael Walzer published his seminal Just And Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, a book still widely cited, he included a discussion of intentionally killing non-combatants in a non-belligerent country. The Allies had reason to believe the Germans were developing nuclear weapons, and at one point had to decide to sink a Norwegian ship which might have been transporting heavy water but was certainly carrying regular Norwegian civilians; the Norwegians, remember, were notionally on the Allies' side. Yet the danger of a Nazi nuclear bomb was so great it was decided to sacrifice random innocent Norwegians to prevent it. The fact that by the time Walzer wrote his book it was long since clear that there had in fact been no Nazi nuclear program to be thwarted was irrelevant, since the decision makers couldn't have known that and had reasonable reason to believe the opposite. After he works through the matter as philosophers do, Walzer justifies the decision.

Greenwald, facing a lesser case where someone killed an Iranian nuclear scientist without scratching any innocents at all, calls it terrorism.

Destroying Empty Homes

The other day Achikam and I were revisiting some of his stories from the Gaza operation of January 2009. He remembered a case where one evening his tank unit was supposed to give support to an infantry unit which was supposed to move into two nearby high-rise buildings and take positions on their roofs, which offered a commanding view of the area. Once the infantry arrived, however, they learned that the buildings were booby trapped, and the tank crews received new orders: to knock down both structures from afar, as tanks can do and infantry can't.

I never took the Goldstone Report and tried to align any of its particular stories with that one, but it might be possible. Or you might be interested in this article, from the lifestyle section of the Guardian, back in those days, talking about how horrible that there were destroyed buildings in Gaza. The lifestyle section.

Now compare that to this mostly matter-of-fact report about how the Americans in Afghanistan are systematically knocking down homes not necessarily because they're booby-trapped, but because they're empty. (And they're using the air-force to do it, in some cases). Is this because America is uniquely evil, or because war is hell?

Interesting Stuff from the Wide Wide Web

Yehuda Mirsky - and his readers - discuss the idea that perhaps American Jewry might get along better without organizational denominations. Not all agree. Eventually the discussion veers off to Chabad. Someday I should tell one of my favorite Chabad jokes... but then again, perhaps I oughtn't.

Arye Tepper reviews Sir Martin Gilber's brand new book In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands. Tepper tells that the book manages to cover lots of ground by being very focused on the single question of the level of persecution or lack of it suffered by the Jews throughout the centuries. Says Tepper:

By proceeding in this fashion, Gilbert succeeds in exploding the myth, manufactured by Islamic ideologues and peddled by left-wing apologists, to the effect that pre-modern Jews always lived harmoniously with their Muslim hosts. Sometimes this was the case; often it was not.

If it's books I'm recommending, a few weeks ago The Economist had a glowing review of  John Calvert's new biography Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst). Since Qutb is an extremely central figure for Islamists, any good book about him should be widely read. Slightly alarmingly, however, Benny Morris has read the book, liked it, but notices that 

Calvert never says, simply, that Qutb was an anti-Semite; perhaps it is politically incorrect to forthrightly accuse a major Muslim thinker of such a predilection. But “the Jews” appear to have been important, if not central, to Qutb’s worldview, at least after the Arab disaster in Palestine in 1948. From that year onward Qutb was wont, like most contemporary Islamists, to refer to the Muslims’ “Crusader [i.e., Christian] and Zionist” enemies.
But Qutb’s anti-Semitism was religious and deep-rooted, originating in the Koran and its descriptions of Muhammad’s antagonistic relations with the Jewish tribes of Arabia (who simply rejected the Prophet and his message and were consequently slaughtered, enslaved or exiled by him), not in the contemporary struggle with Zionism. (Though the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, no doubt, exacerbated his anti-Jewish prejudices. He often compared what he saw as Jewish misdeeds in seventh-century Hejaz—the Jews turning their backs on divine revelation, trying to poison the Prophet and fighting the believers—and twentieth-century Palestine.)
In or around 1951 Qutb published an essay entitled “Our Struggle with the Jews” (reprinted as a book by the Saudi government in 1970). Calvert devotes a paragraph to this screed—but would have done well to elaborate further. In the essay, Qutb vilified the Jews, in line with the Koran, as Islam’s (and Muhammad’s) “worst” enemies, as “slayers of the prophets,” and as essentially perfidious, double-dealing and evil. 

Odd. On the other hand, Culvert makes no secret of the irrational extent to which Qutb was fascinated and repelled by the (emerging) equality of women in America and sexual mores there; according to Culvert, Qutb himself apparently never had sex with a woman. Freudian, I suppose - except that Freud was an example of Jewish insidiousness.

If it's the war against Islamic extremism we're talking of (keep in mind that I'm not bound by the White House Talking Points), the NYT has an interesting article about how the surge in Afghanistan may actually be working. (My friend Juan Cole has yet to relate to the item).

Meanwhile, for a longer and less tractable war than the mere 9-year one in Afghanistan, Khaleb Abu Toameh reminds us that someday someone is going to have to explain to millions of Palestinians that they're not going back to Haifa or Jaffa, nor to Bir'em or Julis. So far, their leaders and the leaders of the Arab world are telling them they will, and this prevents peace. Hussein Ibish and Abu Toameh ought to get together and figure out what the facts of this matter are.

Finally, on a related topic, Eamonn Mc Donagh has a problem with the Spanish, Roman Catholic Democratic Kingdom of Spain. I spoof you not, and it is related.

War and Peace

Khaled Abu Toameh says that things were getting better between Israel and the Palestinians until the Obama administration forced negotiations neither side was interested in, and now things are getting worse.

Robin Shepherd writes about the hypocrisy of Israel's critics who remain silent as ISAF's war in Afghanistan-Pakistan uses the same methods used by Israel. He tells that he's made this point to colleagues in the British bureaucracy, but sadly he doesn't tell how they respond.

The figures are rising fast. In September, the number of publicly admitted drone attacks was 22. And they are extremely deadly too. In 2009, more than 700 people were killed, many if not most of whom will have been civilian bystanders. By the end of this year, the death toll is likely to have far exceeded the 1,400 or so estimated to have died in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

So where’s the Goldstone Report against the United States and its NATO allies? And where is the uproar against Obama’s policy of mass targeted assassinations? Of course, I’m not suggesting either course of action. And, to be fair, the Obama administration has been resolute in opposing Goldstone at the United Nations which is a lot more than can be said for the brazenly hypocritical Europeans.

With apologies to Abu Toameh and Shepherd for putting them in the same blogpost,  the other day I asked Juan Cole if he might wish to comment on Ahmedinejad's fiery anti-Israeli rhetoric while in Lebanon. Cole was one of the main people to invent and propagate the idea that Ahmedinejad never said he wishes Israel to be destroyed, an idea still often cited in the Mondowiess swamps, the CiF comments section and similar venues. His answer to me: Ahmedinajad merely wishes Zionism to disappear, as the Soviet regime once did, leaving everything else intact behind it. I have no idea what he bases this assertion on, and am reporting on it here merely for purposes of documentation.

The Most Tragic Throwaway Line Ever

Deep in a multi-chapter report on forest preservation:

For example, Congo’s government does not know, to the nearest million, how many people have died in its continuing civil war. How will it provide an inventory of its forest-carbon stock?

Killing Westerners in Mosques

The NYT has an item with a vaguely misleading title - or is it? Drones Kill Westerners in Pakistan.The Westerners being Germans, who are of course Westerners, but they're also Muslims training in Pakistan to kill civilians when they get back "home" to Germany: so are they? Was Mohammed Atta a Westerner? And if he had stayed around long enough to acquire a German passport when he lived in Hamburg, would he have qualified for the sobriquet? And if so, does the sobriquet mean what's it's supposed to mean, in this context or any other?

I'm not posing these questions in a frivolous manner. They're real questions, it seems to me, and if they're not at the heart of the present war, they're certainly not that far from it.

Prof. Robert Chesney, of the University of Texas (Austin) is troubled by a different part of the story. Did the American drone attack which killed these guys get to them when them while they were in a mosque? On the one hand, he's not convinced it happened that way and he's perturbed by the ease with which slanderous stories can take wing. On the other hand, he's not certain it didn't, and that would be worse:

The mosque claim may be significant from an IHL [International Humanitarian Law] perspective, of course, and it certainly is significant in terms of hearts-and-minds.  I have no idea whether the claim is accurate, though I suspect it is not (or at least that the building was not known to be a mosque by decisionmakers at the time).  If it is not accurate, then the episode is an illustration of the ease with which media accounts can be seeded with damaging characterizations of this kind.  If it is accurate, on the other hand, it certainly raises some difficult legal and strategic questions–ones that will be hard if not impossible to evaluate from an outside perspective.  At any rate, we’re not likely to get a clearer picture going forward.

IHL stems from Just War Theory, which is not a new branch of thought. Its central concept is that wagers of war must make plausible efforts not to harm non-combatants. I'm not sure how mosques (or for that matter, churches, synagogues or any other houses of worship) came to acquire the status of non-combatants. It's certainly not obviously so, especially when the men in the houses of worship are plotters of mayhem and murder, perhaps even plotters purposefully placing themselves in the houses of worship.

Nor do I know how prof. Chesney knows that killing potential murderers in mosques is necessarily more objectionable to other Pakistanis than killing them in a home, a home which has been converted to a plotter's den, or an open field. The matter of hearts and minds is fiendishly complex, and includes topics such as which hearts and minds, why they are where they are and can they be swayed to move elsewhere, what means of persuasion might be effective and which not, what the locals think about Westerners coming to their mosques so as to plot murder of other Westerners, thereby attracting American drones.... In other words, it seems to me the professor is talking about his own opinions, with no direct relation to the real facts of the matter.

The reason I mention it is that this seems to me one small, rather banal example of the serious disconnect between the prophets of International Humanitarian Law in their comfortable and mostly unthreatened ivory towers, and the real world.

Not to mention that for all we know at the moment, killing German Pakistanis in mosques, if done right, may save the lives of Korean tourists passing through Frankfurt International Airport on their way to a vacation in Montreal. Or something of the sort.

Warfare by Drone

I recognize that 2004 was a very long time ago, and no reasonable person ought to be expected to remember things that far back. Me too. Alas, upon reading this news item in the New York Times, about how the Americans are stepping up their drone attacks against nasties in Pakistan - an article in which the words "Illegal by international law" never appear, I had this strange urge to find out how far back was it since the general international consensus was united in its condemnation of Israel's illegal assassinations. 2000? 2001? Perhaps even as late as September 12th 2001?

2004. The Americans were already in Iraq, and had been engaging in targeted assassinations for at least two years, but Israel's assassinations of Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi were almost unanimously condemned as illegal, not to mention stupid, evil, cruel and so on. Don't take my word for it: do the Goggling yourself.

Bill Millin, RIP

Here's a story to remind us why we admire the British in spite of the Guardian and all the loony loonies:

He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan’ Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”

Barbarism by its Right Name

Susie Linfield writing at Dissent doesn't know what America's policy about Afghanistan should be - it's very complicated, after all - but she can recognize barbarism when she sees it. Lots of well educated folks can't, as she depressingly documents. (h/t Norm).

And it is conscience, I think—or, rather, conflicting claims on our conscience—that is at the heart of this debate. One can argue that it is right to leave Afghanistan, and wrong to ask more Americans to die there. One can argue that the civilian casualties rates of the NATO troops are indefensible, or that the war in Afghanistan is simply too costly for our downwardly-mobile country to pay for. (On the Nation’s Media Fix blog, Greg Mitchell proposed showing photographs of “workers streaming into a newly re-opened factory,” “a returning soldier embraced by his wife and two kids,” and “solar panels being erected on a huge office building” to illustrate “What Happens If We LEAVE Afghanistan.”) But it is bad faith of the worst sort to argue that withdrawal would somehow help the women of Afghanistan; or would rescue them from lives of almost unimaginable pariahdom, misery, poverty, physical pain, poor health, ignorance, and degradation; or would not take away even the minimal gains that have been made. Equally bad, I think, is the pretense that a “deal” with the Taliban won’t somehow come at women’s (and children’s) expense. Let’s at least call barbarism by its right name—which is just what the Time photograph did.

From Goldstone to Wikileaks

Robin Shephard, writing from London, notes that the tools crafted against Israel will soon be used against the UK (and America, Germany, Australia, and anyone else engaged in the currect war in Afghanistan). And the next wars after that, I'd add, wherever they might be, unless we assume Mr. Assange and his ilk are going to but an end to war.

Fog of War, Foggy Thinking, Pure Malice

Due disclosure: I have been writing here for years that the American public and that of its allies has not been facing the reality of its wars. The accounting routinely demanded of Israel is on an order of magnitude more severe than what the armies of the free world are called upon to deliver. I've been saying this, however, not so as to damn the Americans and their allies, so much as to call attention to the inconsistent standards. The war against the Islamists, I am convinced, is in its broad outlines not only just, it is essential; it's also inevitable if the free world wishes to remain free.
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I've been looking through some of the Wikileak documents from Afghanistan, and I'm sick to the stomach. Unless the various Islamist forces which face humankind are all total idiots without Internet connections and with no ability to read English, these documents will get people killed. No ifs, buts, or any other comfortable lies with which to hide grim reality. Publishing this type of internal military documents and in such quantities, at a time of war, must harm the side whose innards have thus been exposed. It cannot be otherwise.

My personal experience with military-intelligence documentation has been limited to two very different cases. The first was in the 1970s, when at two different moments, one in my regular military service and one early in my reserve duty career, I was sat down on hills and told to observe the Arab country on the other side of the fence. (The earlier case was Lebanon, the latter was Jordan). We were given sheets of paper on which to record boring minutiae. Mind-numbing minutiae, actually, so of course we kvetched. In both cases someone mildly better in the know took us to task, going so far as to demonstrate why our intelligence services needed to know if it had been one uniformed policeman in that village or two, and how often they had come by. It dawned on me at the time that if one had a large enough collection of banal, innocuous and uninteresting data, one might find all sorts of important patterns in them. This was an entire generation before it became fashionable to talk about data-mining, pattern matching and all those things that make Wallmart so good at what it does.

The second, very different encounter, was when I was doing research about the SS and it's Nazi accomplices and collaborators, and I spent a few years poring over the slips of paper the bureaucrats sent back and forth with nary the expectation that I'd ever see them. Some of my fellow researchers and I had the time and patience to read the documents carefully and with a growing understanding of the world they were emanating from, and this enabled us to know not only who was doing what, but what different players would be likely to say - indeed, think - when confronted with some new situation.

So when I glance at a report such as this one, from 19 January 2009, even though I've never in my life seen this particular sort of document, I immediately take note that whoever's doing the reporting is gauging importance of participants in the meeting by the size of their security attachment; or that he (?) infers that Saroubi is likely Saroubi district - i.e that he doesn't know, he's guessing. Not to mention that the Americans know about the meeting at all: how do they know? Who told them? Which observer needed to gauge importance by retinue?

And that's one single document, analyzed on the fly by Yaacov who knows nothing from nothing about the context, the identities, the actions, nothing. Might we assume the connivers who managed to topple the WTC buildings might be able to glean actionable knowledge about their foes by spending a month or five carefully sifting through Wikileak's miraculous trove of operational military documents from an ongoing war?

In the snippet embedded here, Julain Assange says, and I quote: "We have tried hard to make sure that this material does not, umm, put innocents at harm, ahh, all the material is over seven months old, so it's of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence".

At best, Mr. Assange appears to be a blathering idiot, an innocent ignoramus who has figured out a way to show us things we were never meant to see, and without ever stopping to ask why we weren't meant to see them invents a story about the evil powers-that-be and gleefully exposes. Though when he then goes on to pontificate about war crimes, the babe-in-the-dry-woods-with-a-flamethrower theory does seem a bit far-fetched.

The fog of war is often understood to mean the inability of soldiers clearly to see what's gong on around them; in its derivative meaning it then includes the limitations on the rest of us to make sense, at our remove, of what's really going on. Yet there's a third meaning, ultimately the most important one. The fog of war is the inability of each fighting side to know what the other side knows, what it intends, how it understands the battlefield it's in, how much longer it can stay on course. Julian Assange and Wikileaks have removed a huge amount of the fog that has been confusing the Islamists until this week. They will take advantage of it.

Democracies must craft an ever-adapting set of mechanisms to peer through the derivative sort of fog. Yet like all other parts of the democratic decision-making, there's a filter between total participation of all citizens, and real actions. There are elected representatives; there are means of oversight; there are all sorts of checks and balances. Shareholders don't participate in commercial negotiations, patients don't sit in staff-meetings of physicians, voters don't sit in the chambers of legislation, and no outsider is ever allowed into the room where the court or the jury deliberates its decisions. The idea that the military, of all organizations the one that most immediately deals with life and death, can be disrobed for all to see and no harm will be caused is breathtaking in its idiocy and its malice.

The Sun Rises in the East

Everyone and their cousins are all excited and agog about yesterday's Wikileaks exposure of 90,000 (exactly 90,000?) documents from the war in Southern Asia. I expect the story will serve well as a litmus test or Rorschach blot to demonstrate what everyone thought previously. Me, I don't have the time for 90,000 documents, so that leaves me to chose which pontificator to believe. On balance, I think I'll follow The Economist, which itself follows Andrew Exum aka Abu Muqawama: The macro story in the documents is novel only if you haven't been watching anyway these past few years.

As for the micro-story, that's a different matter. Will any ISAF troops be killed now or later because their enemies are carefully reading the documents and making tactical changes to the way they wage war? I expect so. Any civilians? Any of us?

Dead People in AfPak

An Afghan organization has published statistics about civilian deaths in Afghanistan during the first half of 2010: 1,074 civilians were killed, for a daily average of six. Two thirds were killed by Islamists, but ISAF forces killed 210 civilians, 108 were killed by Afghan forces and 67 by private contractors.

Meanwhile, over the border in Pakistan no-one really knows what's going on. The BBC is monitoring things and pretends to have verified numbers for 2009-June 2010: about 2;500 dead people, 700 of them killed by American drone attacks. Who were they: Terrorists? Civilians? No one seems to know. Nor are the numbers particularly helpful, since they don't include people killed by the Pakistani army:

Over the same 18-month period, many more than 2,500 people have died in offensives by the Pakistani army and fighting between troops and militants. Exact figures are impossible to obtain.

Which means the Americans and Taliban together have killed fewer than half the total, but no-one actually knows what the total is. Keep in mind, however, that the main killer - the Pakistani army - is killing citizens of its own country.

A Cultural Thing

I admit that I don't see it. Actually, I do - it's crystal clear. But I don't get it.

The elected civilian leadership has, and must always have, full, complete and unquestioned control over the military. That's obvious; it's a fundamental part of democracy.

How the control is applied, however, is or ought to be a matter for deliberation and calibrated calculation. Just as Israel was right to block that flotilla but not smart about it, to give a recent example. There's usually more than one way to do things, and this goes for the relationship between elected civilians and appointed generals as much as it's true about anything else.

The narrative is that everyone, left to right, agreed that McChrystal had to go: you can't have a general bad-mouthing the elected leaders (though why saying that Obama was uncomfortable at an early meeting with the generals is bad-mouthing, is beyond me. It was an observation, probably an accurate one, and not denigrating in any way I can see). According to the New York Times, however, this isn't so: there was a fierce argument about balancing the need to discipline the general and the possible damage to the war effort.

But it was a short argument:

The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, walked a copy of it to the president in the private quarters. After scanning the first few paragraphs — a sarcastic, profanity-laced description of General McChrystal’s disgust at having to dine with a French minister to brief him about the war — Mr. Obama had read enough, a senior administration official said. He ordered his political and national security aides to convene immediately in the Oval Office.

George Patton, anyone?

I read the Rolling Stone article. There was bad-mouthing in it, and jack-assing, if there is such a word. The general and his staff come off as top-notch soldiers and poor politicians, though McChrystal's relationship with Afghanistan's President Karzai indicates he's not a bad diplomat when he feels it's essential to his mission. I didn't see any insubordination, and certainly no threat to democracy. Sorry: I didn't.

But as I say, this may be a cultural thing. As I've repeatedly explained in the past, Israelis use words differently than Americans. Very differently. This isn't to say there's a right way or a wrong way. My feeling after reading the article was that Obama should have pulled in the general, given him a severe tongue-lashing, the general should have submitted his resignation, and the president should have glared at him and said "Are you kidding? You've got a job to do! Now go back and do it, and I don't want any more of this behaviour from you ever again. Dismissed".

It's not true there's no-one who can't be replaced. Sometimes, removing a key figure at a crucial moment results in significantly different outcomes. Were this not so, we'd never try so hard to replace/retain political leaders whom we feel strongly about, for example.

I, for one, am uncomfortable that there's such a broad consensus in an America at war that careless words so obviously trump carefully-planned actions. This may reflect an Israeli feeling that blunt words are better than civil ones, since they're closer to the truth; it may reflect a lifetime of living near or at real war, an experience most Americans, fortunately for them, don't have.

Barry Rubin, another Israeli who writes often in English, thinks the real problem is that McChrystal's words were mostly true.

Killing Afghan Civilians in Nevada

OK, that's a misleading title, I admit. The killing of 23 Afghan civilians was done in Afghanistan, of course, when they were rocketed from a helicopter in February this year. Yet a key role in the identifying of the target, three vehicles driving along some dusty road not near any American troops, was done by some drone operators sitting in a facility in Nevada; they watched the three cars for three hours before directing the attack.

Once the extent of the mistake became clear there was a serious investigation, and four American officers were reprimanded. The whole story is summed up in the New York Times, here. I recommend reading it.

As I never tire of saying, I'm in favor of the American war in Afghanistan. It's a just war, being waged mostly with just means, and when mistakes are inevitably made, the Americans seem to be doing their best to learn from them and not repeat them. Still, reading the report does raise a number of points.

1. The deaths of 23 Afghan civilians is truly tragic. No ifs and buts.

2. It is now commonplace for deaths in combat zones to be the result of actions taken by well-fed, well-clothed professionals sitting in air-conditioned facilities literally half way around the world from the events. These professionals have probably never heard shots fired in anger, if they've heard shots fired at all; they are in no personal danger at any time, cannot plead to have operated under the stress of battle conditions nor emotional turmoil caused by, say, violence threatening their families. Nor do they have any personal experience of the land they're attacking: it's appearance, smells and sounds, nor, bizarre as it ought to sound but probably no longer does, any personal encounters with any of the people of the nation their actions are impacting upon.

3. The investigation seems to have been done entirely by military investigatory outfits. No so-called "independent investigations" were involved.

4. The identity of the investigators and their institutional proximity to the targets of the investigation raise no eyebrows. No-one is demanding that civilians investigate the military, and no-one's dreaming of bring in the United Nations, or any other international outfit.

5. No-one assumes that if civilians died, it must be that civilians were intended to die.

6. All of this in spite of the fact that the killings apparently took place in a sparsely populated rural area, and even according to the report, there were indications that not all was well, and that women and children might have been present, even before the attack; the attack happened some seven miles from the nearest American ground forces, if I'm reading the story correctly.

One of the reasons I read the entire 575-page Goldstone report, as well as many other shorter documents, was to understand how Israel's enemies operate. The modes of thought and speech they routinely use against Israel are totally lacking in this report: not surprising, of course, but important to keep in mind. There are various wars going on these days, but Israel is judged by uniquely harsh and negative standards.