The War on Terror is heading into its seventh year this fall. Six years and counting. That makes it longer than either World War, longer than the Civil War, and closing fast on Vietnam. The good news is that so far the casualty count is a lot lower than those other wars, even counting the people who died on September 11, 2001. It’s a low-intensity war, unless you’re unlucky enough to live in Baghdad or Helmand province. Once again, Americans for the most part get to watch it on TV.
Are we winning? You tell me. There hasn’t been another 9/11, and that’s good, but on the other hand, Iraq, where five years ago there were no suicide bombings, YouTube decapitations or Shiite death squads, is now a vast exercise ground for thugs of all stripes, most of them hostile to us. Whether or not going into Iraq has made us less safe, it has certainly made most Iraqis less safe, and given the ghastliness of the Hussein regime, that’s a real feat. Even if you concede that Saddam was a direct threat to us, it’s hard to argue that our invasion has had a successful outcome.
Afghanistan is different: pretty much everyone, even the nervous Europeans, agrees we had to go into Afghanistan, and if we’d left it at that we’d probably still have most of the world on our side. But even in Afghanistan the jihadists are far from beaten.
So it’s the shooting-war part of the War on Terror that seems to be giving us, the world’s undisputed military top dog, the most trouble. Why?
Maybe it’s a conceptual thing. I’m starting to think that ‘war’ is the wrong way to think about this. After all, the 9/11 attack was largely planned by a handful of guys in an apartment in Hamburg, and all the carrier groups and armored brigades in the world are useless against a roomful of guys muttering in Arabic.
George Soros raised howls of protest from conservatives a while back when he said that maybe we should have treated 9/11 as a crime against humanity instead of an act of war. The proper response to a crime, of course, is intelligent police work rather than war. That didn’t sit well with the hawks. I think the hawks should take a second and think again.
We love to declare wars in this country. We also have a War on Drugs, and there used to be a War on Poverty. I guess we must have won that one, because you don’t hear much about it anymore. Every once in a while some politician identifies a serious problem and decides he has to declare war on it. That’s supposed to get everyone mobilized for a big national effort, I guess. It’s supposed to justify extraordinary measures, and, usually, great expenditures. It signals that the politicians are serious.
The problem is that the war metaphor can mislead us, and I think it’s misled the Bush administration in a serious way in the current crisis. I think in the shock after 9/11 they looked at our first-rate military machine and saw that nothing could stand against it and therefore decided it would solve all our problems with Islamic thuggery. So they declared the War on Terror.
Here’s the problem with that: in a real war, the kind our military was designed to fight, there is an enemy government with a seat of power and a chain of command. It has at its disposal a military machine that can be located and engaged and, if you’re better, destroyed. And then the enemy government can be compelled to do whatever you want it to do, including coming out with their hands up.
But where’s Bin Laden’s capital? Where are his carrier groups and armored brigades? The September 11th attack was carried out by half a dozen guys with box cutters. Yes, there were the camps in Afghanistan, where those guys learned their tricks. And our military took them out in short order. Insofar as there was a locatable enemy, the shooting war worked just fine. But then it got harder. There are a whole lot of guys in a whole lot of apartments, muttering in a whole lot of languages. And you can’t send the B-52’s to bomb Hamburg.
George Soros was right: what we need to defeat Al-Qaeda is principally good intelligence and patient police work that doesn’t alienate the populations that shelter our enemies. We need people who can speak the languages and people who know how to cultivate informants, and flexible and adaptable security agencies that don’t squabble over turf. We need a lot of good smart tough cops, and we will need a lot of time.
That’s not satisfying to a lot of people. They want the bang. They want to turn sand into glass. They want to make somebody hurt. 9/11 was an act of war, they insist, so let’s give the bastards a war. Wasn’t 9/11 an act of war? OK, sure. How about Timothy McVeigh’s blowing up the Murragh Building? Was that an act of war? And who do you declare war on there? You don’t. You put the cops to work, and they track the bastards down.
Here’s another problem with calling this a war: in many people’s eyes, it grants legitimacy to the criminals. In a real war, it’s understood that the other guy is fighting for his country, just like you are. His government may be at fault, but you don’t hold that against him. Diplomats can argue about the merits of the case. Calling what we’re in now a war says to millions of people around the world that Bin Laden has a case, that the suicide bombers are more than deranged killers, that Musab Al-Zarqawi qualifies as a patriot. It grants the killers a status they don’t deserve. Sure, being a criminal suspect may grant you some procedural rights that being an enemy combatant doesn’t, but it’s a loss in the propaganda war. Calling the Al-Qaeda thugs enemy combatants grants them a dignity they don’t deserve. It undermines our case.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not pleading for appeasement or soft treatment. When the enemy is locatable and armed and hostile, I’m fine with sending in the Marines. The problem is that this enemy is so often not locatable, and when he is, he is hunkered down in a house full of women and children who don’t deserve to die with him. Or he is embedded in a university in Europe, or lying low in an office job in the U.S.
If we want to find him and stop him, we have to get smart. We have to stop thinking about invading countries and start thinking about intelligence and investigation and infiltration and patient assembling of data. We have the best military in the world, and they have done everything we’ve asked of them. But not everything is a military problem, and military action can alienate a population and turn it against us in the wink of an eye. I think the war metaphor led us into disaster in Iraq, and it’s time to retire it.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Enough already...
OK, let’s see. We have, what, another year and change before we can vote on this? To look at the paper you’d think the presidential election was next month. Every other day there’s a debate, every other day somebody else throws his hat in the ring. Thompson’s in, Gilmore’s out (raise your hand if you ever knew he was in), Hilary’s not woman enough and Barack isn’t black enough, Mitt’s for the surge and Rudy’s for guns. Snore.
Other countries manage to pull off elections for the top spot in a matter of weeks. In a parliamentary system it’s a brisk, well-choreographed procedure. Here it’s a two-year death march. Maybe three.
I don’t know what can be done about it. You can’t forbid people to campaign; that would be a restriction of free speech. You can try and police how and from whom and how much money they raise, and you can get indignant about states moving their primaries farther and farther from the general election in a fatuous race to be first, but when it gets right down to it you can’t stop the ambitious and the wealthy and the deluded from launching what are nowadays essentially permanent campaigns.
Does this agonizing baby-kissing marathon make our democracy better? Does it produce stronger candidates, promote more thorough discussion of issues? Don't make me laugh. There’s a ruthless process of elimination, for sure. It weeds out the inadequately funded quite effectively. That means we’re left with candidates who know they have I.O.U.’s coming due, because not even Mitt Romney’s rich enough to fund a whole presidential campaign all by himself. The Darwinian process of a U.S. presidential campaign reliably produces candidates who are masters of horse-trading, back-stabbing and lip-zipping. The political process produces superb politicians.
The trouble is, they don’t always bring policy-making skills and insights along with them, and that’s what good government requires.
My standards for a U.S. president are actually fairly low. I have realistic expectations. I don’t need a genius. Reagan showed us that you can be an intellectual mediocrity and change the direction of the country, if you know how to delegate and nap. Clinton showed us you can preside over prosperity and positive social changes with dubious levels of personal integrity. (My expectations are a little higher than the current occupant of the White House, but I’m not going to pile on. There are enough people on the Bush beat already.)
What do you need to be a good U.S. president? First, I think you need firm principles that you can articulate clearly and keep sight of through the fog of war, even if it’s only political war. Oh, and they should be the right principles, too, did I mention that? Good means more than just effective. What are the right principles? Here’s where we might quibble a bit, but I think most of us will agree that the reason our country has always had more people trying to get in than trying to get out has something to do with high levels of economic, political and social freedom.
Second, a president has to be a competent administrator. This cannot be over-emphasized. It’s an administrative job. It’s delegating, hiring and firing, prioritizing, information-gathering and decision-making under pressure. Not everybody has these skills. Not even everybody who wants to be president has these skills. We should take a hard look at the field with an eye to who has high-level executive experience and who doesn’t.
Third, a good president has to be a salesman. He or she has the world’s biggest bully pulpit, and a president can shape the debate like nobody else. A good president can make us think about the world differently.
Sadly, most of the candidates are best at the third requirement. They wouldn’t be in politics if they weren’t great salesmen. But that’s not enough.
What are the chances we’ll get a good president out of this depressing cattle call? Slim, I’d say, going on past form. But you never know. Every once in a while somebody survives the process who actually fills the bill. We can always hope.
In the meantime, I’m already tired of these mopes. Wake me up next November.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Other countries manage to pull off elections for the top spot in a matter of weeks. In a parliamentary system it’s a brisk, well-choreographed procedure. Here it’s a two-year death march. Maybe three.
I don’t know what can be done about it. You can’t forbid people to campaign; that would be a restriction of free speech. You can try and police how and from whom and how much money they raise, and you can get indignant about states moving their primaries farther and farther from the general election in a fatuous race to be first, but when it gets right down to it you can’t stop the ambitious and the wealthy and the deluded from launching what are nowadays essentially permanent campaigns.
Does this agonizing baby-kissing marathon make our democracy better? Does it produce stronger candidates, promote more thorough discussion of issues? Don't make me laugh. There’s a ruthless process of elimination, for sure. It weeds out the inadequately funded quite effectively. That means we’re left with candidates who know they have I.O.U.’s coming due, because not even Mitt Romney’s rich enough to fund a whole presidential campaign all by himself. The Darwinian process of a U.S. presidential campaign reliably produces candidates who are masters of horse-trading, back-stabbing and lip-zipping. The political process produces superb politicians.
The trouble is, they don’t always bring policy-making skills and insights along with them, and that’s what good government requires.
My standards for a U.S. president are actually fairly low. I have realistic expectations. I don’t need a genius. Reagan showed us that you can be an intellectual mediocrity and change the direction of the country, if you know how to delegate and nap. Clinton showed us you can preside over prosperity and positive social changes with dubious levels of personal integrity. (My expectations are a little higher than the current occupant of the White House, but I’m not going to pile on. There are enough people on the Bush beat already.)
What do you need to be a good U.S. president? First, I think you need firm principles that you can articulate clearly and keep sight of through the fog of war, even if it’s only political war. Oh, and they should be the right principles, too, did I mention that? Good means more than just effective. What are the right principles? Here’s where we might quibble a bit, but I think most of us will agree that the reason our country has always had more people trying to get in than trying to get out has something to do with high levels of economic, political and social freedom.
Second, a president has to be a competent administrator. This cannot be over-emphasized. It’s an administrative job. It’s delegating, hiring and firing, prioritizing, information-gathering and decision-making under pressure. Not everybody has these skills. Not even everybody who wants to be president has these skills. We should take a hard look at the field with an eye to who has high-level executive experience and who doesn’t.
Third, a good president has to be a salesman. He or she has the world’s biggest bully pulpit, and a president can shape the debate like nobody else. A good president can make us think about the world differently.
Sadly, most of the candidates are best at the third requirement. They wouldn’t be in politics if they weren’t great salesmen. But that’s not enough.
What are the chances we’ll get a good president out of this depressing cattle call? Slim, I’d say, going on past form. But you never know. Every once in a while somebody survives the process who actually fills the bill. We can always hope.
In the meantime, I’m already tired of these mopes. Wake me up next November.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The end of the Outfit?
In the end it was a little anticlimactic. There were headlines, but they were overshadowed by remembrance of much bigger events on the same date, six years before. When it came, the decapitation of the Outfit came quietly. On Monday five top Chicago organized crime figures were found guilty of a smorgasbord of federal charges, racketeering conspiracy at the head of the list. Seventeen citizens in an uncomfortably warm room in the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago decided that a handful of old men were guilty of the crimes the U.S. government had charged them with. They made a fairly short job of it—after ten weeks of testimony and arguments, with mounds of evidence to wade through, they took only a few days to agree on the verdict. In the course of deliberations they asked the judge for a fan and a dictionary. The word was, they wanted to make sure they understood what usorious meant.
The federal government is about to put the top leadership of the Chicago Outfit in jail, for a long time. If you know anything about the history of Chicago, this is a big deal. For fifty years the Outfit acted more or less with impunity in this city. Prohibition had undermined the rule of law so thoroughly that the city’s political structure, court system and police were all deeply compromised by ties to the gangsters. Prohibition made the Capone gang rich and entrenched it in the city’s power structure. A nexus of crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked judges and just plain crooks of all stripes insured that the hoods got their cut of just about every significant economic activity in the city. Reformers came and went, but nothing seemed to change. Mob hits went unpunished, payoffs went up the line.
Meanwhile, books and movies glamorized organized crime. We followed the Corleones and the Sopranos and cared about them. They became part of our historical narrative, immigrants scrapping for their share of the pie. Top Outfit guys in Chicago had celebrity status. They gave to the community; their neighborhoods were safe. Too often we forgot that gangsters are bullies, cheats, thugs, killers. They wouldn’t be gangsters if they weren’t.
It took the power of the federal government in the form of the R.I.C.O. statue and the Greylord investigation to start chipping away at Outfit power. Outfit guys saw the handwriting on the wall. They started keeping their sons out of the business. They sent them to college and watched them become lawyers, bankers, doctors. In the meantime, the world changed. The Next Big Thing in crime passed the Outfit by as the money shifted to drugs. The blacks and Latins assumed the role the Italians had played in the 1920’s: outsiders on the make. In a sense the decline of the Chicago Outfit reflects the rise of the Italian-American community as a whole and the changing demographics of the country. In the twenties it was the Italians who were poor, alien, excluded. Their criminals exploited Prohibition to gain wealth and power. Today it’s somebody else, but the story is the same. Smart thugs exploit opportunities.
Is the Outfit dead? Organized crime experts say we’d be fools to think so. As long as there’s vice, we’ll have organized crime. The Outfit isn’t going away. Somebody else will step up to take James Marcello’s place as boss, because there’s just too much money to be made off vice. But we can hope he'll inherit a lesser organization. We can hope that the days when the Outfit was a shadowy but real pillar of the Chicago power structure are over. We can hope it will never again have significant veto power in the courts, the police department, the state legislature. We can hope that the Outfit is just another gang now, and an aging one. And we can hope as we struggle with new gangs and new rackets and the eternal temptation to corruption that we won’t be fooled again.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
The federal government is about to put the top leadership of the Chicago Outfit in jail, for a long time. If you know anything about the history of Chicago, this is a big deal. For fifty years the Outfit acted more or less with impunity in this city. Prohibition had undermined the rule of law so thoroughly that the city’s political structure, court system and police were all deeply compromised by ties to the gangsters. Prohibition made the Capone gang rich and entrenched it in the city’s power structure. A nexus of crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked judges and just plain crooks of all stripes insured that the hoods got their cut of just about every significant economic activity in the city. Reformers came and went, but nothing seemed to change. Mob hits went unpunished, payoffs went up the line.
Meanwhile, books and movies glamorized organized crime. We followed the Corleones and the Sopranos and cared about them. They became part of our historical narrative, immigrants scrapping for their share of the pie. Top Outfit guys in Chicago had celebrity status. They gave to the community; their neighborhoods were safe. Too often we forgot that gangsters are bullies, cheats, thugs, killers. They wouldn’t be gangsters if they weren’t.
It took the power of the federal government in the form of the R.I.C.O. statue and the Greylord investigation to start chipping away at Outfit power. Outfit guys saw the handwriting on the wall. They started keeping their sons out of the business. They sent them to college and watched them become lawyers, bankers, doctors. In the meantime, the world changed. The Next Big Thing in crime passed the Outfit by as the money shifted to drugs. The blacks and Latins assumed the role the Italians had played in the 1920’s: outsiders on the make. In a sense the decline of the Chicago Outfit reflects the rise of the Italian-American community as a whole and the changing demographics of the country. In the twenties it was the Italians who were poor, alien, excluded. Their criminals exploited Prohibition to gain wealth and power. Today it’s somebody else, but the story is the same. Smart thugs exploit opportunities.
Is the Outfit dead? Organized crime experts say we’d be fools to think so. As long as there’s vice, we’ll have organized crime. The Outfit isn’t going away. Somebody else will step up to take James Marcello’s place as boss, because there’s just too much money to be made off vice. But we can hope he'll inherit a lesser organization. We can hope that the days when the Outfit was a shadowy but real pillar of the Chicago power structure are over. We can hope it will never again have significant veto power in the courts, the police department, the state legislature. We can hope that the Outfit is just another gang now, and an aging one. And we can hope as we struggle with new gangs and new rackets and the eternal temptation to corruption that we won’t be fooled again.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Monday, September 10, 2007
Churchill didn't say it...
One of my favorite quotes is, it turns out, mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill. I’ve been using this line for several years and confidently telling people that Churchill said it. You’ve probably heard it: “A man who is not a liberal at age twenty has no heart; a man who is not a conservative at age forty has no brain.”
There are variations; in some versions it’s “socialist” instead of “liberal”; sometimes the age is thirty instead of twenty.
Doesn’t matter. Churchill, it turns out, didn’t say it, or at least didn’t say it first. Apparently the existence of different versions reflects the fact that it has been said by different people at different times. The most reliable attributions appear to be to a couple of nineteenth-century French politicians, François Guizot and Aristide Briand, with Guizot saying it first. Maybe Churchill cribbed it from them in turn.
It’s a good line, which accounts for its popularity. But it bugs the hell out of liberals, which is understandable. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn even ran a couple of columns about the line a while ago, inviting reader responses. I don't know if it bugged him; I’d call Zorn a liberal, but whatever he is, he’s a thoughtful writer who’s never afraid to consider the other side.
I didn’t get involved then, maybe because I wasn’t sure what I thought. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I think now: Guizot and Briand and Churchill had hold of a truth, and even if you didn’t wind up a conservative, there’s wisdom in it that you ought to be able to concede.
Full disclosure: I don’t know how much it had to do with my internal anatomy, but I’ve moved to the right in my political views over the past couple of decades. I’d still call myself a liberal rather than a conservative (how can a man who believes that both sodomy and cocaine should be legal be called a conservative?) but I’m a liberal in the way Gladstone or the young Churchill was a liberal. I’m a small government guy. I’m an economic conservative and a social liberal, to give you the usual oversimplification. (I'll break that down a little more some other time.) If you have to slap a label on me, you can call me a libertarian, though I’m not especially anxious to be identified with the black helicopter crowd. If this helps, I am the only person I know who has actually voted for Ron Paul.
We can argue about libertarianism some other time. For now let’s look at that quote: what does it mean, and is there a formulation we can all agree on?
When I think of the quote, I remember my own political trajectory: I grew up in a devoutly religious but intellectually stimulating household (no, it’s not impossible); one parent was a Democrat and the other a Republican who usually voted Democratic; I was a fairly standard peace and love and rock and roll liberal through college, flirted with Marxism, hung out with radicals in Chicago and outright Communists in France; voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, rued the election of Ronald Reagan, and all the time kept reading, thinking, talking with people. I lived in countries where things didn't work as well, and wondered why. In the middle eighties I finally got around to reading The Open Society and Its Enemies, by the man whom the title of this blog honors. That pretty much took care of the Marxist thing, which had always smelled a little fishy to me. I started to educate myself about economics. I read more Popper. I heard some people say that Reagan was ruining the economy and I heard other people say that Reagan was saving the economy and I had an epiphany: they couldn’t both be right. There had to be some empirical grounds for deciding the question. I looked into it and decided that the conservatives were mostly right about economics. The trouble was, they were still wrong about other things. I had kids and rediscovered the meaning of original sin. If I didn’t start believing in God again, I at least started to appreciate the ethical content of religious tradition. I became more intellectually humble. I learned that very few people are wrong about everything (OK, there are a few out there that are truly hopeless). I realized that political views are just hypotheses about how the world works, and that there shouldn't be any reason we can’t discuss those hypotheses as calmly as any others.
Look, here’s all that happened: life experience tempered the incandescent idealism of youth. And that’s all Churchill, or whoever said it first, was talking about. Even if you’re still out there on the left, I imagine you’ve undergone the same process: you see what works and what doesn’t. You learn that human life is a messy, chaotic process that doesn’t always cooperate with Utopian plans. Maybe you’re still a socialist, but you learned something from 1989. Maybe you’re still a passionate critic of our criminal justice system, but the time you got mugged cured you of your sentimental attitude towards street criminals. That’s all we’re talking about. That’s what the quote means, and because the men quoted above all wound up as conservatives, they put it in terms that favor that point of view. But there’s a core of truth in it for everyone. You’ve got to learn from the things life throws at you, temper theory with practical experience.
If your views didn’t get tempered by experience, if you’re still throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars or looking for excuses for Pol Pot, then you’re the guy Churchill was talking about who has no brain. I'm not sure what we can do for you.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
There are variations; in some versions it’s “socialist” instead of “liberal”; sometimes the age is thirty instead of twenty.
Doesn’t matter. Churchill, it turns out, didn’t say it, or at least didn’t say it first. Apparently the existence of different versions reflects the fact that it has been said by different people at different times. The most reliable attributions appear to be to a couple of nineteenth-century French politicians, François Guizot and Aristide Briand, with Guizot saying it first. Maybe Churchill cribbed it from them in turn.
It’s a good line, which accounts for its popularity. But it bugs the hell out of liberals, which is understandable. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn even ran a couple of columns about the line a while ago, inviting reader responses. I don't know if it bugged him; I’d call Zorn a liberal, but whatever he is, he’s a thoughtful writer who’s never afraid to consider the other side.
I didn’t get involved then, maybe because I wasn’t sure what I thought. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I think now: Guizot and Briand and Churchill had hold of a truth, and even if you didn’t wind up a conservative, there’s wisdom in it that you ought to be able to concede.
Full disclosure: I don’t know how much it had to do with my internal anatomy, but I’ve moved to the right in my political views over the past couple of decades. I’d still call myself a liberal rather than a conservative (how can a man who believes that both sodomy and cocaine should be legal be called a conservative?) but I’m a liberal in the way Gladstone or the young Churchill was a liberal. I’m a small government guy. I’m an economic conservative and a social liberal, to give you the usual oversimplification. (I'll break that down a little more some other time.) If you have to slap a label on me, you can call me a libertarian, though I’m not especially anxious to be identified with the black helicopter crowd. If this helps, I am the only person I know who has actually voted for Ron Paul.
We can argue about libertarianism some other time. For now let’s look at that quote: what does it mean, and is there a formulation we can all agree on?
When I think of the quote, I remember my own political trajectory: I grew up in a devoutly religious but intellectually stimulating household (no, it’s not impossible); one parent was a Democrat and the other a Republican who usually voted Democratic; I was a fairly standard peace and love and rock and roll liberal through college, flirted with Marxism, hung out with radicals in Chicago and outright Communists in France; voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, rued the election of Ronald Reagan, and all the time kept reading, thinking, talking with people. I lived in countries where things didn't work as well, and wondered why. In the middle eighties I finally got around to reading The Open Society and Its Enemies, by the man whom the title of this blog honors. That pretty much took care of the Marxist thing, which had always smelled a little fishy to me. I started to educate myself about economics. I read more Popper. I heard some people say that Reagan was ruining the economy and I heard other people say that Reagan was saving the economy and I had an epiphany: they couldn’t both be right. There had to be some empirical grounds for deciding the question. I looked into it and decided that the conservatives were mostly right about economics. The trouble was, they were still wrong about other things. I had kids and rediscovered the meaning of original sin. If I didn’t start believing in God again, I at least started to appreciate the ethical content of religious tradition. I became more intellectually humble. I learned that very few people are wrong about everything (OK, there are a few out there that are truly hopeless). I realized that political views are just hypotheses about how the world works, and that there shouldn't be any reason we can’t discuss those hypotheses as calmly as any others.
Look, here’s all that happened: life experience tempered the incandescent idealism of youth. And that’s all Churchill, or whoever said it first, was talking about. Even if you’re still out there on the left, I imagine you’ve undergone the same process: you see what works and what doesn’t. You learn that human life is a messy, chaotic process that doesn’t always cooperate with Utopian plans. Maybe you’re still a socialist, but you learned something from 1989. Maybe you’re still a passionate critic of our criminal justice system, but the time you got mugged cured you of your sentimental attitude towards street criminals. That’s all we’re talking about. That’s what the quote means, and because the men quoted above all wound up as conservatives, they put it in terms that favor that point of view. But there’s a core of truth in it for everyone. You’ve got to learn from the things life throws at you, temper theory with practical experience.
If your views didn’t get tempered by experience, if you’re still throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars or looking for excuses for Pol Pot, then you’re the guy Churchill was talking about who has no brain. I'm not sure what we can do for you.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Monday, September 3, 2007
These divided states...
I'm getting tired of hearing about the things that divide us in this country. Red states, blue states, black and white, haves and have nots... To hear some people talk, the United States is a balkanized patchwork of warring clans. On a sunny Labor Day with the usual ethnic and socio-economic grab bag jostling for grill space out by the lake, it's a good time to take a skeptical look at that notion.
All these divisions exist, of course, but they're greatly overrated. Start with the red and blue state thing: this is a media-created artifact of the electoral college system which greatly oversimplifies the political and social map. You can run a red and blue analysis county-by-county or township-by-township in any given state and come up with a more accurate map, but even that is going to steamroller complexity: heck, I grew up with "red" and "blue" factions in my family. In the reddest of red states you will find wine-sipping, sandal-wearing Kucinich enthusiasts, and in the bluest of blue states you will find Limbaugh-loving, gun-rack-in-the-pickup meat eaters. And everything in between. So give the color thing a rest. The truth is that we all live in purple states.
As for black and white, far be it from me to proclaim an end to racial divisions, but I can't be as pessimistic as the Faces at the Bottom of the Well crowd. Control for social factors that are not inherently linked to the amount of melanin in a person's skin, and racial disparities start to flatten out. That is, if you get an education, delay childbearing until you're in a stable marriage with a decent income, and don't blow all your income on intoxicating substances, the odds are you are going to have a successful life, whatever color you are. If you can't do those things, you will probably be poor and miserable, and this goes for black, white or any other color. I have a brother who is a prosecutor in a mainly rural Indiana county, and his description of the local white underclass sounds just like what we hear about the urban black underclass: absent fathers, substance abuse, disdain for education. In other words, even our underclass culture crosses racial lines. That's good news, because all these things are correctable problems, and there's nothing inherently black or white about them.
Even the real divisions of language and culture tend to disappear over time, as children of immigrants assimilate. This is happening even with Hispanics, who have found more accomodation for their language and culture than any other group in U.S. history. Our culture is powerfully assimilative, and if we let it work it will embrace all comers.
None of the foregoing is to deny that there are real conflicts of interest to be worked out in our messy society. But that's what the political process is for, on all levels from your local PTA to the Congress of the United States. We have a strong civil society and a panoply of institutions to work out the conflicts, and if we don't panic about our divisions, they will get worked out.
The things that unite us are stronger and deeper than the things that divide us. So don't panic. Human life is inherently messy, but American society is as good as any on earth at dealing with that messiness. And personally, I think that unruliness is part of the fun.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Technorati Profile
All these divisions exist, of course, but they're greatly overrated. Start with the red and blue state thing: this is a media-created artifact of the electoral college system which greatly oversimplifies the political and social map. You can run a red and blue analysis county-by-county or township-by-township in any given state and come up with a more accurate map, but even that is going to steamroller complexity: heck, I grew up with "red" and "blue" factions in my family. In the reddest of red states you will find wine-sipping, sandal-wearing Kucinich enthusiasts, and in the bluest of blue states you will find Limbaugh-loving, gun-rack-in-the-pickup meat eaters. And everything in between. So give the color thing a rest. The truth is that we all live in purple states.
As for black and white, far be it from me to proclaim an end to racial divisions, but I can't be as pessimistic as the Faces at the Bottom of the Well crowd. Control for social factors that are not inherently linked to the amount of melanin in a person's skin, and racial disparities start to flatten out. That is, if you get an education, delay childbearing until you're in a stable marriage with a decent income, and don't blow all your income on intoxicating substances, the odds are you are going to have a successful life, whatever color you are. If you can't do those things, you will probably be poor and miserable, and this goes for black, white or any other color. I have a brother who is a prosecutor in a mainly rural Indiana county, and his description of the local white underclass sounds just like what we hear about the urban black underclass: absent fathers, substance abuse, disdain for education. In other words, even our underclass culture crosses racial lines. That's good news, because all these things are correctable problems, and there's nothing inherently black or white about them.
Even the real divisions of language and culture tend to disappear over time, as children of immigrants assimilate. This is happening even with Hispanics, who have found more accomodation for their language and culture than any other group in U.S. history. Our culture is powerfully assimilative, and if we let it work it will embrace all comers.
None of the foregoing is to deny that there are real conflicts of interest to be worked out in our messy society. But that's what the political process is for, on all levels from your local PTA to the Congress of the United States. We have a strong civil society and a panoply of institutions to work out the conflicts, and if we don't panic about our divisions, they will get worked out.
The things that unite us are stronger and deeper than the things that divide us. So don't panic. Human life is inherently messy, but American society is as good as any on earth at dealing with that messiness. And personally, I think that unruliness is part of the fun.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Technorati Profile
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Hearts and minds
Winning hearts and minds in the war against Muslim extremism ought to be a slam dunk. After all, few people, even in the Muslim world, can possibly find that kind of puritan totalitarianism very attractive. I’ve lived in the Arab world—and give or take the usual cultural gaps, people there are pretty much like we are. Nobody likes being bossed around by fanatics. Mainstream Muslim culture is more socially conservative than ours, to be sure—but it’s not insane, and it’s prey to the same secularizing, modernizing pressures that Christian culture has undergone. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to keep several hundred million Muslims at the very least neutral toward the West, if not actively sympathizing with us in opposition to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Muslims aren’t stupid, and they can see as well as we can who’s perpetrating the bulk of the atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and who wants to outlaw music, cinema and fun in general.
So why aren’t they rallying to us wholeheartedly? Well, for one thing, we keep killing a lot of them in airstrikes. Afghanistan’s president Karzai has been complaining about the high rate of civilian casualties in coalition airstrikes for some time. Now that three British soldiers have been killed by American bombs, maybe someone over here will listen.
Now, every war has friendly fire incidents, and I understand as well as you do the difference between collateral damage in a strike on a legitimate military target and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. But from the point of view of the victim, lying in the hospital with bandaged stumps where his legs used to be, the effects are indistinguishable. When your house is taken out by a laser-guided bomb from an A-10 Warthog, your loved ones obliterated or crushed under the rubble, it’s not much of a consolation to be told that the pilots were trying for the mujahideen next door. The horror is the same for you as it is for the victim of a Hamas suicide bombing in Israel. When mistakes like that are repeated time and time again, the apologies start to wear thin. You start to wonder at what point carelessness becomes callousness, and the line between callousness and hostility can be hard to trace.
Now, I understand that if you’re a U.S. Army or Marine squad leader taking fire from a house across the valley, what’s foremost on your mind is going to be how to take out that hostile fire with the least risk to your men. The lives of your men are a lot more important to you than the lives of whoever is in that house, and if you can call in an airstrike on that building, you’re going to do it. And I’m going to try hard not to second-guess you. I want your men to make it home as much as you do. But here’s what our military leaders have to understand: in a conflict like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you’re killing a lot of civilians, you’re losing the war. Period. You are not going to win the populace over, no matter how much reason and enlightenment you have on your side, if you keep blowing them up, especially if at the same time you are asking them to condemn their cousins for blowing up their hereditary enemies. That’s asking a lot of intellectual sophistication and emotional detachment.
I don’t know what the acceptable ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is supposed to be. And I sure as hell don’t have a good suggestion for that squad leader out there taking fire. But somebody in Kabul or Baghdad or Washington has to look at things and figure out how to kill the bad guys without taking out the whole neighborhood. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. Period.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
So why aren’t they rallying to us wholeheartedly? Well, for one thing, we keep killing a lot of them in airstrikes. Afghanistan’s president Karzai has been complaining about the high rate of civilian casualties in coalition airstrikes for some time. Now that three British soldiers have been killed by American bombs, maybe someone over here will listen.
Now, every war has friendly fire incidents, and I understand as well as you do the difference between collateral damage in a strike on a legitimate military target and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. But from the point of view of the victim, lying in the hospital with bandaged stumps where his legs used to be, the effects are indistinguishable. When your house is taken out by a laser-guided bomb from an A-10 Warthog, your loved ones obliterated or crushed under the rubble, it’s not much of a consolation to be told that the pilots were trying for the mujahideen next door. The horror is the same for you as it is for the victim of a Hamas suicide bombing in Israel. When mistakes like that are repeated time and time again, the apologies start to wear thin. You start to wonder at what point carelessness becomes callousness, and the line between callousness and hostility can be hard to trace.
Now, I understand that if you’re a U.S. Army or Marine squad leader taking fire from a house across the valley, what’s foremost on your mind is going to be how to take out that hostile fire with the least risk to your men. The lives of your men are a lot more important to you than the lives of whoever is in that house, and if you can call in an airstrike on that building, you’re going to do it. And I’m going to try hard not to second-guess you. I want your men to make it home as much as you do. But here’s what our military leaders have to understand: in a conflict like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you’re killing a lot of civilians, you’re losing the war. Period. You are not going to win the populace over, no matter how much reason and enlightenment you have on your side, if you keep blowing them up, especially if at the same time you are asking them to condemn their cousins for blowing up their hereditary enemies. That’s asking a lot of intellectual sophistication and emotional detachment.
I don’t know what the acceptable ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is supposed to be. And I sure as hell don’t have a good suggestion for that squad leader out there taking fire. But somebody in Kabul or Baghdad or Washington has to look at things and figure out how to kill the bad guys without taking out the whole neighborhood. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. Period.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Let 'em come
OK, let’s solve the immigration problem. Let’s crack down, let’s get tough. Here’s what we do: First, we fence off the border with Mexico. It’s only 1,500 miles or so. That would be--hang on, have to go price fencing at Home Depot... Hmmm. That’s a lot of fencing. But hey, it’s a serious problem, so let’s spend the billions. We’ll run the fence right through Big Bend National Park, ignore the environmentalists’ protests. At the rate of a hundred yards a day, pretty good going for a competent crew, we’ll have the sucker walled off in... Wait a second. Fencing off the border might not be as easy as it sounds. But if we could put a man on the moon...
All right then, tackle the other end of the problem. Go after the employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Threaten them with fines or even jail if they don’t double-check to make sure all their employees are legal. Put the burden of checking the papers on the guy who needs to get his apples in before they rot, or the contractor who has two weeks to get the concrete poured. Round up the illegals, all twelve million of them, and bus them back to the border. (OK, that’s a lot of buses, but if we could put a man on the moon...) The resulting job vacancies will be filled by our domestic unemployed. People will stream eagerly out of Oakland into the Sacramento Valley to pick the vegetables...
Let’s get serious. Massive illegal immigration does pose certain problems for the United States, but they are not existential, nation-threatening problems. (The existential threat to the nations of America started in 1492, and it’s over. The Americans lost, and the Europeans won.) Furthermore, the various draconian solutions proposed would be absurdly costly and futile, like, well, building levees around New Orleans.
To think seriously about immigration we have to think seriously about scale. The illusion of “taking control of our borders” rests on an inability to conceive of the distances and spaces and numbers involved. If a few thousand people per day want to sneak across a line fifteen hundred miles long, you’re just not going to stop them all. You will catch a few, maybe enough to create deterrence locally, but then they’ll just go look for another crossing point. When you’ve sealed off all the easy ones they’ll start trashing Big Bend National Park. Large voluntary population movements cannot be easily controlled. They just can’t. Only incentives will do it.
It makes more sense to police things at the other end, where the stepped-up enforcement measures just announced in Washington could create enough fear in employers to make them pickier about whom they hire. But there are costs as well as benefits here. How much additional paperwork can a small business take on without cracking under the strain? How easy is it going to be for employers to find legal workers all of a sudden? It’s easy to demonize employers who hire illegal aliens (and no doubt some of them do it knowingly and just don’t care). But it’s harder to come up with alternatives for them. When there’s work to be done, you hire who’s there.
Furthermore, how much are you willing to pay for groceries? Maybe you’re willing to pay a lot more to insure that your vegetables were picked by Americans. But maybe not everyone has as much money as you. Poor people benefit from low prices, or had that never occurred to you in your outrage over companies using cheap labor to hold down their costs? Tell you what, you explain to the people living from one Social Security check to the next that grocery prices just doubled because we kicked out the Mexicans.
From a purely economic point of view, the case for open borders is strong. If the rich can shift their capital anywhere in the world at the touch of a button, why shouldn’t the poor be able to take their labor where it is most valued? Mexicans are doing exactly what blacks did when they came north in the Great Migration, and a lot of white people didn’t like that, either. But somehow the economy survived. Competition, in labor just as in everything else, is what holds down costs and makes the economy efficient. So if you’re only interested in economic efficiency, you ought to throw the gates wide open.
The trouble is, economics isn’t the only thing involved. There are two genuine problems posed by massive illegal immigration. The first is the rule-of-law issue. If you have laws on the books but fail, year after year, to enforce them, it undermines the rule of law on which any decent society has to be based. It tells people that the law is no longer supreme, that instead expediency is supreme. And that’s a really bad message to send. It makes people who have taken pains to observe the law (like those who jumped through all the hoops and waited all the years to gain legal residence in the U.S.) wonder why they bothered. Whatever the merits of our immigration laws, the fact that their enforcement has been completely ineffectual is a serious failing.
Now, some essential laws are hard to enforce, and no law is perfectly enforceable. Difficulty of enforcement alone is not a reason to ditch a law. But if enforcement is so difficult or costly that we just can’t be bothered to enforce it, it’s time to ask whether we ought to have the law. If the prohibited activity is not in and of itself harmful, maybe we don’t need that law. That’s the case for some kind of amnesty on immigration, some recognition that our immigration policy has simply been overtaken by events and it’s time to reconsider it.
However, there are problems with amnesty as well (such as the bird it flips to the aforementioned people who jumped through all the hoops). If all an amnesty does is let everyone off the hook, it just tells people that we’re not serious about our laws. So there has to be some kind of process for legalization. You have to make people jump through some hoops. You have to say to them: we’re willing to let you become legal, but you have to prove that it means something to you by taking these steps. Then the debate is over how many hoops we make them jump through.
The second problem with mass immigration is cultural. Any country needs a certain amount of cultural unity. We need a common language, we need common allegiance and a common culture. That does not mean a bland cultural uniformity: there is plenty of room in this country for preservation of diverse traditions. But we need a common core of values.
Now, U.S. culture is very powerful and appealing. People tend to want to assimilate to it. Even if the first generation sticks to the old-country ways, their children usually don’t. Left to themselves, people assimilate automatically. Unless, that is, they are actively encouraged not to assimilate. And that is the effect of some policies that may be well-intended but have the effect of encouraging ghettoization and separatism. It is folly to try to provide education and official documents in every language under the sun. There is no need to pass legislation to make English our official language; all we need to do is to refrain from caving in to demands to conduct official business in anything else. People are very good at learning the languages they need to function. All we need to do is let them get on with it.
Our immigration “problem” will sort itself out if we focus on essentials: maintaining a legal framework that allows migration but encourages integration. I say let them come, but expect them to assimilate.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
All right then, tackle the other end of the problem. Go after the employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Threaten them with fines or even jail if they don’t double-check to make sure all their employees are legal. Put the burden of checking the papers on the guy who needs to get his apples in before they rot, or the contractor who has two weeks to get the concrete poured. Round up the illegals, all twelve million of them, and bus them back to the border. (OK, that’s a lot of buses, but if we could put a man on the moon...) The resulting job vacancies will be filled by our domestic unemployed. People will stream eagerly out of Oakland into the Sacramento Valley to pick the vegetables...
Let’s get serious. Massive illegal immigration does pose certain problems for the United States, but they are not existential, nation-threatening problems. (The existential threat to the nations of America started in 1492, and it’s over. The Americans lost, and the Europeans won.) Furthermore, the various draconian solutions proposed would be absurdly costly and futile, like, well, building levees around New Orleans.
To think seriously about immigration we have to think seriously about scale. The illusion of “taking control of our borders” rests on an inability to conceive of the distances and spaces and numbers involved. If a few thousand people per day want to sneak across a line fifteen hundred miles long, you’re just not going to stop them all. You will catch a few, maybe enough to create deterrence locally, but then they’ll just go look for another crossing point. When you’ve sealed off all the easy ones they’ll start trashing Big Bend National Park. Large voluntary population movements cannot be easily controlled. They just can’t. Only incentives will do it.
It makes more sense to police things at the other end, where the stepped-up enforcement measures just announced in Washington could create enough fear in employers to make them pickier about whom they hire. But there are costs as well as benefits here. How much additional paperwork can a small business take on without cracking under the strain? How easy is it going to be for employers to find legal workers all of a sudden? It’s easy to demonize employers who hire illegal aliens (and no doubt some of them do it knowingly and just don’t care). But it’s harder to come up with alternatives for them. When there’s work to be done, you hire who’s there.
Furthermore, how much are you willing to pay for groceries? Maybe you’re willing to pay a lot more to insure that your vegetables were picked by Americans. But maybe not everyone has as much money as you. Poor people benefit from low prices, or had that never occurred to you in your outrage over companies using cheap labor to hold down their costs? Tell you what, you explain to the people living from one Social Security check to the next that grocery prices just doubled because we kicked out the Mexicans.
From a purely economic point of view, the case for open borders is strong. If the rich can shift their capital anywhere in the world at the touch of a button, why shouldn’t the poor be able to take their labor where it is most valued? Mexicans are doing exactly what blacks did when they came north in the Great Migration, and a lot of white people didn’t like that, either. But somehow the economy survived. Competition, in labor just as in everything else, is what holds down costs and makes the economy efficient. So if you’re only interested in economic efficiency, you ought to throw the gates wide open.
The trouble is, economics isn’t the only thing involved. There are two genuine problems posed by massive illegal immigration. The first is the rule-of-law issue. If you have laws on the books but fail, year after year, to enforce them, it undermines the rule of law on which any decent society has to be based. It tells people that the law is no longer supreme, that instead expediency is supreme. And that’s a really bad message to send. It makes people who have taken pains to observe the law (like those who jumped through all the hoops and waited all the years to gain legal residence in the U.S.) wonder why they bothered. Whatever the merits of our immigration laws, the fact that their enforcement has been completely ineffectual is a serious failing.
Now, some essential laws are hard to enforce, and no law is perfectly enforceable. Difficulty of enforcement alone is not a reason to ditch a law. But if enforcement is so difficult or costly that we just can’t be bothered to enforce it, it’s time to ask whether we ought to have the law. If the prohibited activity is not in and of itself harmful, maybe we don’t need that law. That’s the case for some kind of amnesty on immigration, some recognition that our immigration policy has simply been overtaken by events and it’s time to reconsider it.
However, there are problems with amnesty as well (such as the bird it flips to the aforementioned people who jumped through all the hoops). If all an amnesty does is let everyone off the hook, it just tells people that we’re not serious about our laws. So there has to be some kind of process for legalization. You have to make people jump through some hoops. You have to say to them: we’re willing to let you become legal, but you have to prove that it means something to you by taking these steps. Then the debate is over how many hoops we make them jump through.
The second problem with mass immigration is cultural. Any country needs a certain amount of cultural unity. We need a common language, we need common allegiance and a common culture. That does not mean a bland cultural uniformity: there is plenty of room in this country for preservation of diverse traditions. But we need a common core of values.
Now, U.S. culture is very powerful and appealing. People tend to want to assimilate to it. Even if the first generation sticks to the old-country ways, their children usually don’t. Left to themselves, people assimilate automatically. Unless, that is, they are actively encouraged not to assimilate. And that is the effect of some policies that may be well-intended but have the effect of encouraging ghettoization and separatism. It is folly to try to provide education and official documents in every language under the sun. There is no need to pass legislation to make English our official language; all we need to do is to refrain from caving in to demands to conduct official business in anything else. People are very good at learning the languages they need to function. All we need to do is let them get on with it.
Our immigration “problem” will sort itself out if we focus on essentials: maintaining a legal framework that allows migration but encourages integration. I say let them come, but expect them to assimilate.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
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