An ongoing review of politics and culture

Actual Death Panels in the Obama Administration

In my latest piece at The Daily Beast, I excoriate the Obama Administration for its contention that it possesses the power to kill American citizens if they are determined by unknown persons in the executive branch to be imminent threats to the United States or its interests. The whole piece can be found here, and it includes links to pieces by Dana Priest, Eli Lake, and Glenn Greenwald, three talented journalists to whom I’m indebted on this story.

Frankly, I am flabbergasted that the practice is as uncontroversial as it seems to be. Over the weekend, I Tweeted back and forth on the subject with Jon Henke, a razor sharp libertarian whose thinking and writing I am always eager to consume. He argued that this is an inherently difficult subject because there are a lot of “problems, subjective judgments and gray areas” at play. I agree to a point. Obviously I don’t think that an American citizen squaring off against the United States Marines on a battlefield need be arrested. So does a heavily armed terrorist cell holed up in a Baghdad apartment occupy a war zone? What if they’re holed up in a Hamburg apartment? An apartment in Charleston, South Carolina?

But I cannot believe that blurring lines makes it constitutionally permissible to assassinate citizens who aren’t on a battlefield, or sitting armed in an apartment that serves as the equivalent.

As Mr. Greenwald puts it:

The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

In my piece in The Daily Beast, I argue the following: “That this power helps us to eliminate a few dangerous men in the short term hardly justifies the imprudent folly of indulging an unchecked power so extreme it can only end in corruption.” I stand by this position. How many Americans can there possibly be who are a) terrorists who pose an imminent threat; b) impervious to being captured alive; c) capable of being killed.

But even if you believe that our situation is so dire that American citizens must be killed without having been charged, tried and convicted of anything, shouldn’t you at the very least want this extraordinary, unprecedented power checked by someone in another branch of government? What is the counterargument against that added safety? If these killings are actually free from abuses, surely the president possesses ample evidence that the person targeted actually is a terrorist who poses a grave threat. Is it too much to ask that a three judge panel agrees? And that Congress reviews all killings periodically? Shouldn’t the folks at The Claremont Institute, who champion the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, be arguing that those men would’ve made sure to build checks against such a significant power into other branches of the government?

The balance of my piece is here. As always, I’m eager to hear critiques, and especially curious to hear the argument against oversight from those who insist that this is a necessary practice. Takeaway lesson: no one who rises to the presidency can be trusted to limit himself to powers afforded his office by the Constitution properly understood.

Somehow, I Ended Up in a Bloggingheads Called "Puppies Are Awesome"

But don’t let that fool you: There are no puppies involved, just TPM’s Brian Beutler and myself talking health care reform.

Since puppies actually are awesome, and I wouldn’t want to leave you disappointed, here’s a picture of Bartleby:

Reader E-mail

A regular reader writes:

Bad shit has happened, seems likely to still be happening, to prisoners under US protection, with little legal oversight (as if legal oversight of some of the bad shit that’s happened world even matter). It is a measure of how bad and how distressingly common said shit is, that the murder line Horton’s peddling is taken seriously by some serious people. And where you’re biting is, jeez, three dudes, this weird way they’re found (hands/feet bound, etc.), all the same — pushes credibility. OK. Now, the investigators put forward an explanation for how that might’ve happened. It’s creaky, and stinks, but it can sorta work. I’d like to hear Carter acknowledge that it’s possible but malodorous.

But what I’ve yet to hear you acknowledge — and this is what sets Shafer’s hackles (I think) and mine (I know) on edge, here, is, your narrative is also creaky. In that, well, what the hell is the motive here? We’ve had horrible shit done to prisoners in the process of interrogation and/or “interrogation” and under theories of what made them compliant. And we’ve seen just plain indiscriminate brutality to the newly captured. And we’ve seen long-term degradation of groups of prisoners in the name of some stupid idea of making them interrogable. That’s what we’ve seen and while I think it is largely deplorable, I get it: I understand it, there is something resembling a rationale there.

The Horton story: not so much. There’s some CIA guys, and they aren’t the regular keepers/interrogators, and there’s a hell of a lot of overlapping jurisdictions all sitting around. So these CIA guys, they got these three guys out, separately but deliberately. They killed one, probably with an injection. So they went and got another, and did the same. So they got another….

I mean, this is where the Horton story, for me, falls flat on its face. The few people banging this drum are telling me, ohmyGawd, it was a murder, the circumstances all show it was a murder. Fine. But — and it might be I’ve missed this writing — I haven’t seen anyone write up what it is they think the CIA/military (two services!) guys were trying to do, exactly. It’s none of those other three things we’ve seen. It doesn’t make sense. They planned the hell out of this thing, so what was it they were doing?

In the absence of that narrative I think the implausibilities Carter confronts are MUCH smaller than yours. Please give me a motive. Not “they wanted to interrogate them and did it too hard.” What exactly do you figure was going on, three separate times, that one night, to only those three? I mean, God knows it’s damning and horrifying enough to say that what we have been doing leaves untried, unconvicted prisoners so despairing and degraded as to plan their own suicides: I don’t need there to’ve been a murder and a huge coverup conspiracy to be outraged here.

Quickly, I’d say that those of us who doubt that these deaths are suicides don’t think that the prisoners were taken one by one from their cells to be deliberately murdered — just that a plausible counter-narrative has them dying at the hands of their captors in some way, perhaps via overzealous interrogation methods intended to keep them alive, but taken too far. What I’ve written is that there is circumstantial evidence that something like this happened, but certainly not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

In prior writings, I should have said that perhaps there is a far less damning explanation: that the folks who accounted for these deaths strayed from an accurate narrative to cover-up misconduct by guards or the existence of a black site at Gitmo, and in doing so wound up looking as though they were covering up far more serious crimes.

Although I’ve got more to read on this subject, however, I remain convinced of three things: a) at best, America’s prison at Gitmo drove an innocent man to commit suicide under the watch of negligent guards, despite his having no ties to terrorists, and no one has been held accountable b) that the official narrative regarding these deaths is implausible on its face; c) due to the suspicious circumstances surrounding these deaths, the importance of treating prisoners, innocent detainees among them, humanely, and the fact that the government has on prior occasions covertly abused men in its custody, continued scrutiny into this story is justified.

Delayed Reaction to the State of the Union

It has taken me a while to assess my reaction to President Obama’s speech. On the whole, I think his supporters should be somewhat dismayed. It struck me as very effective in diagnosing problems, and in proposing policy solutions that – even though I disagree with many (but not all) of them – are well-reasoned and might plausibly succeed; but as far as I can see, he proposed no realistic solution to the political problem that he argued is at the heart of our inability to take useful action on these proposals.

At the highest level, Obama was precise about the central problem of our political economy: dealing with the current phase of democratic capitalism, characterized by the race between technology and skills, and the challenges of globalization. After reviewing how his administration has addressed the challenges of the past year, he came to what I think is the core of his diagnosis and proposals. He started with a statement of the problem:

From the day I took office, I’ve been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I’ve been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold? (Applause.)

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations — they’re not standing still. These nations aren’t playing for second place. They’re putting more emphasis on math and science. They’re rebuilding their infrastructure. They’re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America. (Applause.)

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become, it’s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.

He then went on to lay out his proposals:

Now, one place to start is serious financial reform. … Next, we need to encourage American innovation. …Third, we need to export more of our goods. …Fourth, we need to invest in the skills and education of our people.

Now, I disagree with many (but not all) of the specifics of how the President proposed to deal with these items (e.g., encouraging innovation via government direction of resources, educational improvement through greater central allocation of resources, etc.). But he described the challenge (“These nations aren’t playing for second place.”), and broke this down into the core areas that must be addressed to meet this challenge, in terms that I find to be extremely compelling.

The obvious question to be addressed was why we have had so little tangible progress in Washington against these problems during the first year of his presidency. His theory, referenced in the passage above, is that “gridlock” has prevented this. He argued, implicitly but clearly, that members of the government are not putting the general welfare ahead of individual and factional interests. He returned to this over and again:

But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can’t wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side — a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of — (applause) — I’m speaking to both parties now. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants shouldn’t be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators. (Applause.)

Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game. But it’s precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it’s sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government.

So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics. I know it’s an election year. And after last week, it’s clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern.

In this speech, then, he traced a theory all the way from observable problem through a sequence of asserted causation down to a root cause: a political class that refuses to do its job. Later, in what I (and probably only I) found to be the most moving part of the speech he put it this way:

Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths and pointing fingers. We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation.

But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.

Go back and look at video. There is no more clapping, laughter and mugging for the camera. All you see is a bunch of people silently squirming in their seats. He is calling them out, and they know it.

And then, as the listener waits for him to come out swinging – to tell us what he proposes that we actually do to meet the political problem he has identified – he retreated back to more letter reading about the struggles of ordinary Americans. He flinched from proposing a solution to the problem he asserts is at the root of the important issues facing the country.

There are only two possibilities: either he is basically right that that lack of fidelity to the public good by the political class is why he can’t get his policy proposals implemented into law, or he is not. If he is right, then asking everybody to play nice won’t, by definition, fix the problem. Proposing procedural reforms to lobbying and so forth (as the president did) won’t fix it, because such a political class would simply make sure that such reforms were Potemkin affairs that did nothing to address the root problem. If he is trying to go over the heads of Congress, and shame them in front of the American people, he has not come close to the depth, intensity and repetition of the criticisms he would need to make such a strategy work. But if is he is not right, then he has misidentified the problem. Either way he is stuck without a proposed course of action – which is where, at least in this speech, I think he found himself.

Designing a defense budget

Our own Graeme Wood shared this blog post by Spencer Ackerman on the defense budget. After pointing out that the biggest (and growing) item is combat aircraft, Mr Ackerman calls this “insane”:

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say we don’t use combat aircraft in the wars we’re fighting. You have to come up with a baroque set of Michael Bey-esque geopolitical calculations by which we would use combat aircraft in any conceivable war. The U.S.’s area of combat-aircraft dominance is called Planet Earth. No Air Force is going to challenge ours. No actual U.S. adversary has an air force, and the list of real-potential U.S. adversaries that do starts with Iran and ends with North Korea, neither of which are remotely stupid enough to test us in the air. The most likely scenario for using combat aircraft in a U.S. war is an alien invasion.

He goes on to write:

What is relevant to the wars we fight are (a) remotely-piloted aircraft like drones, (b) surveillance aircraft like drones, © helicopters, and (d) especially airlift, to get our ground troops from Point A to Point B. And as you can see from the chart, we don’t spend nearly on that stuff what we spend on combat aircraft.

While I certainly agree that given America’s counterinsurgencies require a different set of kit than a Cold War military, and I absolutely agree with the general proposition that defense spending is irrational, riven by political-bureaucratic infighting rather than strategic investing (I agreed with nixing the F-22 program), I think calling high spending on aircraft simply “insane” is a little bit short-sighted.

If there is one lesson to draw from both recent and ancient military history, it is the tendency to fight “the last war”. Certainly this was the problem with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were at first basically fought like the first Gulf War. That war, meanwhile, was such a stunning success because the one fighting the last war was Saddam Hussein, entrenching his large cavalry in the desert, expecting a repeat of the Iran-Iraq war instead of the air-dominated, high tech war that the US had been perfecting.

The point is that while the US is fighting counterinsurgencies now, there’s no sure way to tell what wars it will fight tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. My friends who know about this stuff tell me that China’s military spending is geared toward an overwhelming amount of mid-range missile and naval warfare, which is designed to accomplish a fait accompli whereby China has so much overwhelming force in range of Taiwan that the US can no longer defend it. I think letting that happen would suck. (I also think antagonizing China would be very bad, but also that the best way to be friends with everyone in this big bad world is to have the biggest stick in the room.)

I’m not saying the US should orient its military spending toward preventing or matching China’s rise. I’m saying that whatever the big security challenge will be twenty years from now, we don’t know what it will be. Certainly 10 years ago you couldn’t have anticipated the situation we’re in today. In this context, for a country with the scale and power that the US has, with this extent of security engagements, the best way to respond to this radical uncertainty is to hedge against every possibility (after all, especially on a Reihan-edited site, we can’t dismiss an alien invasion completely out of hand), and maintain heads-and-shoulders dominance over every area.

The reason why today the US air force has no rival, not even China or Russia, is because those guys don’t even try to match the Air Force’s capacity, because the Air Force is so far ahead of them. If the strategy becomes “let’s only be slightly bigger than those guys” there’s a good chance those guys will all of a sudden buy a lot of fighter planes and launch a bunch of military satellites.

As far as fighting counter-insurgency wars, Ackerman is right that the US should buy a whole bunch of drones and transport aircraft (a first step would be to get over the astounding protectionism regarding the EADS A400M, which is superior to every alternative). But the US should also invest a lot more in strategic space commands, it should also prepare for the rise of a belligerent China (even as American foreign policy works hard to prevent such belligerence), it should prepare for a collapse of North Korea (for which Haiti is a priceless opportunity for a dress rehearsal, by the way), it should prepare for an alien invasion, it should prepare for (successful) Battle of Mogadishu-style interventions in places like Yemen, it should prepare to pummel Iran. It should prepare for a lot of those things at the same time.

The point isn’t to bring back the F-22. The point isn’t even that spending so much on fighter aircraft is smart — it may very well be dumb.

The point is that it’s not self-evidently “insane” to spend a lot of money on fighter planes for the sole reason that we’re not using them right now.

P.S. I also feel compelled to point out this absolutely extraordinary talk by Thomas Barnett regarding the kind of counterinsurgency strategy the US should support.

Tea & Culture

At Plumb Lines, David Schaengold raises a good question about my latest round of teablogging:

Isn’t there some worry that Friedman might be right? That we’ve reached precisely that stage of history where innovation requires despotism? Hence all the articles about the future of Authoritarian Capitalism. In which case despotism would still be despotism and liberty still liberty, but Friedman, while wrong to prefer despotism, would be right in a technical way. And of course the friends of liberty would in that case face a much more diabolical foe than the Mustache of Understanding. […]

This folly hardly seems unique to Friedman. Isn’t it shared by most thinkers about what we now call politics? Is this the same as the Front-Porch critique of the GWB “go shopping” moment or the persistent reference to American citizens as “consumers”?

As potent as the critique of go-shopping Republicanism can be, anyone who’s followed this past year’s back-and-forth between FPR and Pomocon probably at least senses that my line of attack is fairly different. It’s not that I think organic food is ridiculous, or that I want Walmart to finish conquering the world and deliver cheap, safe drugs to the masses in partnership with the federal government. A Rieffian insistence on the importance of cultural authority does not need to extend, I think, to the culture-first communitarianism often advanced by conservatives utterly disenchanted with the American political environment in general and movement conservatism in particular.

Again, it isn’t that I don’t appreciate the possibilities and disciplines opened up in one’s life by a Porcheresque or Crunchy Con turn. After all, starting a family, as I did last year, is an absolute obstacle to careerism, especially of the type that requires long idle thoughtful moments at the keyboard; after all, a family demands a certain amount of space, and I’m in the process of moving into a residence with a front yard, a back yard (with garden plot!), and — lo! — a front porch. Though I will not be raising chickens, I will be painting large canvases in the sun, etc.

What is it, then? I won’t accuse my culture-first friends of being antipolitical; they’re often fans of Christopher Lasch, for whom any culture worthy of the name had to craft true citizens. Lasch’s left conservatism deserves, in this bottom-up way, a comeback that its top-down, Carteresque complement does not. But it still seems to me that critics of go-shopping Republicanism most often take proper citizenship to be an offshoot or consequence of a certain kind of culture. The right politics, that is, is derivative from the right culture. I don’t think they mean this in the way somebody would who sought to focus our attention on the kind of citizen a free individual will be when he or she is religious. Rather, the desired orientation is toward the kinds of citizens that believing members of religious communities will be.

There’s no reason why Americans sympathetic to one or the other of these approaches shouldn’t be natural political allies — especially when the partisan alternatives they confront are animated by economic individualism on the one hand and economic collectivism on the other. Yet this array of allies and adversaries tends to mask, and has masked, the degree to which a certain strain of conservatism — the one I am associating with the tea partiers — opposes the excesses of economic individualism and collectivism more for politically foundational than culturally foundational reasons. Those who make culture foundational see individualist and collectivist economic thinking (and let’s make no mistake: these go together well) as inimical primarily because they destroy the social character of culture that rightly orders everyday life. Those whose problem with individualist and collectivist economic thinking is grounded in politics, not culture, have a much different issue. For them, economic individualism and collectivism are bad because both erode political liberty and our taste for it.

In the crude terms of our current understanding, the former camp is paleoconservative and the latter camp is neoconservative. But some of those in the latter camp — a more significant number, I bet, than we’ve got ourselves thinking — are just as seriously religious as their paleo or paleo-ish brethren. Their faith, however, is much more individualist and stoic in a manner neither at all captured by, say, moralistic therapeutic Deism. Sometimes, they are mega-church evangelicals, but the strain of faith I’m thinking of is much better symbolized by the semi-rural chapel than by the buddy-Jesus superdome. If you want an oversimplification, think of the country-gentleman’s piety of Lee and Jackson. I suspect their kind of piety has an underinvestigated lot to do with their appeal, where that appeal exists. True, as an organized strain of faith it was shattered by the failure to adequately confront slavery on the one hand and the decimation of the South’s cultural officer class during and after the Civil War. But it is a powerful ribbon running through the history of American Christianity, and the frustrations it has faced in maintaining political liberty through coalition-building have been coming to a head for some time now. To one side, economic individualists and Perot quirkiness; to the other, ’80s and ’90s-‘00s evangelicals, whose moral agenda, though generally shared, was so intense that too much in the way of political liberty was up for trade or sacrifice. Those coalitions having failed, along with, in a stroke of nice timing, establishmentarian party politics, there is a fresh opening for a fresh coalition. The working out of this coalition is what makes watching the tea partiers so fascinating, and the practical stakes so high.