13.9.02

VVV The President's speech to the UN about Iraq played some interesting logical games with the concept of multilateralism.

It seems he'd finally found a reasonable rationale for attacking Iraq (though one wonders about a decision-making process that picks a policy then goes looking for a rationale). "Saddam sponsored al Qaida," an early favorite, fell apart because of the complete lack of evidence for the connection beyond a scrap of hearsay about Mohammed Atta meeting with an Iraqi official, coupled with bin Laden's professed hatred for Hussein. "He's going to nuke us" played well at home, but there was still the nagging question of why, after a decade of not showing any agression beyond his borders, he was suddenly a pressing threat. Further, neither rationale explained why it was ok for the US to take care of the problem alone.

At the UN, Bush found a third rationale which he hoped would resonate with his multilateralist critics: Saddam has defied the UN. The UN must therefore assert its authority by enforcing its rule. He drew on the principle -- the key to international governance -- which states "members of the UN must do what the UN says." So far, so good.

Then, in a sneaky sort of move, Bush reverses the logic. He declared that, to defend the validity of its principle, the UN must allow the US to go after Hussein. He recognizes that "what UN members do" must match up with "what the UN says" in both the case of Iraq and the case of the US. However, in the case of Iraq, the logic runs in one direction -- IF the UN says to let weapons inspectors in, THEN the member must allow weapons inspectors in. The burden is on the member to make the two things match up. But in the case of US intervention, he reverses it -- IF the member invades, THEN the UN must say it can. He's putting the burden of reconciling UN resolutions and member actions on the UN, and threatening that the UN's principle will be weakened otherwise. This also puts Bush in the paradoxical situation that invading Iraq without UN approval would invalidate the very principle that furnished the rationale for invading in the first place.

Certainly Bush is right that the UN's legitimacy will be weakened if it does not enforce its resolutions regarding Iraq (though its failure to enforce other resolutions, such as those regarding Israel and Palestine, call into question how strong that legitimacy was in the first place). But there are other, better ways than simply giving in to America's pressure to "authorize us or else."
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:50 -- link --

12.9.02

VVV An interesting addendum to an earlier post:

Sep11's Effect On Spirituality Barna was stunned to find that, soon after Sept. 11, the percentage of Americans affirming that they believe in "moral truths or principles" that are eternal and unchanging actually declined - from 38 to 22 percent. Only 32 percent of born-again Christians still believe in the existence of absolute moral truth.

What happened to all those postmodernists and relativists, again?
posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:31 -- link --

VVV It just occurred to me that not only do most people casually refer to Saddam Hussein by his first name, but so does the Washington Post, in direct contradiction to its usual style guide. Pretty soon he'll be like Cher or Madonna.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:14 -- link --

11.9.02

VVV Securing Freedom's Triumph

If the President actually practices what he preached in his New York Times editorial, we'll see a complete reversal of American policy on a number of fronts. Allow me to deconstruct just one paragraph (W in italics):

America's greatest opportunity is to create a balance of world power balance is inherently multilateral that favors human freedom. We will use our position of unparalleled strength and influence to build an atmosphere of international order international order implies a working international system, which requires working with, rather than against, institutions like the UN, the WTO, the ICC, the Kyoto Protocol, and so forth and openness for example, by sharing evidence that would back up our insistence that we must go to war with Iraq, instead of keeping it -- like everything else the Bush administration touches -- top secret. in which progress and liberty can flourish in many nations. A peaceful world of growing freedom serves American long-term interests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America's allies. We defend this peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes. key word: "prevent" -- that is, create conditions that will lead away from violence. Not "react to with violence," even if we react before we've been provoked (in the case of Iraq, for example). Also, for a regime to be an "outlaw," there must be some law higher than that which the regime writes -- another statement of support for the UN and the international community We preserve this peace by building good relations among the world's great powers which we're not doing currently, except to the extent that we're uniting them against us and we extend this peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. free and open societies like our close friends Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

However, I suspect that this editorial is less "putting America on a new track" and more "lying."
posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:16 -- link --

VVV

The Great Refutation The mind's eye holds a mixture of emotions, including anger, directed at primitive enemies from abroad, and at the faux sophistication of some homegrown thinking. The thinking is as contemptible as, and more dangerous than, any foreign enemy, now or ever, because its agenda is to discredit ideas that make nobility intelligible and hence heroism possible. Last Sept. 11 was, among other things, the Great Refutation. And perhaps a catalyst of a sustained restoration. Ideas have consequences -- indeed, only ideas have large and lasting consequences -- so history is, at bottom, the history of mind. The acts of war a year ago made up our nation's mind, as one restores order to an unmade bed. We made up our mind to fight, of course, but also to become virtuously intolerant of a certain kind of nonsense, including the notion that tolerance is everything because everything else is nothing -- nothing but opinion or chimera. The postmodern plague of quotation marks -- the punctuation of disparagement that labels as superstitions "virtue" and "heroism" and most of the other things that make life worth living -- was erased by men running into burning buildings, men who had not been disabled by today's higher learning. The quotation marks remaining after the Great Refutation surround two words: "Let's roll!"

It's become one of the most popular cliches of the past year (and I'm sad to see a writer of George F. Will's caliber resorting to it) that September 11 somehow disproved postmodernism and cultural/moral relativism. But despite the popularity of the cliche, it's not true.

September 11 certainly discouraged a lot of people from being postmodernists. It put people in a position where they faced a choice between rejecting postmodernism (which argues that there's no objective standard of right and wrong) or accepting that the terrorist attacks are no more wrong than anything else. It's a tough choice for someone who is intellectually committed to postmodernism, because most people have, for lack of a better word, a conscience -- a deeply ingrained sense that certain actions are wrong. But the fact that this idea is in our brains doesn't make it right, any more than our deep-seated instinct to lash out angrily at the apparent perpetrators was right. To argue that September 11 disproves postmodernism, then, is to argue that instinct and emotion (which say the attacks were wrong) should triumph over reason (which, though it may have been used incorrectly in this case, is the source of postmodernism).

I'm no postmodernist. I agree that all manifestations of moral standards are socially constructed (truth has no more power than we give it). But I don't think that makes them all equally valid. And I remain skeptical about modernist claims to have found The Answer (as experience in social and environmental planning has shown that many of those claims were more hubris than substance). But I don't reject the ideas of good and bad, and I think the search for them is rewarding even if we never find The Answer. So my point is not to defend postmodernism, just to point out that the cliche about its death is not well-supported.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:01 -- link --

VVV Yeah, still fussing with my template.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:50 -- link --

9.9.02

VVV I think the Bush Doctrine is a self-fulfiling prophecy, at least with regard to Iraq.

The current justification for war on Iraq runs something like this: Saddam Hussein is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, which he may use against the US. The probability of such a strike is great enough that we need to move first. But if a nation has the right to attack preemptively if it sees another nation as likely to attack it, then Saddam has a right to nuke the US. Indeed, he probably has more right than we have to attack him. The likelihood of a Iraqi strike on the US is still debated (despite the administration's best efforts to pin September 11 on Saddam), and even if there is an attack it would be several years away, most likely. But American military action against Iraq is pretty much guaranteed to happen, by early 2003 at the latest. Bush is essentially giving Saddam the ideological justification to attack the US in order to establish the preconditions for a US attack on Iraq.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:29 -- link --