Re: Just more bullying?

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 10:40:46PM -0700, Michael Zara wrote:

> The flaw in Alford's argument is that there is little support for the notion
> that bin Laden and the Taliban (assuming them to be the culprits) have
> anything but the most passing interest -- indeed, an interest of convenience
> -- in the plight of those admittedly victimized by US policies: e.g., the
> Palestinians, the Iraqis, or even the Afghans.

I've spent some time lately complaining about the general refusal to
acknowledge the perfectly clear (to me, at least) distinction between
offering explanations that go to historical causality and offering moral
justifications of historical events, which can often, in fact, sound similar
but are, in principle, distinct. The systematic obliteration of this
distinction is one fault with Christopher Hitchens recent commentary, for
example, in which he attacks the left.

Keeping the distinction in mind, as for historical explanation of recent
events: I think your claim is way overstated. 

Whatever personally motivates bin Laden -- I've read three things: 1) US
military in Saudi Arabia (I take it that you'd agree with me that we support
the Saudi regime, which means we support the thwarting of whatever
democratic aspiration exists among the Saudi people, which makes them as
much victim of US regional policy as Palestinians and Iraqis, even if a
different kind of victim); 2) US support for Israeli oppression of
Palestinians; 3) US imposition of sanctions on Iraq -- it's pretty obvious
that Al Qaeda is what it is because it exists in countries full of peopele,
chiefly Muslims, who are opposed to US regional policy for the deepest, most
principled moral reasons.

In other words, I can easily imagine Muslims in the region thinking, and
I've read and heard reports to this effect, "The US backs horribly
repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Israel. It has starved
millions of Iraqis. It fought a proxy war in Afghanistan, during which it
helped create, nurture, arm, train, and support the most extreme, fringe,
even criminal, elements, and then simply abandoned them to the region and to
the world. In short, I am for moral and poltical reasons deeply opposed to
US policy. Osama bin Laden is a *crazy motherfucker*, but he's the only one
brave or insane enough to stand up to the US. I wish he wouldn't kill
innocent American civilians, but I also wish ordinary Americans wouldn't
support their government's policy, which has lead to the deaths of so many
innocent people in my part of the world. If things were slightly better, or
if my government were in the least bit democratic, I would have options
other than tacit support of bin Laden. As things stand, what choice do I
have?"

Without an environment of, to my mind, *justified* hostility to the US, Al
Qaeda and bin Laden (and probably much of Islamist extremism) would be
strangled and outcast. It would at least be vastly weakened.

Without whatever shelter and support it now receives from the Taliban -- and
I'm refraining from judging this just yet since I still haven't seen the
goddam evidence -- bin Laden and Al Qaeda would be in the crapper. And what
is the Taliban if not a extremist force that rushed in to fill the vacuum of
our cold war proxy war in Afghanistan.

What personally motivates bin Laden is to my way of thinking rather
irrelevant.  He is to the entire region what a fish is to water. And the
region *boils* with hostility to the US because of US regional policy. And
he feeds off that boil. He's like the red tide, which only blooms, killing
fish and choking the ocean, when the water gets way too hot. I find it
implausibe to claim that US regional policy is *not* in whole or in large
part responsible for the temperature of the water.

> Because none of the current targets of the US response are either
> legitimate, prior victims of US policy, or have even the minimum moral claim
> to the use of deadly force against civilians, Alford's depiction of the US
> response as simply  "more bullying" cannot be accepted.  

Hmm, there are a few problems with this. First, and I can't believe I'm
asking *you* this, what about the legality of our present actions?

Why are we bombing Afgh when 13 of the 19 hijackers were Egyptian or Saudi?

Why are we bombing Afgh at all since doing so clearly thwarts neither armed
attack nor imminent threat thereof. How does blowing up people and property
in Afghanistan respond to the threat, if such there is, of sleeper cells in
the US?

I grant that the 4 landmine removal workers -- you know, the folks who get
on their hands and knees and look eye to eye with a live landmine, removing
it with a bayonet -- were neither "legitimate, prior victims of US policy"
nor do they have "even the minimum moral claim to the use of deadly force
against civilians". What follows from *that*? I mean, so what? Neither of
those conditions applies to many Afghanis. Does that make them legitimate
targets? How so?

I'd be willing to bet *none* of the 20 Afghanis killed so far fall into
either category. Why did we kill them and what possible moral justification
could we offer for having done so? (To say nothing of legal justification.)

I take at least one of the criteria of morally justified use of
international force to be necessity (the other is proportionality). I *defy*
anyone to demonstrate that the bombings are necessary, *here and now*,
following, as they do, our steady, petulant, *two week* refusal to meet even
minimal standards of diplomacy, fair dealing, precedent statecraft, and the
like with the Taliban regime.

  Until and unless
> the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 atrocities can be shown to be actual
> victims (or their legitimate champions) of US policies with life-or-death
> implications, the US retaliation against those perpetrators is morally
> justified.  

You simply assume that relatively indiscriminate bombing of old targets in
Afghanistan is the same as using force against "these perpetrators", but
surely that's a factual question, yes?  That is, it's not only likely but I
suspect it is the case that the intersection of these two sets -- "people
responsible for 9-11 attacks" and "people who have or will die as a result
of the US/UK bombings" -- is *null*.

We know that under ideal conditions Tomahawks are 60% accurate. Under
conditions where they fly roughly 75% of their operational range, over some
of the most bewildering terrain on earth, it's hard to expect ideal
accuracy, 60%. But even if they were ideally accurate, we launched 50 of
them. That means we know to a moral certainty that 20 of them are not going
to hit their targets.

Those foreseeable, preventable deaths are morally justified?

> Neither bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, nor the Taliban are beaten wives, but rather
> *at most* insulted and belittled wives.  We should no sooner accept as
> payback the Sept. 11 atrocities than we should accept as justifiable the
> shooting of a domineering, but not physically threatening, husband by an
> insulted wife.  

Whether yours or your correspondent's, this is an inappropriate and, to be
frank, creepy analogy.

  Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, after all, had until just this week
> as their primary concern the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia.  This
> complaint hardly rises to the level of those of the Palestinians, the
> Iraqis, or the Afghans -- no matter how many coats of cultural relativism
> are applied!   

The Saudi regime is terrible, and we support it fully. You're way
overstating here, and cultural relativism simply has nothing to do with it.

Even if not, how is this relevant? Bin Laden is neither the Taliban nor
Afghanistan. He was in Sudan before Afghanistan. Are we justified in bombing
them next?

Would Afghanistan be justified in bombing the US if we refused to extradite
someone who killed 5,000 of their citizens?  Surely not.

  Moreover, the Taliban, which should be championing the Afghan
> people, is just plain psychotic, as many Afghans themselves declare.

And the Northern Alliance, which we are now championing, is by some accounts
*worse* than the Taliban.

Is the psychoticness of the Taliban offered for good measure here? "Oh, by
the way, we're bombing some real psychopaths, so it's ok." Odd.

> There is *not* however, any moral equivalence between the Sept. 11 attacks
> and any US policies toward the actual perpetrators, their direct supporters,
> or any people whose causes the perpetrators had *actually* taken up.  

Why does there need to be?

  The US
> response, therefore, in so far as it is limited to retaliation against the
> perpetrators and their direct supporters, is both morally justified, 

Is it so limited? I hadn't noticed. Tell that to the families of the dead
landmine removers. 

And despite whatever moral equivalence can be found, "retaliation" is *very*
hard to justify morally and I daresay you've not come anywhere near it. For
example, retributionist theories of capital punishment are notoriously
problematic. I suspect that a retributionist theory of moral use of
international force would be even more problematic.

  and
> perhaps the only route to exercise of the self-defense imperative.

Now you've just confused me; A retaliatory response is "the only route to
exercise of the self-defense imperative"? Hmm, you must be operating under
some moral or legal theories I don't know; all my knowledge of relevant
fields and types of inquiry suggest that retaliation or retribution is
separate from self-defense.

Further, I wonder what kind of *imperative* self-defense is? Surely it's not
a legal imperative? The UN Charter recognizes it as an inherent right, but
I'm not sure that makes it *imperative*, i.e., obligatory.

Even if the exercise of some inherent rights is obligatory, surely that's a
general conclusion, with no specific applicability here.

Last, setting aside the retaliatory motive, and the confusing amalgamation
of retaliation and self-defense, I think it's very difficult to justify the
present attacks as self-defense using either the Caroline case framework or
explicitly moral frameworks of self-defense.

Best,
Kendall

PS--Let me add as a personal note, Mike, that you sound more hawkish here
than I've heard you sound so far, either in the present situation, or at
all. What's up with that?