Fragmenta Philosophica

Off to Albion

I'm off to England for a couple of weeks.

Happy holidays, and please check in after the new year.

Ritter Redivivus

Hitchens and Ritter are to debate tonight (and, in what surely augurs ill, are to be joined by "comedian" Randy Credico). As this is a debate, one assumes that the two main opponents will differ over the questions which the advert implies are of the essence:

... is Iraq better off? Why did we go, and why are we still there? When should we pull out?

A few weeks ago Ritter was in town to promote his new book, and sat for an interview with a local, vehemently anti-invasion talk-show host. The conversation gave a good preview of the positions Ritter will likely take in his debate with Hitchens.  I was actually more impressed with his performance than I had expected to be; he was respectably articulate, and cut the figure of a rather sober and reasonable opponent of the invasion, apparently relying on a good deal of first-hand experience in Iraq.

To the host's apparent disappoinment, Ritter declined to be drawn on the question of whether, in the run-up to the invasion, Bush lied (knowingly said things he himself believed were false) when warning of Iraqi possessions and capabilities vis-a-vis WMD. The problem with having a sympathetic interviewer - and audience: the immediate listeners would be in the SF Bay Area - is that one doesn't get accustomed to the kinds of challenges which a worthy adversary would offer.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get through with my question, concerning discrepancies between the assertions of the more recent Ritter (last 5 years or so), and the "hawkish" Ritter of '97/'98, fresh on the heels of his tenure with UNSCOM. Of course, it's fine to change one's mind, in the light of new considerations and/or evidence. What deserves blame is the politician's approach of flat-out denying a clear change of heart - especially, as in Ritter's case, where the rationale for the change is baffling, and all but invites uncharitable speculation.

I have no plans to invest in the new Ritter book, but as part of my own research in the Autumn of 2002 I read his Endgame:Solving the Iraq Crisis. The book was published in 2000, with an "afterword" from 2002. In the latter, Ritter recounts a meeting with Tariq Aziz in 2000, which articulates Ritter's current position with respect to WMD:

" 'Well Mr. Ritter," [Aziz] said, 'the question of inspectors is part of the whole story. There are U.N. resolutions, mainly Resolution 687, and we had to implement it. And we did. We accepted this resolution formally, and we implemented this resolution for seven-and-a-half years. And I can say also that we still abide by this resolution' ...Tariq Aziz was repeating the mantra of the Iraqi government, playing the innocent in the face of incontrovertible evidence that established that Iraq in fact had not fully complied with Security Council resolutions concerning its disarmament obligations."

"And yet now, more than ten years after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that had set this whole chain of events into motion, Tariq Aziz's words rang with a new credibility. As the lead investigator for UNSCOM, I knew firsthand the lengths to which Iraq would go to keep the inspectors, and the international community at bay. And yet I also knew that, during the course of our difficult work we inspectors had uncovered the lion's share of Iraq's illegal arsenal. What was left, if anything, represented nothing more than documents and scraps of material, seed-stock, perhaps, for any reconstitution effort that might take place in the future, but by and of themselves, not a viable weapons program." [emphasis added]

The reader is not told why Aziz's words "rang with a new credibility."

Here is Ritter writing in December of '98 for The New Republic:

"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. UNSCOM lacks a full declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq's retained proscribed arsenal inherently tentative. But, based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells,bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production ...

"These capabilities may seem paltry compared with what Iraq had before the Gulf war. But they represent a vital "seed stock" that can and will be used by Saddam Hussein to reconstitute his former arsenal.  His strategy for doing so has emerged over the past seven years of struggle with UNSCOM. That struggle began almost as soon as the commission was created to verity a declaration Iraq was supposed to provide to the Security Council 15 days after the end of the Gulf war.  A Security Council resolution required Iraq to set forth the totality of its proscribed arsenal, as well as all its components and the means of producing it.  But, instead of telling the truth, Iraq gave a radically misleading and incomplete account.  UNSCOM's original mandate, a seemingly simple exercise in conventional arms control verification, evolved into an endless game of cat and mouse."
[emphasis added]

Ritter's testimony before the U.S. Senate in September '98 was, if anything, even less cautious:

"Iraq today is not disarmed, and remains an ugly threat to its neighbors and to world peace." (opening statement, beginning of third paragraph).

" ... I cannot speak on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nuclear disarmament issues in Iraq are their purview. But what I can say is that we have clear evidence that Iraq is retaining prohibited weapons capabilities in the fields of chemical, biological and ballistic- missile delivery systems of a range of greater than 150 kilometers. And if Iraq has undertaken a concerted effort run at the highest levels inside Iraq to retain these capabilities, then I see no reason why they would not exercise the same sort of concealment efforts for their nuclear programs" (response to Thurmond)

"The fact of the matter is that since April 1991 under the direct orders and direction of the President of Iraq the government of Iraq has lied to the Special Commission about the totality of its holdings. We cannot conduct verification of Iraq's compliance with Security Council resolutions without an understanding of what there was to begin with.  Iraq not only lied to us in April 1991. In the summer of 1991 they conducted what they call unilateral destruction: that is, they disposed of certain materials without the presence of weapons inspectors and then destroyed the records of this alleged destruction. They also diverted certain materials to the presidential security forces. This has confused an already confusing situation. We do not know the totality of what Iraq has. What we do know is that the declarations they have made to the Special Commission to date are false. And the explanations that they give to us about how they disposed of weapons are wrong. And therefore we know we have a job to do. How much longer will it take? I can say this, and I'll echo the words of the executive chairman. If Iraq gave us today a full and final accounting of all of its weapons of mass destruction -- programs and retained weapons capabilities -- our job would be over very quickly. But because we don't have such an accounting, our job has become a mission of discovery. We must go forth and find these weapons that Iraq is hiding. And that could go on a very long time, especially given the level of Iraqi obstruction today" (Response to Warner)

Of the questions which are to exercise the debaters' attention this evening, the preceding is most relevant to: Why did we go?

Nowadays, Ritter seems to want to say that the pre-war propaganda  in '02 and '03 was unduly affirmative and unequivocal, whereas all that those in the know - like Ritter! - would have been prepared to say was that there were merely questions about "unaccounted for" materiel. But if the statements from the administration betrayed a lack of probative rigor, cleaning them up a bit hardly helps Ritter's case - and what Hitchens ought to say is simply that, while no one knew for sure, to the extent that WMD were a motivating factor for the invasion it was entirely reasonable to assume the worst about Saddam Hussein and his regime (as Ritter himself realized back in '98).

There's another oddity in the new vs. the old Ritter: now he says - and apparently this is the "gotcha" of his new book - that the US repeatedly undermined inspections over the years because the goal for the Americans "all along" (meaning, since '91) has been regime change; they never wanted inspections to " work," and leave a de-fanged Saddam in power. But in Endgame, and in the Senate Testimony, Ritter takes the Cinton Administration to task for not wanting inspections to become confrontational, thus causing enmity in the Security Council.  Hence a leitmotif of the Senate hearing was the expressed concern on the part of the Senators that the US and the UNSC were not serious about Saddam's malfeasance. That is to say, the Senators were concerned that empty threats of force had been bandied about. (Note in particular the bluster of current Bush critics Levin and Biden).

Despite it all, this aspect of the debate over the war is misleading: the controversy over invading was always more of a prudential question - what to do in light of the evidential and existential picture - rather than a matter which could somehow be resolved almost automatically, if only the data were established.

Gathman's Five Points

My friend Roger and I disagree about most things, Iraq being foremost on the list. Nevertheless, a recent post of his struck me as quite an illuminating sketch of how things currently look from a respectable and advised "anti-war" standpoint.

Yellow Journalism

The reputable Sun of the UK has published an alleged "interview" with Saddam Hussein.  Its reliability may be in doubt, but there are some humorous moments, including a little chutzpah from the authors of the article: 'Saddam — currently on trial charged with killing 140 people in the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982 — also heaped praise on his old friend President Jacques Chirac. Spineless French leader Chirac was dubbed “Le Worm” in the run-up to the Iraq war after failing to back allied forces invading Iraq.'

Right - dubbed thus by whom?!

We also learn that Saddam, like Boethius, can find consolation in his imprisoment and travail: 'Saddam still remains defiant about his trial which could see him face the death sentence. He gloated: “I don’t mind being killed. There will always be another Saddam”. '

Buckley on top form

WFB strikes a respectable balance between hope and caution over the recent historic elections in Iraq:

"The national elections in Iraq are putatively good news. What happened that was of great importance was the decision by the Sunni insurgents to permit people to vote without threatening death and mayhem. That license increased the participation rate from a little over 50 percent of eligible voters last January to about 70 percent on Thursday. We will not have long to wait before seeing whether the insurgents’ decision was an acknowledgment of political reality, or only a temporary maneuver calculated to reinforce their strength in showdowns to come. If a few weeks go by and there is a marked decrease in insurgent activity, then the events of December 15 will reasonably be viewed as a true turning point in this protracted struggle.

"It is wise to remember that democratic exercises are pointless except as they commit the participants to accepting the consequences of losing. If a political movement takes part in an election only in order to measure strength, intending no commitment to be instructed by the election's results, we have only illusory adjudications of power. There is insufficient evidence, as I write, of the strategic disposition of the Sunnis, either the secularists or the Islamists. When the insurgents gave out word that Iraqis were free to vote, was it implicit that voting in this election — held to choose 275 council representatives — frees them from prior obligations to ethnic and tribal attachments? In any case, there will be dissenters, as there are in societies with a long history of democracy, and the dissenters must be allowed to continue to dissent. But in a society unused to democratic dispositions, will the losers feel free to dissent from majority decisions at gunpoint? And is there anything that can be done to vitiate the perception that the resistance of the bitter-enders represents fidelity to the supernatural?"

Buckley's benchmark - " If a few weeks go by and there is a marked decrease in insurgent activity, then the events of December 15 will reasonably be viewed as a true turning point in this protracted struggle" - is, I expect, the same standard which will govern the output of the virulently anti-invasion bloggers, most of whom apparently have remained silent over the vote thus far.  As a wait-and-see kinda guy myself, I would welcome a similar ethos from that lot. But their usual practice of seemingly seizing on every bit of bad news, gleefully, leads me to think that most are simply biding their time.  Perhaps fortune will go their way again, and we'll learn of massive voter fraud, a theocratic "list" will dominate the assembly, or perchance an intrepid reporter will uncover another alleged Bush outrage.

Aegroto, dum anima est, spes esse dicitur.

Isaac & Ishmael, III

Rather quixotically, the Center for Economic and Social Justice - which in many particulars manages to transcend the tired Left-Right divide - proposes to unriddle the Israel/Palestine puzzle by securing the existence of three states: Israel, Palestine and - initially on/within the most disputed territory, perhaps eventually to incorporate the other two states - the "Abraham Federation."

'[P]resent hostilities must not be ignored. This should be obvious. But any proposed solution would rest on political quicksand unless it recognized existing hatreds and fears of Jews and Arabs, as well as their legitimate hopes and aspirations. To overcome these hostilities to the point where Arabs and Jews can work out their differences, we must look to the past for a common bond.

'Arabs and Jews have a point of unity both can understand: Abraham, the Old Testament patriarch.

'Arabs trace their ancestry to Abraham through Ishmael, whom he fathered through his wife's servant Hagar. Jews trace their bloodlines to Abraham through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, who, according to the Bible, God later renamed Israel. The name "Abraham" literally means "father of many nations." Having once separated the descendants of Ishmael from the children of Israel, 3,800 years later, Abraham could fulfill the biblical prophecy not only of their unification but also of the eventual unification and harmony of all nations and peoples.

'Symbols of the past often serve as useful symbols for charting the future. A federation of the spiritual and blood descendants of Abraham could offer a bold political framework for taking small steps in a new direction. Thus, rather appropriately, the new nation could be named the "Abraham Federation." '

Such a conception, unapologetically embracing what strikes the modern temper as the "mythical past," is a far cry from the usual nostrum of a "democratic, secular state" (which would fail, as per de Jouvenel's meditation in Part I).

Perhaps the reply to de Jouvenel's pessimistic outlook would then be: there might be a solution, along the general lines of the "Abraham Federation" idea - and it isn't "rational."

Isaac & Ishmael, II

A fascinating post over at the excellent - and regrettably under-updated - Milinda's questions contains extended excerpts from Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). Alan Cook summarizes the book's point-of-departure: "[authors] Crone and Cook scandalized the world of Islamic studies by adopting as their operating thesis that no Islamic sources for the study of the early history of Islam could be trusted, being irretrievably corrupted with apologetics and hagiography, and setting out to construct an alternate history based solely on external (Greek, etc.) sources."

Some extended excerpts (which seem to be direct citations, not paraphrases) from Hagarism ...:

'Two seventh century documents at our disposal are helpful here: a) the Doctrina Iacobi, the earliest testimony of Muhammad and of his “movement” available to us outside Islamic tradition; a Greek anti-Jewish tract which was written in Palestine between 634 and 640 A.D. (Brock 1982:9; Crone-Cook 1977:3), and b) a chronicle supposedly written by Sebeos in 660 A.D. Both of these documents deal with the relationship between the Arabs and Jews in the seventh century.

'The Qur’an implies that Muhammad severed his relationship with the Jews in 624 A.D. (or soon after the Hijra in 622 A.D.), and thus moved the direction of prayer, the Qibla at that time from Jerusalem to Mecca (Sura 2:144, 149-150). The early non-Muslim sources, however, depict a good relationship between the Muslims and Jews at the time of the first conquests (late 620s A.D.), and even later. Yet the Doctrina Iacobi warns of the Jews who mix with the Saracens,’ and the danger to life and limb of falling into the hands of these Jews and Saracens’ (Bonwetsch 1910:88; Cook 1983:75). In fact, this relationship seems to carry right on into the conquest as an early Armenian source mentions that the governor of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the conquest was a Jew (Patkanean 1879:111; Sebeos 1904:103).

'What is significant here is the possibility that Jews and Arabs (Saracens) seem to be allied together during the time of the conquest of Palestine and even for a short time after (Crone-Cook 1977:6).

'If these witnesses are correct than one must ask how it is that the Jews and Saracens (Arabs) are allies as late as 640 A.D., when, according to the Qur’an, Muhammad severed his ties with the Jews as early as 624 A.D., more than 15 years earlier?

'To answer that we need to refer to the earliest connected account of the career of the prophet, that given in an Armenian chronicle from around 660 A.D., which is ascribed by some to Bishop Sebeos (Sebeos 1904:94-96; Crone-Cook 1977:6). The chronicler describes how Muhammad established a community which comprised both Ishmaelites (i.e. Arabs) and Jews, and that their common platform was their common descent from Abraham; the Arabs via Ishmael, and the Jews via Isaac (Sebeos 1904:94-96; Crone-Cook 1977:8; Cook 1983:75). The chronicler believed Muhammad had endowed both communities with a birthright to the Holy Land, while simultaneously providing them with a monotheist genealogy (Crone-Cook 1977:8). This is not without precedent as the idea of an Ishmaelite birthright to the Holy Land was discussed and rejected earlier in the Genesis Rabbah (61:7), in the Babylonian Talmud and in the Book of Jubilees (Crone-Cook 1977:159).

'Here we find a number of non-Muslim documentary sources contradicting the Qur’an, maintaining that there was a good relationship between the Arabs and Jews for at least a further 15 years beyond that which the Qur’an asserts.'

Isaac & Ishmael, I

"...[T]he sovereignty of the people, by nature unlimited, is exceedingly dangerous to minorities. To be sure, it has not turned out so in Western democratic states. This is because Western democracy developed in homogeneous communities,  where people find themselves in very different positions but not in inherently incompatible relationships; that is, they shared the same beliefs, the same customs ... It is convenient for the purposes of constitutional government to have two coherent teams, but this should not lead us to the supposition that within the nation there exist coherent groups, one of which will find itself in a permanent minority. Speaking of 'two nations within one' is a figure of speech, and woe to the nation where it becomes truth.

"These remarks are trite, but they illustrate the dilemma posed when 'two nations' really exist, two communities, distinct in origin, in language, in faith, in customs. In that case, the two communities can be made to live together in amity only under neutral law, under a government which obeys neither but serves both. If representative government is introduced, however, such a government will be representative of one or the other community, not of both. Palestine was for many years a headache to British statesmanship; this territory housed two distinct populations, Arabs and Hebrews; each 'nation' had a 'national will' but there was none common to both. In such a situation, the community weakest in numbers cannot accept, as the Hebrews would not, the institution of popular sovereignty; for the Arabs, who bitterly resented the settling of the land by the Hebrews, even though this was enriching the country and redounding to the benefit of all, would have exerted through their communal will, made sovereign by their predominance in numbers, against the achievements and the very existence of the less numerous community. The problem was capable of no rational solution." [emphasis added]

Bertrand de Jouvenel, "Reflections on Colonialism" in Economics and Good Life: Essays on Political Economy (1955)

Looking for a foothold

In the comments section of a post at Right Reason, author Edward Feser offers some obiter dicta which strike me as being right-on, with respect to the poverty of the current controversy over torture :

"I don't have a worked out view on the torture debate, but I do know this much: one side (the "conservative" one) is too obsessed with purely pragmatic questions about what we might "need to do" in order to stop a terrorist attack when they should be more concened with the question of what justice allows; while the other side (the "liberal" one) is too beholden to vague and poorly thought-out rhetoric about "human dignity" and not concerned enough with careful analysis of the concepts involved or with serious argumentation. The first side is too coldly utilitarian and amoral, the other too muddle-headed and self-righteous."

(Parenthetically, I'll add that I'm not persuaded by Feser's post, defending the propriety of capital punishment - but that's a separate issue).

I'm generally not an enthusiast for "split-the-difference" approaches to contentious matters,and I wouldn't want to be understood as recommending that in this case. But Feser has put his finger on what's bothered me about the two main sides in this debate (which helps to identify, at the least, what to avoid) : taking two prominent antagonists as examples ... disturbingly, the Krauthammer-ian view seems willing, unaccountably, to jettison various strictures on means in order to serve pressing ends; on the other hand, the Sullivan-esque approach, at its worst,is platitudinous and sanctimonious. The goal ought to be, somehow, neither to sacrifice principle to expediency, nor to trumpet formulae and legalisms.

As I intimated in a previous post, I suspect that this question will not admit of a satisfyingly precise resolution, underscoring yet again that ethics is an "inexact science" - which will be particularly discomfiting to the overtly decidophobic.

Fabulist

I'm wondering if I prefer the old myths to the new.