So listening to the radio out here in Berkeley one constantly hears righteous denunciations of Haliburtuon, their sub-sub-sub contractors Blackwater and the role of private companies in the Iraq occupation. Now there may be valid reasons to think that private military contractors are harmful but I’ve yet to hear anyone even really try. Instead the fact that private companies are performing military duties is usually cited as if it was an obvious harm itself. Even more puzzlingly one often hears a condemnation of the military contractors on the grounds that the Bush administration wouldn’t be able to support such a massive military presence in Iraq without them.

Trying to be charitable one might try and interpret these individuals as arguing that private military contractors are bad because the Iraq war is bad and they make it easier for the administration to extend the war. While this is a reasonable argument it is incompatible with the usual aim of those bringing up the role of private contractors in Iraq: to marshal further reasons to condemn the war. Moreover, it is in direct conflict with the accepted wisdom of where Bush went wrong in Iraq — entering the conflict without enough troops to stabilize the country. Also most demands for a prompt withdrawal are justified by the price being paid by our honorable young servicemen in Iraq (they certainly don’t present evidence that withdrawal would best serve the Iraqis). Presumably if your objection to the continuing occupation is that the costs to the US military is to high even if it might be somewhat beneficial to the Iraqis for us to stay longer you should welcome private contractors as they lighten the burden that our soldiers must bear¹.

Even more strangely much of the opposition to military contractors seems to focus on the fact that private companies are making a profit on the war. Part of this seems to result from the bizarre belief that since every contractor and subcontractor involved is making a profit somehow the American public must be getting a bad deal. This is tantamount to arguing that the federal and state governments should always build bridges themselves rather than contracting it out to private companies because those companies will be making a profit. At least those who note that the rate companies like Blackwater charge to supply troops are much higher than the wages of US troops are only being foolish not falling into simpleminded anti-profit bias. The military only hires companies like Blackwater when they actually need them and that flexibility demands a premium². All that really matters is whether the US army could hire more soldiers to take over these jobs at a cheaper rate than what companies like Haliburton and Blackwater charge and unless we plan on staying in Iraq for many many years this is highly unlikely³.

The worry that these companies now have a profit interest in the war is slightly more reasonable but seems inconsistently applied. When we use private air carriers to fly our troops over to staging areas or send wounded soldiers to private hospitals for treatment no one seems to worry about the profit interests of these companies. Moreover, the political influence of small mercenary companies like Blackwater is minuscule compared to that of companies like Lockhead and TWA and their interest isn’t continuing war but in increased funding for new military technology which the war in Iraq has curtailed.

Ultimately this whole issue perfectly illustrates how intellectually bankrupt the whole debate over the war really is. Those supporting a continued occupation seem more concerned with rhetoric about supporting the troops and not making their sacrifice meaningless (i.e. the sunk cost fallacy) rather than any evidence that the occupation is likely to pay off. Those demanding a pullout seem more interested in throwing together a bunch of emotional ploys (isn’t it horrible that we hire mercenaries) than in making a coherent argument. The war in Iraq is a perfect example of the sort of failure of public opinion “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” postulates. People take their positions because they have an emotional reaction to the war (support troops/repulsed by war) and it is more appealing to group up with others who have similar emotional reactions rather than actually consider the issues and potentially be forced to support something you find distasteful. Of course when people realize their decisions will really have massive effects on millions of lives (instead of just being something to bitch about over lunch) they tend to get a lot more serious which is why the congress (thankfully) can’t really bring itself to shut down the occupation.

Of course this isn’t to say their aren’t real concerns about the use of mercenaries but thankfully someone else has already written a nice post explaining why these are often overblown.

I’m sitting here listening to general Petraeus give his report to congress and while the senate does better than the public discourse they still seem to have fallen into this simplistic ‘are we winning or losing’ narrative. Obviously it’s the senate’s job to discern the prospects for success in Iraq and pull the plug if they determine that American troops are doing more harm than good in Iraq but that’s not the same thing as saying we are likely to lose. If we pull out of Iraq precipitously the country could explode into a full fledged genocidal civil war.¹ How likely does success have to be for us to try to prevent another holocaust? If there was a 10% chance of saving the citizens of Boston from death at the hands of a rapacious bloodthirsty militia would we refuse to send in the army because it might cause a few thousand casualties?

At least the people who believe that we did the Iraqis a favor by invading have a bit of an excuse². They can say, “we did you a favor now it’s up to you,” but the rest of us can take no such comfort. We invaded Iraq and fucked up their country and it’s now our responsibility to do the best by the Iraqi people. It’s downright disgusting to hear senators telling Petraeus that Iraq is distracting from the war on terror, that it’s creating terrorists, or that it’s negatively impacting our military readiness. Is that going to be what we tell the millions of Iraqi mothers, and brothers and children when their family members are killed in a civil war. “Sorry, we needed to go fight terror. You should have managed your country better after we fucked it up.” Sure it’s frustrating to see so little progress and disheartening to think that we might have to stay there for ten years but neither of these justify risking millions of lives in a potential genocide. Saying that “the American people won’t tolerate continued lack of progress,” isn’t an excuse to let millions die.

Sure one or two Senators made the claim that our troops create more violence than they deter. That’s an important theory that ought to be seriously examined but you’ll excuse me if I don’t believe it is a justified belief when I only hear it from hardcore anti-war Senators in the middle of rants about how our military belongs at home not fighting wars for incompetent administrations. Quite obviously these politicians and their supporters have first decided to oppose the war and demand our troops come home and then looked for a justification for that view. The war might have been a horrible mistake but it’s a mistake we made and now we need to figure out the best way to mitigate the harm we caused.

As disappointed as I am in many of our Senators it’s groups like moveon.org that truly disgust me. I used to like them as an energetic democratic fund raising group and even considered donating money to them during Kerry’s candidacy but running across this advertisement today made me sick. Not only does this ad trivialize the lives of millions of Iraqis when it criticizes Petraeus for not saying, “what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops.” but it also blatantly misrepresents the source documents it uses to indict Petraeus. The GAO report merely says exactly what Petraeus himself has said, that many of the political objectives the Al-Maliki government set for itself were not met. The National Intelligence Estimate also backs up Petraeus when it says that there has been “some security progress but political reconciliation elusive.” Finally the report by the Jones Commission argues that while the Iraqi police have proven ineffective the army is making progress but isn’t yet ready to take over independent operations. All statements compatible with the view that we need to stay in Iraq longer but none of them about the really important issue of what will happen when we leave. Jesus christ you are supposed to be a liberal organization where is your concern for the Iraqis? Don’t you think they deserve more than a ‘yah yah they’ll be better off without us’? Like say seriously considering whether keeping the soldiers in Iraq would save lives?

Ironically despite the constant hand wringing by many liberals about “the American Empire” it is their assault on a general called back from a war to answer primarily domestic concerns that reminds me of the worst aspects of the Roman empire. Any old country can invade and occupy another country but only an empire can so blithely play domestic politics with millions of foreign lives. This behavior makes me ashamed to be an American and a liberal. When the Bush administration placed the lives of the Iraqis second to their ideological agenda it was bad enough but for the liberals to follow them down the rabbit hole and not even seriously consider the welfare of the Iraqis is downright evil. These are real people just as worthy of moral consideration as the ones who live in Indiana no matter what milestones their government has failed to meet. Let’s step back and put aside our ideological preferences and figure out what is most likely to fix Iraq. I genuinely want to know what policy will most likely bring success in Iraq but no one else seems interested³

Each and every one of you out there has a real moral obligation to the Iraqi people not to demand a pullout (or a continued occupation) without good reason to believe it is in the Iraqi people’s best interest. If we pull out because people like you demanded it without seriously considering the consequences the blood will be on your hands.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PEOPLE IF WE MAKE THE WRONG CHOICE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU MIGHT DIE, TENS OF THOUSANDS MAY BE RAPED AND TORTURED, AND MANY MORE FORCED TO FLEE AND IT’S ALL OUR FAULT. Isn’t that more important than political ideology and domestic considerations? Would it really be that hard to admit that you aren’t sure what the best policy in this complicated situation is? If you were in congress you wouldn’t bet their lives on a gut feeling without looking at the evidence so don’t demand that your congressmen bet their lives on your uninformed feeling.

This is a quesiton that has been bothering me for awhile so you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve already said this but why can’t we keep peace in Iraq like Saddam did?. Now obviously the answer seems to be that we choose not to do so, probably if we tortured innocent people, rewarded corrupt officials who repressed their people for us and otherwise behaved like dictators do all over the world we could oppress the Iraqi people just like Saddam managed to do. The question I really want to ask is whether it’s reasonable for us to refuse to behave like Saddam.

In particular many liberal’s beliefs about Iraq consist of the following two views:

• Invading Iraq was a horrible mistake that made the average Iraqi much worse off than they were under Saddam, often with the clear implication that a civil war or some other sort of massive bloodshed is inevitable.
• If we could do something for the Iraqis we should but we can’t so we should just leave now.

I realize this doesn’t summarize all liberal’s beliefs about the war (certainly not mine). Some people believe (unreasonably IMO) that things will get much better once we leave and there might be some who even believe the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam but I get the sense that the two views I summarized represent at least a significant percentage of mainstream liberals.

Don’t they entail that we should stay in Iraq but just clamp down just like Saddam did? For those of you who doubt we could do this all we would need to do is pick some local strongman and use our troops as muscle to help him establish himself as Saddam 2. Heck, maybe we could even keep our hands clean by just giving him implicit support and training his forces.

So why shouldn’t we kill a few innocent people now to save many more from a potential civil war? Or was the initial invasion actually a good thing?

So they just did a little segment on NPR (well Chicago public radio) about the difficulty democrats are having rounding up votes for their supplemental on the war. Amazingly they are having difficulty getting the votes for it both ways (see nytimes article). Some democrats are uncomfortable with the ‘mandated’ withdrawal date of August 2008 while others object to funding what they view as an unjust war. Whatever you think about the withdrawal questions at least one of these two groups are behaving idioticly or wagering lives (Iraqi and US) for personal political gain.

It can’t be the case that scuttling this bill will both result in a bill that mandates and earlier withdrawal and one that doesn’t tie the president’s or his commanders’ hands. A failed bill would result in a shit to one side or the other so one side must be acting against their stated interest in refusing to vote for the bill. Now it’s logically possible that both sides reasonably believe that if this bill fails their side will gain the upper hand but it’s not really plausible. There are a massive number of republicans who are unwilling to support this bill because of the mandated time table and all but the most far left democrats are unwilling to play chicken with the president and leave the troops in Iraq without any funding. So it seems pretty obvious what the effects of not passing this bill would be, passing a replacement bill with no mandate for withdrawal. But even if I’m wrong in my judgement it strains credibility to believe that the far left democrats and the conservative democrats have such different information that they can both reasonably believe it is to their benefit to scuttle this legislation.

Sure it could be that this is just a public position to win votes and if it came down to the wire Kucinich and his anti-war band would vote yes but I think they are totally serious about refusing to fund ‘an unjust war.’ In short it appears they are putting simplistic emotions (and maybe electoral gain) above serious analysis of what is likely to save lives and help the Iraqi people. Maybe I’m wrong but I get the strong sense that they would vote against this supplemental even if they were guaranteed the effect would be to pass a no strings attached bill. Yet I am positive they would not vote to pass a no strings attached bill knowing that the alternative would be this bill.

I realize that average people who don’t have the time, inclination, or information to really think through these issues might think in these sort of simplistic emotional arguments (it’s an unjust war don’t vote to fund it) but I’m ashamed that congressmen would as well. I guess I knew better but it is still annoying and disappointing.

First though I thought i would pass along this amusing short video commenting on Chomsky. I don’t have enough background to comment on this particular dispute but it mostly matches my opinion of Chomsky, namely that he is either deeply delusional or intellectually deceptive in his political claims (perhaps both). Meaning that every speech or remark I have heard Chomsky make on political matters has been very rhetorically stirring but logically defective in ways that Chomsky should be smart enough to notice.

Anyway the point of this post is really to make a request. Can anyone link me to substantive arguments, preferably by experts, that the Iraq troop surge is likely to make matters worse in Iraq? Almost everything I see opposing the troop surge either does so for totally irrational reasons (they are against the Iraq war and this is part of it) or out of blatant American selfishness (it will cause more US troops to die). This seems like a very important issue and I would like to have an informed opinion but I really don’t know where to turn for information.

Note I’m not interested in arguments that just say the troop surge is unlikely to work. I know that and everyone knows that. I’m interested in the question of whether the troop surge increases the chances of avoiding a civil war in Iraq by say at least 2%. I’m also not interested in whether another tactic (negotiating with the Iranians) would have been preferable but whether a troop surge is more likely to work than doing what we are doing now or withdrawing.

If anyone has some good sources I would be much appreciated.

I know I’ve complained about this before but how can so many people be too stupid to understand the distinction between the wisdom of past decisions and what the current situation requires. Four years ago many moderates couldn’t distinguish between the wisdom of giving the president the power to wage war on Iraq and the disaster of actually going to war. Now it is the liberals who can’t seem to distinguish the question of whether we should withdraw from Iraq from whether the invasion was a good idea in the first place. I hear this error all the time but this morning their was a litany of callers to talk of the nation [edit: maybe KQED forum] who kept angrily demanding that the troops be withdrawn on the grounds that it was an unjust and wrong war. I understand that people are influence by their political opinions but can’t they at least pretend to have reasonable arguments?

I’ve already talked about how this attitude seems to infect our politicians but even the arguments I hear from the more intellectual figures supporting the non-binding resolution against the troop surge are flawed. Invariably they wave the conclusions of the Baker commission or other expert who recommends some sort of political solution, e.g., negotiating with Iran, in combination with a staged withdrawal. But whatever the merits of such a plan we know the Bush administration won’t even consider it. If the democrats want to pass a resolution criticizing the administration for not following the Baker commission that’s fine but that isn’t what is on the table. Instead the democrats are criticizing the administration for deviating from the status qua with their troop surge yet I’ve heard them offer no good arguments that the troop surge is worse than the status qua.

Frankly I still don’t know enough to be sure of the right choice but what I’ve heard makes me believe the troop surge is actually a good idea. I have no doubt the Baker commission is better informed than I but my sense is that they answered the question of what was in the best interests of the US not what was best for the world/people. Still maybe that would be the best strategy for the Iraqi people as well but it isn’t on the table and of the plausible options a troop surge seems more likely to stave off civil war than doing nothing and probably more than just getting up and leaving without a political solution. It is unlikely to work but even a small chance of preventing off the ethnic and religious war about to engulf Iraq is worth tens of thousands of lives.

UPDATE: To be clear while I’m skeptical of the withdraw now and things will get better theory it is at least reasonable. What isn’t reasonable is to believe is that a surge is less likely to work than staying the course and continuing to do what we are doing now. My complaint is the democrats are chiding Bush for choosing to improve his strategy not for refusing to follow an even better one.

So is Bush’s plan for a troop surge a good idea? Frankly I don’t have the slightest clue. We certainly have a moral responsibility, not to mention a self-interested stake, to do what we can to help Iraq avoid civil war. But whether or not a troop surge is a worthwhile gamble that might head off civil war or a useless waste of American lives so Bush can avoid admitting defeat is a question that requires far more expertise to answer than I or any lay person possesses.

Even if the best course forward is obscured it’s easy to see that the current discussion about Bush’s troop surge is horribly broken. I’m horrified to hear all the liberal activists whose violent opposition for the troop surge apparently springs from nothing more than their opposition to the war. Yes, obviously the Iraq war was a mistake but it can’t be unmade by half-assing our occupation. The only question worth asking now is how can we minimize the harm of our mistake and thinking you can ignore the situation in Iraq just because you opposed the invasion is downright idiotic.

Ironically the activists on the left appear to be making the same mistake that got the neo-conservatives into Iraq in the first place. The neo-conservatives were so focused on what could have been done if we had gone all the way to Baghdad in the first gulf war that they didn’t bother to really consider what had changed (loss of Iraqi trust, loss of international support). Similarly the anti-war liberals seem to be doing their best to ignore that we did invade and our troops are now what’s holding the country together.

The rhetorical responses of our politicians seem to be just as bad. Rather than giving compelling reasons why a surge won’t work or supporting plausible alternatives most of the visible democrats seem to be trying to fight the Iraq war several years too late. It’s probably good politics for democrats to burnish up their anti-war credentials but it doesn’t make for a compelling policy debate. In short I’m disappointed to see the democrats join the republicans in (at least apparently) fighting old battles with their position on the war rather than choosing them to respond to the current situation.

I wanted to make it clear that if we had a uniform legal and procedural framework to try dictators for crimes against humanity I would probably support trying Saddam under that framework. Failing to try Saddam under such a framework would not be unfair, we know he is guilty, but the precedential value of following the rules might help avoid future unfairness. The problem is that no such legal framework exists. In fact I was wrong in assuming that the ICJ will ever be able to take jurisdiction over these sort of incidents, they only have jurisdiction over states.

For instance the war crimes in the Bosnian conflict are being prosecuted by an ad hoc court. Interestingly despite being set up in the Hague with international jurists Milosevic was not allowed to cross examine General Clark about the NATO involvement. In any case the point is no matter what a new court with new rules was necessary to try Saddam for his crimes. Thus there is no getting around the fact that Saddam was going to be tried using procedures handpicked for this situation.

But what is it that makes the procedural rules of a court fair or unfair? As I argued previously the rules of a court are fair when they guarantee that trials are likely to result in the correct outcome. Given that Saddam and his compatriots are the only ones who will be tried using these procedures they are fair just if they give the right result for Saddam and his companions. So the rules for Saddam’s trial could have just explicitly stated he was guilty and the trial would have been no less fair.

In other words once you are handpicking the procedure of a trial for a specific defendant the only sense in which they are fair or not is whether they give the right result for that individual.

So it’s interesting. I’ve been hearing about all the iraqi’s dying for a couple years now and while I felt bad when I heard individual stories I never really registered the badness on an emotional level. Now though I find out they are killing scientists and that really upsets me.

At some deep level I think I only register scientist types as really human. Seeing as I do math that is interpreted broadly (don’t worry Sharon analytic philosophers count too) and they don’t really have to have published papers or anything, just have a certain analytic approach to understanding the world.

Scarily if I had to make a choice between saving the couple hundred scientists and saving all the hundreds of thousands of normal people I don’t know what I would pick.

–

As an aside I’m very torn about how to select the gender of pronouns. Since I don’t think something this trivial has much of an effect I used to be happy to just always use the male as this is what common usage required. However, at least in some contexts always using the male is starting to communicate certain anti-feminist sympathies. On the other hand I’m not usually willing to use the female pronouns (or weird genderless ones) because to most readers it associates the author with a certain fairly extreme and I think silly overly PC point of view, i.e., many people will take you to be one of those people who thinks using equally gendered pronouns is super important.

Really I think the whole thing just grates against my anti-conformist sentiments. Either way I choose it seems like I’m jumping on some political bandwagon. I’m perfectly happy in annoying everyone and using ‘it’ for god but there isn’t such a nice third choice in other contexts.

In philosophical contexts this is getting to be less of an issue as the use of the feminine pronoun is getting so standard that no particular sympathy is read into using it. However, for more general contexts there doesn’t seem to be any good answer. At the moment since I can’t think of anyone I know who would disapprove of me using the feminine pronoun I will continue to use the male but this isn’t very satisfying.

So it’s blatantly obvious at this point that Bush was deadset on invading Iraq and acted with extreme negligence in the lead up to the war in addition to misleading the public on several points. Yet there is still every reason to believe that Bush believed there were WMD in Iraq, the Iraq war would be good for US security, good for the Iraqi people and even aid in the war on terror. He was negligent because he decided (not necessarily consciously) to believe these things first and then sent his administration looking only for evidence that supported these views (whether or not this type of attitude is encouraged by experience with evangelical Christianity is an interesting question).

Yet despite how disturbing this explanation is if you think about it apparently it just isn’t enough for anti-war liberals. For some reason whenever the topic of the war comes up all sorts of liberals pop out of the woodwork to offer some crazy theory about how Bush only did it for oil, for political gain, or just to appease the Zionists. A scary number of people even suggest the government faked 9/11 to give a pretext for war (wouldn’t they have made the trail trace back to Iraq?). Even the more moderate anti-war progressives seem to need to add some major malevolent intent to the story I told above.

This crazy anti-war extremism isn’t just relegated to interpretation of the past. The major anti-war protest that just happened (or will happen) in Chicago is demanding we withdraw our troops immediately. As if somehow the fact that we shouldn’t have invaded in the first place justifies further fucking the Iraqis over by suddenly withdrawing and letting them plunge into civil war (a gradual withdrawal at this point is a reasonable position but that is a different matter). That’s like suggesting that if you just shot your friend with an arrow and he is lying on the ground in pain you should pull it out because you shouldn’t have shot him even if you know that withdrawing it will cause him more harm.

So lots of liberals keep trying to figure out why the democrats aren’t more vocal anti-war critics or why no one is holding the Bush admin to account. I think these crazy anti-war wackos are the reason. The visibility of this group and the lack of a vocal moderates critical of the war means anyone who goes too far in criticizing the war risks being identified with this crazy fringe. It also means that as a matter of political calculus there is no reason to be any more critical of the war. The crazy fringe will still see you as being a pussy for not going far enough and you will lose some support from those who still aren’t sure about the war.

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise to me that people come to their conclusions on things like wars emotionally and that issues of strong emotion will tend to polarize people but hearing these crazy anti-war liberals on the radio just pisses me off so much. Why does no one seem to believe that Bush was criminally negligent (metaphorically) and mislead the public but that there is nothing more malevolent than that going on. Maybe it’s just because I live in Berkeley that I see this but the failure of Kerry’s explanation of his Iraq war vote suggests that the general populace is simply unable to do more than emote about the war.