Yes and No
Glenn Greenwald (note: now I’m doing it!) has what is generally an excellent item about the real enthusiasm for attacks on civilians, and the transformation of the Republican Party into “from Falwell/Robertson social conservativsm obsessed with abortion and gay rights into a macro version of the Little Green Footballs comment section, obsessed instead with, literally excited by, detaining and torturing people, maximizing government domestic surveillance, starting still new wars in the Middle East and being far more brutal with the current ones.” There’s one thing he doesn’t quite get around to saying and one thing where he misses the point.
First, he’s right to leave aside the specific tactic of “suicide bombing” to focus on the question of attacks against civilians. Suicide bombing is simply a way to kill people that guarantees the perpetrator himself won’t survive. The suicide bomber can target military personnel, government officials, supply convoys or just plain folks. So can any other combatant, legal or illegal, uniformed or not. Suicide attacks give us the heebie-jeebies for reasons separate from the morality of the target: suicide attacks freak us out because they’re very hard to defend against, they are sneaky by design, and they betoken a level of commitment on the part of the attacker that unsettles us back in the hindbrain. Since it scares us, we prefer to pretend that one person killing himself to blow up a pizza place is somehow more abominable than a thousand people safely firebombing every pizza place in a city from the air, as well as every house and garage and grocery store and restaurant and factory.
9% of Muslims refused to answer the “Are suicide attacks against civilians ever justified to defend Islam.” If I were a Muslim, I might join the 9% on the “Wow, you’ve really constructed that question to carefully apply to what a few people who look like me do, haven’t you?” grounds. The real ethical question is, “Are deliberate attacks against civilians ever acceptable?” Greenwald has the data on just where you can find enthusiasm for the idea that they are.
Second, in a passage about militarism, he writes
It is certainly the case that there is an orthodoxy of militarism to which major political figures in both parties feel compelled to pay homage notwithstanding the fact that such orthodoxies are opposed by large numbers of Americans (Chris Floyd regularly documents this dynamic as well as anyone). And any questioning of those orthodoxies single-handedly removes one from the mainstream (see e.g., Ron Paul and Mike Gravel). But what are emerging as the defining principles of the Republican Party go far beyond a mere belief that the U.S. should maintain global military hegemony in the Middle East and around the world.
but this isn’t quite right. Rather, the Republican Party is just definitively embracing the moral costs of maintaining global military hegemony. From the 1930s to the 1990s, paleoconservative critics and their counterparts on the left worried that militarism and interventionism were inevitably corrupting of republican (small-r) principles, that there was no nice way to rule the world, that the United States would have to choose between hegemony and liberty. All the Republican Party base and its candidates are doing is finally making a choice that, thanks to the bipartisan orthodoxy, always loomed.
Comment by bob mcmanus —
May 25, 2007 @ 9:28 am
Having has Chris Floyd recommended to me yesterday by Arthur Silber, I guess I need to add him to my blogroll.
Comment by Hesiod —
May 25, 2007 @ 9:31 am
Why noboidy uses the word “fascism” in polite company when describing the current GOP orthodoxy is beyond me.
Is it because they oppose a higher marginal income tax rate, or something?
Comment by Dave W. —
May 25, 2007 @ 10:27 am
Mr. Henley said it all and nothing else needs to be said!
Great post!
2d best one on here I have come across right after the Mona one with the soldier pic.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 25, 2007 @ 10:27 am
Well, who’s “nobody?” Lew Rockwell wrote his “Red State Fascism” essay in 2004. I linked it contemporaneously, and I was hardly the only person to do so. Hell, I explained why the anti-Dixie Chicks jihad was a fascist movement back in 2003. Seems to me that Bush critics among people concerned with civil liberties have been using the word for some time now.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 25, 2007 @ 12:29 pm
Extremely good post–this is the kind of stuff that is so transparently missing from the op ed pages and the political talk shows (to the extent that I can stand to look at them, anyway). Though I guess Glenn being published at Salon puts him on the edge of the MSM.
Comment by Mona —
May 25, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
I still don’t call the Republicans “fascists,” for a number of reasons, including that I don’t think they are entirely there yet; what they are now is pure authoritarians, and perhaps proto-fascist. We, however, still live in a democratic republic, have freee speech rights, and in the last election tossed the GOP jackases out. Promiscuously tossing the fascist word around, well, I want to be careful that we don’t end up both robbing that word of serious content, and also sounding like raving extremists.
In the meantime, the MSM is finding it *impossible* to ignore Greenwald and other high profle non-authoritarian bloggers, because among the intelligent and politically involved, we are making such bloggers (and media voices like Olbermann’s) too popular to permit their points to go unaddressed.
Dismissing them all as “left-wing,”
“radicals” and all the rest of the mindless boogeyman epithets that have worked before, is working less and less well for the authoritarians, because fact is, the American public doesn’t want endless war.
But by Greewald’s accurate assessment, to some extent I guess I now am a left-winger of sorts, under current political typology. Certainly I have nothing in common with a GOP dominated by the LGF comments section writ large.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 25, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
I thought it was because, unless I missed a change in our military, modern militaries don’t generally carpet-bomb cities or target civilians in bombings, while many suicide bombers literally walk or drive up to crowds of civilians and quite intentionally try to kill them.
Sure, it’s reasonable to say bombing a military base in the middle of nowhere is less bad than bombing a target that can or will result in nearby civilian deaths, but both seem pretty clearly different than aiming purely at those you know to be civilians, whether you’re dropping a bomb or setting off the one you’re wearing.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 25, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
On second thought and with the after-lunch coffee suddenly kicking in, I think I’ve just missed the point.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 25, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
The Israelis targeted civilians in Lebanon and the US mostly cheered them on. It’s not clear to what extent our military does or does not ever target civilians in Iraq. They’re not going around wiping out entire towns and villages with carpet bombing, but we don’t have much info about collateral damage or the circumstances under which it happens, AFAIK. They have tortured civilians.
Also, to the extent that we do avoid killing civilians it’d be nice to think it’s for moral reasons, but I doubt that’s the full story. We avoid it because it’s perceived as counterproductive. When we do kill civilians or have allies that kill them, we lie about it, which is probably one reason why it’s so hard to obtain reliable statistics on civilian casualties in Iraq. Radical Islamists brag about their attacks, so I suppose at least we’re paying tribute to virtue.
Finally, the post is about the willingness of Americans to kill civilians, not whether that’s still standard operating procedure for the military.
Comment by Spencer —
May 25, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
While we are on the subject of war and mayhem, what about Mike Gravel’s United States Armed Forces Withdrawal from Iraq Act
Democratic Presidential candidate Mike Gravel has a plan that will end the war in Iraq by September 2007 with all US troops home by Christmas. This plan recognizes that under the United States Constitution the power of the Congress is superior to the power of the Presidency.
Mike’s plan is to pass a law in the Congress making the war in Iraq illegal. Failure to comply with the law would be punishable by 5 years in jail without possibility of parole. Understand that the President of the United States is required to follow the law just as is any other American citizen.
Of course, once the law is passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, it is likely that President Bush will veto it. Mike Gravel’s plan would call for the Senate and House Democratic leadership, Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to bring the bill to a vote day after day, 7 days a week, 30 minutes per day, forcing the media spotlight to shine on those Senators and Congressman who are prolonging the war until pressure from their constituents produces a two-thirds majority sufficient to override the Presidential veto. (If the law is filibustered in the Senate initially, the same procedure would apply.)
What is important to understand is that Mike served two terms in the US Senate fighting for “unpopular” causes and winning against the odds. Mike is a legislative strategist and you will see that his plan for ending the war will work, if adopted. Most other options for ending the war fall into the “do the right thing” category or involve timelines that extend far off into the future. Rather than wait, let’s force our elected representatives to listen to the will of the American people by introducing Mike Gravel’s draft legislation, the United States Armed Forces Withdrawal from Iraq Act, and end this destructive and unnecessary war now.
Comment by Dave W. —
May 25, 2007 @ 3:16 pm
Finally, the post is about the willingness of Americans to kill civilians, not whether that’s still standard operating procedure for the military.
True, but that would make a nice topic, too. Do we even know? Can we?
I think it was in Japan and sometimes Viet Nam. We get less info than we used to.
Comment by Wild Pegasus —
May 25, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
Since it scares us, we prefer to pretend that one person killing himself to blow up a pizza place is somehow more abominable than a thousand people safely firebombing every pizza place in a city from the air, as well as every house and garage and grocery store and restaurant and factory.
Also, few if any Americans can see themselves being attacked by carpet-bombing. Many can foresee themselves being caught in a suicide bomber attack in a public place.
- Josh
Comment by Barry —
May 25, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
Josh, that’s probably it. Eric, IIRC the first survey of death rates published in the Lancet gave US aerial bombardment as reponsible for the majority of the increased death rates. As an anecdotal add-on, I read a story by a reporter who was embedded with a USAF unit, last year. He said that that unit had flown 25 sorties in the day that he was with them, and that the AF personnel said that there were several other units nearby, with similar sortie rates. That’d be an easy 100 sorties per day (plus more from Kuwait, I’d guess).
A sortie is one plane flying one mission. The bombload could range from 500lbs to tons. Given a 25% ‘oops’ rate (here, meaning that the intel was bad, and some random civilians got hit), that’d be an easy 25 bombings of random civilians per day, with each bombload ranging roughly from ‘a house’ to ‘a block’.
Given that, the effect would be pretty similar to suicide bombings in Israel, but with a *far* higher death rate.
Comment by Jon H —
May 25, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
“Suicide attacks give us the heebie-jeebies for reasons separate from the morality of the target: suicide attacks freak us out because they’re very hard to defend against,”
The suicide thing seems like a red herring. Realistically, for the jihadi the fatal result would be the same whether armed with a bomb, rifle, pistol, shuriken, or steak knife. That being the case, it makes perfect (if warped) sense to go for the weapon that causes the most damage.
The reason it freaks us out is that modern explosives allow an individual to do SO much damage.
I don’t think anyone is that much concerned about suicide throwing star squads. Or rifle squads, for that matter.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 25, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
I think Jim basically gets it right when he says:
Suicide attacks give us the heebie-jeebies for reasons separate from the morality of the target: suicide attacks freak us out because they’re very hard to defend against, they are sneaky by design, and they betoken a level of commitment on the part of the attacker that unsettles us back in the hindbrain.
Jon H, I have to disagree on suicide rifle squads: I’m pretty sure that if jihadists with rifles went out in public and shot at civilians until killed by police the public would be scared as all hell. Look at the reaction to school shootings. Now imagine that the guy at VA Tech was a Muslim armed with a rifle, which looks scarier than a handgun.
If something like that happened, we’d probably pass laws that would make the Patriot Act look tame.
Comment by Bob Weber —
May 25, 2007 @ 11:50 pm
Jim, another solid hit for you. To a civilian, getting killed by a suicide bomber is indeed terrifying, but so is getting bombed by an F-16