Negotiating with Thugs: Thoughts on Engaging the Taliban

Helena Cobban makes an interesting observation:

So here are Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and SecDef Bob Gates now saying they support-- and are giving active support to-- the Afghan government's initiative to negotiate with the Taliban. But the U.S. government continues to completely oppose any attempt by any parties, Palestinian or other, to reach out and deal with the Hamas government that, lest we forget, was democratically elected in Palestine in January 2006.

A confusing policy, it's true. Why does the Obama administration support negotiations with those who took power by force and are connected to the 9/11 attacks, but reject negotiations with those who were legitimately elected (in January 2006) and have not attacked the US directly?

I've made this argument here before: I strongly believe that channels for discussion should always be left open, not used as a stick to punish opponents. While dialogue may not always lead to a solution, closing the door on dialogue will almost certainly not produce a better result. Just think of how ineffective the Bush administration's efforts were to isolate Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela. By failing to engage with them, Washington had little leverage with which to influence their policies, check their involvement in neighboring countries, discourage their nuclear ambitions, etc. In the case of North Korea and Iran, for example, years of non-engagement left both countries with almost free reign to pursue aggressive nuclear programs. And now look where they are today.

In contrast, consider the effect of our increased engagement with Russia. As I've noted before in the context of Georgia, engagement often brings newfound leverage; it can also create new avenues for cooperation. The US is not in such a unipolar position in the world that the mere assertion of our unwillingness to negotiate is a sufficient stick to discourage certain types of behaviors. Of course, engagement doesn't always work and there are plenty of times in history when negotiations have not served our interests because of how poorly they were conducted (Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961 comes to mind). But that's not an excuse not to talk; negotiations can be done strategically and in a way that bolster, not undermine, our interests.

In the case of the Taliban, channels of dialogue should continue to be opened. That said, I tend to agree with more pessimistic assessments of what these discussions might accomplish. The Taliban is in a position of strength; they have access to the news and know what's happening in Washington. Whereas Obama, day by day, is under increasing pressure to withdraw American forces, the Taliban have the benefit of time. Why should they give concessions to an Afghan government who, in just months from now, will be in a much weaker position?

Max Boot, in an interview published on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the kind of argument that strikes me as highly dangerous: that if we only commit more troops, hit them harder, show the Taliban we're never going to leave, that Taliban leaders will be more likely to cede ground (bad pun, yes) during negotiations with the Kabul government. This is almost certainly wrong. Even if Obama decided to extend our involvement in Afghanistan past July of next year, the Taliban still understand that our occupation cannot last far beyond that. Indeed, his is the exact same kind of argumentation that prolonged the war in Vietnam. When Kissinger took over as National Security Advisor in 1969, he decided that peace offers from the North Vietnamese were not favorable enough because the US was not in a clear position of strength vis-a-vis Hanoi. The subsequent increase in air strikes, typified by the famous Christmas Day Bombing in late 1972, was designed to put the US back in a position of strength. Well, it didn't work. South Vietnam was still overrun and, in the meantime, tens of thousands of US troops had died.

Like the North Vietnamese, the Taliban can just wait us out. And there is every indication that they are doing just that. But while I am overwhelmingly pessimistic that dialogue with the Taliban will accomplish much, there is little reason not to keep diplomatic avenues open. There's always a chance that something will come of them.

____
Advertisement
Consult Bomza for your l1 visa services.

Quick Hit: Currency

While I agree with Atrios that this statement by Geithner might send a mixed message, it's worth noting that the dollar floats, the renminbi doesn't. Unless my understanding is seriously flawed, the Chinese government has been depressing the value of its currency (at the expense of its citizens' living standards) for some time. What the U.S. wants is for that manipulation to stop, or at least to ease up a bit. So this doesn't seem quite like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Quick Hit: Self-Determination

Jeb's post this weekend on Siberian nationalism highlighted the broader problem of ethnic minorities and the practical issues raised by their purported right to secede from existing states. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a pretty good summary of the practical and ethical issues involved. Like the author I tend to lean toward a "remedial right only" view of the question, but the international legal questions involved in implementing such a regime remain murky.

Siberian Self-Determination?

First off, I want to apologize about my MIA status for the last little while. A slew of apps and an unexpected work load has kept me away from this blog. Jumping right back in, the report that grabbed my attention this afternoon is Paul Goble's post on the blooming nationalist aspirations of...the Siberians. Yup, it's true.

Siberian nationalists, encouraged by the response to their call for residents of that enormous region to declare themselves Siberian by nationality in the upcoming Russian Federation census, have now issued an appeal to the broader international community about what they see as the coming of age of the Siberian nation. The 400-word appeal, which was posted online yesterday in both Siberian/Russian and English, argues that the willingness of people there to declare their nationality as Siberian marks “the end of the ripening and forming of Siberian identity” and thus the coming into existence of a Siberian nation...

This story provides another indication about how thorny this issue of ethnic self-determination is becoming. If the right of ethnic groups to self-autonomy is encouraged and legitimatized by international actors (see the recent Kosovo example), then where's it ever to stop? Russia, ethnically diverse as it is, is in a particularly difficult position and one can understand why Moscow has been less than supportive of such movements. If the Siberians want self-determination, then what about all the hundreds of other ethnic groups that live within Russia's borders as well?

Consider the numbers. According to its 2002 census, Russia has over 150 ethnic groups. But we know that these numbers are understated and politicized (as they were historically during the Soviet era), given that there are many more groupings who recognize themselves but remain officially unrecognized by Moscow. One can imagine a scenario in which more and more ethnic groups become disillusioned with the failings of the Russian government, feel marginalized within their own communities, and are inspired by an eloquent leader to assert their own ethnic identities by violently forming autonomous nations of their own. It's a frightening prospect.

As Donald Horowitz famously argued in his piece, The Cracked Foundation of the Right to Secede, "propounding a right to secede... is likely to increase ultimately fruitless secessionist warfare, at the expense of internal efforts at political accommodation and at the cost of increased human suffering." In other words, as long as a principle exists that legitimizes a right of ethnic groups to stake out their own claims to self-determination, there is little end in sight to ethnic conflict. Who, after the Siberians, will be next to demand their own autonomy? I can think of quite a few candidates.

"Strategy" and the E.U.

Judah Grunstein comments that we shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss the E.U. as a "strategic actor" despite how dysfunctional the organization often seems in areas of international affairs. Judah notes that:

...the EU has begun to wake up... to the fact that, even without hard power in the form of force projection, there are ways of wielding the soft power it does possess in a "harder" way. And if it manages to figure out how to do that in a coherent way, there's no reason why the union can't establish itself as a credible strategic actor whose interests, rather than its moral judgment, need to be taken seriously.

It's a good piece and worth a read. I think there's a link here to Yglesias's observation that the definition of what counts as "strategic" probably needs to change to better reflect a 21st century world. For most of history, "strategic" questions have been military questions. Militaries were necessary to protect and sustain mercantalist economic relationships, and were the principal means that highly-militarized early-modern and modern states projected power.

Now, though, questions of climate change, or of combatting piracy, or of global trade regimes, almost certainly merit the label "strategic," at least in some cases. On security questions, meanwhile, Europe has few major threats to worry about. This probably bodes well for the E.U., since a coherent security policy is one of the last elements of sovereignty that the states constituting the union are likely to relinquish. A world in which E.U. power can be projected in non-military, but still very effective and even "hard" ways is a world in which the E.U. will be able to act with comparative unity and coherence.

Again on Self-Awareness

I wasn't expecting a great deal of intellectual nuance when I started to read Rupert Murdoch's recent address to the ADL, so I wasn't overly disappointed by the logical inconsistencies, or by his equating of criticism of Israeli policy with the waves of conventional and terrorist violence against Israel that have taken place over the past half-century. For all his overreaching, though, Murdoch did evince a fairly sophisticated understanding of the subtlety with which anti-semitic sentiment still permeates contemporary discourse. He pointed out the following recent remarks made by EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht:

There is indeed a belief—it’s difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews
or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.

Murdoch goes on to comment:

This minister did not suggest the problem was any specific Israeli policy. The problem, as he defined it, is the nature of the Jews. Adding to the absurdity, this man then responded to his critics this way: Anti-Semitism, he asserted, “has no place in today’s world and is fundamentally against our European values.”

Of course, he has kept his job.

Murdoch is entirely right to point out the poisonous nature of such statements, which project a stubborn unwillingness to reevaluate ideas onto an entire group of people, based just on their religion and ancestry. Clearly, non-Jews are never stubborn and never believe themselves to be right.

This principle doesn't apply solely to anti-semitic discourse, though, and Murdoch oversees a corporate media empire that routinely gives platforms (and in some cases outright support) to some of the worst Islamophobic bigots out there. Most of these people still have their jobs too.

Identity Matters: Recognition of a Jewish State

Michael Oren has an op-ed in the Times today calling for Palestinian recognition of the Jewish character of the Israeli state. Diplomatic boilerplate for the most part, complete with slipshod logic and sophistic rhetorical flourishes, but worth a read if only as an example of decent PR work. This whole issue seems like no more than another roadblock/blame-shifting strategy by Netanyahu, and I wouldn't expect the Palestinian leadership to take it particularly seriously. Like Yglesias, I think that if Israel were serious about negotiating a settlement with the PA it wouldn't keep hunting for new excuses to avoid brass tacks. Legitimacy is one of the few things that Israel actually wants from the Palestinians, and to expect them to make concessions to that effect as a precondition for talks makes little sense.

That said, it's worth pointing out again that, from the perspective of Israeli nationalists, demanding recognition of Israel's Jewish character from Palestinians external to Green Line Israel is really quite stupid. Regardless of what, if any, accord is ever reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, twenty percent of Israeli citizens are of Palestinian ethnicity. Their status in an explicitly Jewish state seems likely to be an issue of serious political contention at some future point, and if I were an Israeli nationalist I wouldn't want to have invited the broader Palestinian community into the debate. It seems clear that more short term considerations are at work at the moment, but in the long run, taking this stance seems like a poor strategic choice.

Institutional Prerogative, Terrorism and the Liberal State

One of the more interesting debates in the blogosphere in recent days has been between Glenn Greenwald (always provocative) and Andrew Sullivan over the legitimacy of the Obama Administration's program to assassinate American citizens abroad without the protections of due process. As Steve Walt notes in his comments, both authors are civil (if spirited) and present their cases in a fairly intellectually honest way. I don't go quite as far as Walt in admitting that my views "shifted back and forth" as I read the Greenwald and Sullivan pieces - at the end of the day the notion that the President of the United States has the legal right to assassinate American citizens without judicial oversight, or indeed any oversight beyond his own judgment, strikes me as anathama to the very idea of constitutional government. If the executive has the right to kill his fellow citizens at will, then I'm at a loss to think of actions that would be legally beyond his authority. That's the very essence of tyrrany.

Still, to say that Sullivan is wrong on balance is not to suggest that he doesn't make some decent points, and their larger implications actually get to far more basic questions of the future of the liberal state, as well as the compatibility of (domestic) liberal governance with assertive/imperialist behavior abroad. While I'd recommend reading the pieces, they boil down to a fundamental difference of opinion over the duties and limits of the executive, the nature of the threat posed by international terrorism, and the modern applicability of the concepts of war and peace.

For Greenwald, the notion that the executive branch, without submitting to the oversight authority of any other legal body, can simply decide that an American citizen is in a state of war with the United States, and then use that status to kill him irrespective of circumstances (he could be firing a Kalashnikov at American soldiers, or he could be eating dinner with his family), must necessarily invalidate any meaningful restriction on executive actions. In theory, under this doctrine, the executive could decide that I'm at war with the United States, then put me on a hit list and have me killed. No other body would be able to prevent this from happening, neither could one even demand the evidence justifying the killing (state secrets). If three hundred years of work circumscribing the power of the state to create a government of laws and not of men can be tossed aside because of a few militants who wish Americans ill, what does that say about the viability of the liberal project?

For Sullivan, Greenwald and his supporters pay far too little attention to the fact that, to quote his post's title, "yes, we are at war." A confluence of modern communications technology, modern kinetic and explosive technology, and the immense destruction that a fairly small group of people can wreak with a combination of the two, must lead to an expansion of the concept of "war" to include fights with stateless terrorists and militants that have both the desire and the capacity to kill Americans in fairly large numbers. To imagine that wars against such groups, the leaders of which frequently cross borders and base their operations in the midst of civilian communities, can be fought without basically abandoning the concept of a "battlefield" as a geographically-limited space is naive, and would unduly hobble state agents in their pursuit of such people.

Liberal states - and here I'm using "liberal" in the expansive sense - have since their inception faced interrelated challenges from two different directions. One has been external - other states, groups or ideological movements have presented alternatives to the liberal model of governance, at times backed with considerable firepower. The other has been internal - those very same threats create political space for existing state institutions to expand their power, escape meaningful oversight and ignore or downplay individual rights. American history provides numerous examples. The quasi-war with France produced the Alien and Sedition acts, later allowed to expire by those uncomfortable with their overreaching. World War I saw a massive expansion in the coercive power of government, a power that was only selectively curtailed during the inter-war years (the first Red Scares of the 1920s didn't help), only to mushroom to new levels of institutional strength during and after World War II (the second wave of Red Scares during the 1950s didn't help either). The restrictions put on executive power during the post-Nixon years have now in large measure been superseded or circumvented (even Nixon didn't assert a right to unilaterally kill American citizens), and since 9/11 the institutional weight of the American military and intelligence apparatus has become absolutely staggering.

Leaving aside for a moment whether the current institutional architecture of the American counter-terrorism apparatus is equal to the task, the larger question is whether, in the context of a modern, highly intrusive, highly coercive state, liberal restrictions on governance are truly sustainable. Institutional leaders nearly always seek to increase the power, resources and independence of their institutions. The Washington Post estimates that there are currently 1,271 government organizations (and at least as many private ones) involved in counter-terrorism and intelligence activities. At the same time, the fact that they're dealing with an extremely amorphous, secretive and ill-understood (if, as Sullivan reminds us, quite real) threat has the potential to create ever-more political space for those institutions to expand their power and shake off the chains of what little oversight they remain subject to. The current attempt by the executive to almost completely decouple himself from legal or political scrutiny in matters of counter-terrorism (again, if the President can kill American citizens at will...) is in many ways the next logical step in a long-term trend.

All of this is extremely worrying, precisely because it doesn't seem to matter that much who is in power. Some Presidents enthusiastically enable the expansion of executive power, others do so with more subtlety, but the overall trend line seems only to move in one direction, even with a professor of Constitutional law sitting in the Oval Office. It makes me genuinely concerned for the future of law-based governance, here or anyplace else.

Jones's Resignation

So apparently General James Jones is resigning as National Security Advisor, to be replaced by Deputy NSA Tom Donilon. I have no significant insight into either person, though I did find amusing the immediate clarification to Politico (who else?) that, no, there's no problem between Donilon and Bob Gates, what ever would have given people that idea? Also, how has it become a rule in Washington that Bob Woodward gets to have (manipulated and selective) inside access to every administration for a couple of books per term? Is there some kind of standing agreement with the executive branch?

Anyway, if the court gossip about the reasons for the supposed Gates-Donilon tensions are true, I suppose it would be some cause for concern (shooting off half-cocked opinions isn't a trait I'd want in an NSA). That said, if the Caucus's initial take is actually representative of Donilon's priorities (a lower footprint in the Middle East, less emphasis on Europe, and more attention to the American security position in Asia), then I suppose I welcome the switch. I also think American over-investment in the Middle East is structurally overdetermined, so I'd expect something like a staff shake-up to help only at the margins, if at all. Still, given the comparatively unimaginative way in which the Obama team has conducted foreign and security policy so far, putting some different ideas at the forefront can't hurt.

Clinton-Biden Swap?

I'm assuming that Bob Woodward's speculation about a Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden role reversal is mostly about Bob Woodward wanting to generate buzz for himself. Possibly it's also a trial baloon being floated by the White House, complete with the requisite denials. I doubt anything will come of it.

For the record, though, I'd be perfectly happy with the switch. I was always a bit puzzled (and not entirely satisfied) with the pick of Hillary Clinton for State, mostly because foreign policy was one of the few areas of substantive disagreement between Clinton and Obama during the campaign, and I liked Obama's approach better. I also like Biden on foreign policy issues - a feeling that was reinforced by press rumors that he opposed the Afghanistan escalation last year (full disclosure, I very briefly interned for Biden while he was in the Senate). All things being equal, then, it's actually a decision I'd support on the merits. Again, I'm assuming this is more flash-in-the-pan rumor than serious possibility, and that were it to happen it would be for domestic electoral reasons, not policy ones, but politics aside it might be a decent idea.

The Military and Renewable Energy

One of the lead Times stories this morning concerns the efforts of the U.S. military - spurred on by extraordinary logistical difficulties posed by the remote and energy-resource-poor battlefields of Afghanistan - to rapidly integrate renewable energy sources into its operations. Assuming the sea change being talked about here has some reasonable relationship with reality, then this is great. As the article notes, the market power of the Pentagon is staggering, and a rapid increase in military demand for renewable energy technologies could spur the kind of investment in such advances that's been so sorely lacking in this country.

Admittedly, this leaves me somewhat ambivalent. As a general rule, I wish it were easier to engage in major public policy initiatives and invest in important research without having to find some military justification for doing so. The kinds of investments in clean energy that will be necessary to transform the American energy economy could probably be more efficiently made in a civilian context, and a country with a healthy political culture would make them on their own merits. That said, to the extent that the Pentagon is able to induce an end run around energy politics that have become caught up in issues of identity as much as economics (real Americans burn fossil fuels dammit), I suppose I'll take the help from whence it's coming.

Update: When I talk about my discomfort with vesting the military with too much power in what ought to be civilian domains, this is why.

Slapstick Politics

Bolivian President Evo Morales apparently kneed an opponent in the groin in retaliation for a rough tackle during a soccer match. No comment necessary.

Seulement les Français...

I'm preparing a much longer post addressing this debate, but I'd just like to point out that only the French would have a color coded terror alert system that separates "reinforced red" from the highest level, "scarlet."

Terrorism is a Banal Threat to Public Safety

Matt Yglesias posted an interesting thought about counter-terrorism resources yesterday:

According to my calculation, if we were to cut America’s $663.8 billion defense budget by 1%, that would free up enough funds to double the budget of the FBI. Doesn’t it seem like that would probably, on net, reduce the risk of Americans dying in a terrorist attack? And in the meantime we might catch some more bank robbers or other banal threats to public safety.

Decent point to be sure. The last sentence, though, gets to a slight pet peeve of mine when it comes to discourse about terrorism (and this isn't directed at Matt, who I suspect is being at least slightly ironic). Terrorism is a banal threat to public safety. Webster defines "banal" as "lacking in originality, freshness or novelty." Certainly some innovations in the tactics and practice of terrorism have appeared over the years. Suicide terrorism, at least in the modern context, is a reasonably recent phenomenon depending on how one defines one's terms, and certainly there are new groups and causes that have become associated with terrorist activity. It's really worth remembering, though, that societies have been dealing with what we would generally recogninze as terrorism since the beginning of the industrial age. David Rapoport has identified four separate "waves" of modern terrorism stretching back to the nineteenth century.

We expect governments to do what they can, within the limits necessary to afford meaningful freedom to their citizens, to protect those in their jurisdiction from harm. To protect citizens against violent harm is obviously a particular imperative, and political violence tends to get state leaders in a particular tizzy, as it represents the most fundamental challenge to a state's monopoly of violence and of political activity. Still, our politics would almost certainly be healthier if people had an easier time putting the threat of terrorism in some reasonable context, recognizing it's but one threat to public health and safety, and by no means the most serious one.

Cyberwarfare and Sir Francis Drake

Yesterday, the Times had a story about how the Stuxnet worm, a piece of malware designed to attack a particular kind of industrial control computer used at Iran's nuclear facilities (in addition to those of a number of other countries) might contain a biblical reference to the book of Esther and the pre-emptive foiling of a Persian plot. Nobody said hackers/intelligence types have no sense of humor.

Putting aside questions of authorship for a moment, though, the article got me thinking about potential historical parallels to the emerging phenomenon of cyber attacks like this. There have been a number of instances in recent years in which international tensions have found expression - intentional or not - in campaigns of electronic disruption and harassment. It seems to me that an interesting parallel can be found in the era of New World piracy/privateering in the 16th and 17th centuries. Both phenomena - peacetime cyber attacks and piracy - give states the ability to, in a sense, poke each other with a stick. They can harass, annoy and disrupt a state's operations and slow its attainment of political or economic goals without providing sufficient strategic imperative for a stronger, more direct response from the target state. As today's article underlines, they also leave murky trails of responsibility, and the risk that a particular cyber attack will be definitively traced to a particular government is quite low, especially if intelligence agencies act through private proxies. As the article points out, murky lines of authority make cyber deterrence quite difficult (also like the 'peacetime' piracy/privateering of an earlier era), and I wouldn't be surprised to see this kind of behavior, lying as it does on the borders of state policy, economic opportunism and criminality, increase sharply in the near future.

This is not to deny that this kind of behavior has drawbacks for its perpetrators. Also like early moder piracy, when privateers recruited during war came back to haunt their erstwhile paymasters in peace, I imagine the danger of "blowback" associated with this kind of activity will increase along with its frequency. Putting state resources into the hands of semi-affiliated actors with their own motives and goals is sure to have unintended consequences. It should also be remembered that piracy did on occasion lead to more serious escalations of hostilities (there was that whole Spanish Armada thing), and that an unstable deterrence regime may make state responses to particularly serious cyber threats unpredictable.

Something to keep a weather eye on.

Message to Muslims

Another gem by Kristof.

Food for Thought

As someone with a personal interest in the future of American academia, I just thought I'd point out Steve Walt's post on Harvard's handling of the Marty Peretz issue. It's well worth a read. For some context, read it next to the following graf from Sullivan today:

Some want to claim that equating the torture techniques used by the Bush administration with those used by the Nazis is unforgivable hyperbole. Sadly, it isn't. It's indisputable fact. And one man responsible for it, Stanley McChrystal, was rewarded with promotion and now teaches at Yale. And another man who twisted the law to make it happen, John Yoo, teaches at Berkeley.

I'm honestly torn as to where to draw the line, in the academic context, beyond which a person's past professional behavior ought to disqualify them from either honors or appointments. It seems as though there at least ought to be one, though, and that it ought not bend too flexibly to the pressures of power and status.

On Divestment and Headlines

Jon Haber has an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor today with the attention-grabbing headline "Campaigns to hurt Israeli economy really hurt Middle East Peace," in which he simultaneously argues that campaigns in the West to divest from Israel have been inconsequential failures, and that they endanger the future of the peace process. He basically argues that most of the material victories of these movements have been small, fleeting or fabricated, and that the divestment movement gets much more media attention than it does political and financial support. He then almost perfunctorily tacks on a few sentences that purport to demonstrate why such campaigns are still harmful:

...keep in mind that the goal of boycott and divestment campaigners is to put Israel in the dock and to give legitimacy to their accusations against Israel by claiming well-known and respected organizations as their supporters.

Because of the potential propaganda payoff of even a temporary success, BDS campaigns are likely to continue this year, regardless of the needless pain that always accompanies dragging the Middle East conflict into a civic institution. In fact, the BDS campaigns may contribute to extending and exacerbating conflict, even during a period when the parties themselves are negotiating peace.

First off, what is this "needless pain" that "always accompanies dragging the Middle East conflict into a civic institution"? Into how many civic institutions has this conflict been dragged, and who precisely has been hurt by it? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm genuinely not sure what Haber is talking about. Second, to the extent that BDS campaigns have any value (I look at them with some ambivalence, and am particularly skeptical of those relating to academia), it is in the look to the future that they provide Israeli leaders.

Such campaigns, and the sentiments they express, remind Israel that there is a limit, in the long term, to the patience of the international community with regard to the occupation. Over the past sixty years Israel has, with considerable success, developed political, strategic and economic relationships with the West that have served its interests and assisted in it becoming a prosperous and reasonably secure society. Right or wrong, though, the mounting impatience of Western populations and even some Western leaders with the moral and strategic hazards of the Israeli-Palestinian status quo will become ever more difficult for Israel to smooth over. Divestment campaigns, even weak, skeletal forms, serve as a reminder of that.

I get the sense from Haber's article, which seeks to dismiss comparisons between Israel and South Africa as "propaganda" - an accurate charge to be sure, but even propaganda can contain truth - that he understands precisely the power of the BDS narrative, and seeks to undermine it by both dismissing its importance and deriding it as dangerous. Unless one believes that Israel is entirely blameless for the dismal course of the multi-decade peace process, though, it seems that the specter raised by the BDS movement - of Israel isolated - might provide precisely the kind of background pressure needed to induce compromise. After all, if Israeli leaders feel peace can always be put off, why would the make the sacrifices necessary to achieve it?

Quick Hit: Joyner on France, the Roma and the EU

James Joyner does a pretty good job laying out the issues at stake in the brewing confrontation between France and the EU over France's expulsion of hundreds of Roma from its territory. Money graf:

My guess is that both sides find a face-saving way to back way from confrontation over what is at the end of the day a relatively minor issue. But if they don't, we'll soon be either much closer to a powerful Europe or take several steps back towards it being a mere economic cooperative.

This gets back to a couple of posts I've written about the possibility of "Marbury v. Madison" moment(s) for EU institutions, in which confrontations over particular issues clarify previously ambiguous roles and structures of power. This could well end up being one of those.

Peretz's "Apology"

I was considering posting about this back when Peretz's original post went up and started to cause controversy, but the issue was addressed pretty eloquently by several sources with far higher readership, so I thought I'd let bigoted magazine editors lie and move on to other issues. Yesterday, in response to some of the criticism, Peretz issued what he deems to be an apology. I'll say this for Peretz: he's willing to stick to his guns. His reductionist, bigoted guns.

For those who missed the original dust-up, Peretz's particularly outlandish statements (and that's saying something with his record) were the following two sentences from this September 4 post:

Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims... I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Peretz's apology addresses the second bit about the denial of First Amendment rights. He says the statement "genuinely embarrasses" him, adding that he does "not think that any group or class of persons in the United States should be denied the protections of the First Amendment, not now, not ever." For what it's worth, I take this statement as fairly genuine, though why such deeply-held respect for the First Amendment (from a magazine editor no less) neither precluded his initial impulse to click "publish" nor gave him impetus to apologize until after Kristof's piece came out is puzzling to me. That said, as a blogger who knows how easy it is to let emotionally-driven half-formed thoughts turn into intemperate rhetoric that can't be un-published, I'll give Peretz the benefit of the doubt.

He goes on, though, to defend his statement that "Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims." Indeed, he bills it as "a statement of fact, not value." He seems to think that Kristof agrees, noting that in a follow-up post, Kristof wrote that "I agree with him that Muslims haven’t said nearly enough about those Muslims who kill other Muslims — in Kurdish areas, in Iraq, in Western Sahara, in Sudan, and so on." Um, if Peretz honestly thinks those two statements are equivalent, then he's a terrible writer and shouldn't go anywhere near a keyboard. He might have read the next sentence from Kristof's post, which notes that "at some point criticisms morph into racist stereotypes and slurs, and the suggestion that Muslims don’t value human life and maybe don’t deserve First Amendment protections is just that, a slur."

Peretz didn't say, "I wish I saw stronger condemnation of internecine Muslim violence from prominent Muslim leaders." He didn't say, "there is violence in many parts of the Muslim world that I wish I saw more Muslims aggressively addressing." He said "Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims." Slightly re-phrased: 'Muslim life isn't valuable, especially to other Muslims.' His evidence, apparently, is that there are a lot of wars going on in Muslim-majority societies and the 1.5 billion Muslims of the world aren't engaging in a massive, coordinated movement to stop them.

Let me close with a small thought experiment. In living memory, societies made up largely of Western Christians engaged in a half-decade of mechanized killing on a scale without historical parallel. Very few people on any side of the conflict objected. Is it legitimate to conclude that "Western life is cheap, most notably to other Westerners?" If not, then we must recognize Peretz's statement for what it is: reductionist bigotry.