Thank you for making this point. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
Respectfully,
Justin Logan
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Thank you for making this point. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
Respectfully,
Justin Logan
After his first major interview with an Arab TV network, it is clear President Obama is striking a decidedly different tone in talking about terrorism. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, legal policy analyst David H. Rittgers discusses the new direction Obama will take in the fight against terrorism.
“This is a serious departure from some of the message that the Bush Administration put forth,” says Rittgers, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan as an officer in the Army. “Using ‘you are with us or against us’ is appropriate in certain circumstances, but as a blanket approach that is not the message we need to be sending.”
National Journal’s Sydney Freedberg asks a group of distinguished foreign policy types, “Is the two-state solution dead?” Pat Lang offers some sensible remarks:
It is expected ritual to say that the Palestinians and Israelis want peace. What is never specified as part of that incantation is the description of just what sort of peace each group wants. Here it is… What they still want (on both sides) is to win in the contest for that sad, beautiful, stony little strip of land and for their own group to live in peace and possession of the country.
There is no external power preventing the sides from making peace. If the Israelis and Palestinians wanted peace more than they want to win, they would make peace. They do not make peace because there is not enough good will toward the “other” among them to allow peace to exist. No. I no longer really believe that the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine want peace for other than their own side in the bloody mess that has persisted there throughout their lives.
Someone has said on this blog that the United States lacks the ability to “make peace” between these two peoples. That is profoundly true. It is part of our national illusion that we Americans think of the rest of the world as though we are the guardians of distant, unruly and childish folk who act in strange, inexplicable and unreasonable ways. We tend to believe that their quarrels are errors in information or simply bad behavior of the kind seen in school yards. This mistake on our part is persistent.…
Then, however, I’d humbly submit that Lang goes astray in arguing that while neither side appears ready to make the sacrifices required for a workable peace deal, the problem will ultimately “require an external formulation of a peace settlement when they ARE ready.”
Why am I skeptical? Because, as Lang admits, what would be required for this to work is “a consensus of the interested parties across the Middle Eastern, Islamic and Western regions, a consensus that does not shrink from domestic political pressure, that does not fear to apply the inherent leverage provided by huge annual budgetary contributions to both sides and that values human life and happiness more than it does momentary advantage.” If both sides were ready for peace, why would pulling budgetary levers be required? Alternatively, it seems terribly unlikely that pulling budgetary levers could make either side amenable enough to genuine concessions to make peace work. And aside from the extreme unlikelihood of the blessed convergence described above happening in our lifetimes, I’m reminded of George Kennan’s concern in the 1970s about the responsibilities that come with imposing a settlement:
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Cato Leads Opposition to Fiscal Stimulus
In reaction to statements from Obama administration officials who say “all economists agree” that the only way to fight the economic recession is to go on a massive government spending spree, the Cato Institute took out a full page ad in the nation’s largest newspapers that showed that those words were not true. Signed by more than 200 economists, including Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, the statement was published this week in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other publications.
On the day the ad ran in The New York Times, Cato executive vice president David Boaz added more names to the list of economists who are skeptical of the spending bill.
Commenting on the principles behind the stimulus, Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White and fellow economist David C. Rose discuss why we can’t spend our way out of this mess:
You can’t solve an excessive spending problem by spending more. We are making the crisis worse.
In The Wall Street Journal, Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds examines the numbers and discovers that each government job created will cost taxpayers a staggering $646,214 per hire.
The Justice Department received an extension from the Supreme Court in the pending appeal of Ali Saleh Mohamed Kahlah al-Marri, an exchange student who allegedly arrived in the United States on September 10th, 2001, as an Al Qaeda sleeper agent. He is the only person presently domestically detained as an enemy combatant, a practice I oppose. The Obama administration is taking the extra time to reconsider the government’s position.
The Fourth Circuit previously held that al-Marri can continue to be detained as an enemy combatant. The unclassified version of the evidence against him is available in the Rapp Declaration. I highly recommend you read the whole thing. Al-Marri is (probably) a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda. We should have tried him.
The fight against Al Qaeda is part military, part law enforcement. Whichever approach we use, this is a struggle where the population is not incidental to the battlefield, the population is the battlefield. Insurgencies and terrorism are 10% tactical, 90% propaganda. By making a legal martyr out of al-Marri, we give him a propaganda victory he has not earned.
The FBI did exactly what we want domestic terrorism investigators to do: it gathered evidence to produce an indictment. The government should have followed through with prosecution instead of moving him to a military brig. We prosecute domestic terrorists for criminal actions, and al-Marri should be treated no differently.
Former FBI special agent and terrorism expert Mike German infiltrated two domestic terror organizations and brought charges against their members. As German says in his excellent book, Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, prosecuting terrorists for fraud charges should not give us pause.
Read the rest of this post →As an FBI agent my counterterrorism investigations never resulted in anyone being charged with terrorism. The terrorists I arrested were charged with specific criminal offenses; possessing and transferring illegal firearms and explosive devices, illegally using firearms and destructive devices, conspiring to use illegal firearms and destructive devices, and conspiring to violate civil rights. Terrorists use these crimes to accomplish their political goals. Once I had evidence of their illegal activities, I could bring charges against them. Certainly the motive behind their conduct came into play to prove they had the requisite criminal intent, but the laws I enforced had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorists’ ideology.
Arguing against a delay of the transition to digital television, Rep. Joe Barton (R‑TX) argued that spectrum destined for public safety uses would be held up. Well and good. But he did so this way:
Osama bin Laden isn’t fictional, and he isn’t waiting. That should be reason enough to go full speed ahead with the DTV transition.
People around the world read and discuss what U.S. leaders say about terrorists. By invoking the specter of bin Laden, Barton has given free publicity to a leading terrorist among people who might join him or any group loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda. If they want to be a part of something powerful, Representative Barton has signaled to them what they should do.
The digital television transition should go forward, but exalting terrorists is not the way to argue for that.
A special thanks to all bloggers who wrote about Cato’s letter showing that there is not a unanimous agreement among economists about President Obama’s stimulus package.
Although we can’t name everyone who linked to the page, some of the bloggers include Michelle Malkin, Don Boudreaux, Damon W. Root, Alex Singleton, Cord Blomquist, Doug Mataconis, Jason Pye, Jason Talley, Andy Roth, Gerrit Lansing, J.D. Tuccille, Nathan Benefield, Frank Ahrens, Rodger Thomas, Amber Gunn, Colin Grabow, Russ Johnson, Michael Patterson, Robert Huberty, David Adams and Mitch Berg.
Also blogging about Cato:
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