Sure, stopped clocks and all that. But the New Republic is a clock with no hour hand and it’s second hand runs backwards. Now that Captain 29% is deadweight, Beinart feels free to say, “gee, maybe I shouldn’t have supported him,” in the hopes of salvaging some credibility. And he’s counting on the Kevin Drums of the world to throw him a bone.

Drum: "Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."

(In this scene, Kevin Drum admires the huge... tracts of land in the political center)

I think Beinart aspires to be the new generation's Bob Shrum. Not a particularly good choice of role model, I'd say.

Sure, welcome the returned lambs to the fold. But they don't get to wear the bell any more, okay?

Clearly you don't understand the rules. Antiwar hippies are wrong, no matter how many times they're right. Well-connected professional pundits are right, no matter how many times they're wrong.

It doesn't matter whether you're right, it matters who you are.

and you know, for a certain value of "we" that's a tragically accurate statement.

I was with you right up until this point. You know, you're kind of making a thing out of being rude. I'm a laid-back, easygoing kind of person (HA!), but it's really getting annoying. Whyn't you cut it out, huh?

Pundits, on the other hand, seem to be the courtiers of a democracy, without even the basic raison d'etre of the courtesan.

I don't think so. Or rather, I don't think those are the most illuminating terms to use.

There are first-order questions of policy (invade or don't invade, negotiate or don't negotiate, etc.). And then there are second-order questions about those first-order questions (*who* is advancing this view? what other views have they advanced? what is their win/loss record over time? etc.)

I think Drum is making a reasonable point that Beinart has come around to the lefty consensus on the first-order questions.

I think you are also making a reasonable point: that the fact that Beinart has taken so long to come around, and that he did so much damage before coming around, and that he refuses to acknowledge how badly he screwed up before, should always be held against him on the second-order questions.

"It’s about a real question of political power: whose opinion matters? A good word for this kind of disagreement is substantive".

Yeah, I agree that the question of whose opinion matters is a substantive one. I just don't think that Drum was denying what you are asserting.

Drum was denying that there was *first-order* disagreement about policies. That is consistent with agreeing that there is second-order disagreement (which is also substantive) about whose opinions on first-order issues are taken to matter.

And you can go back to hating on Drum for any number of other reasons, if you like. Oh, and hating on Beinart, who deserves it far more than Drum.

Umm, assignment?

-----

Tad Brennan: And you can go back to hating on Drum for any number of other reasons, if you like. Oh, and hating on Beinart, who deserves it far more than Drum.

For me, the problem occurs when opinion leaders (e.g. Kevin Drum, whom I still read regularly) are willing to let published knuckleheads like Beinart slide, rather than letting them take their licks and suffer a reduction in credibility.

Basically, Beinart was wrong. OK. Now he realizes he was wrong. That's OK, too. So we should now afford him as much credibility as in the past, regardless of his (rather critical) mistake? Not OK. It's that kind of thinking that will replace Basra, Fallujah and Baghdad in the news with Qom, Bandar-e-Abbas and Teheran. It's that all-is-forgiven thing that's Drum's problem here.

Aside from this bit of mushiness, I still read Drum's blog, and look forward to the occasional catblogging, which is alas less frequent than in his Calpundit days.

The same goes for the question of withdrawal. If he's truly serious, he should now support immediate withdrawal.

Even if he passes those tests however, he still doesn't have the credibility to be a Democratic spokesperson, as basically he's been howling with the wolves until the pressure got too big and is now all faux-contrite. He can turn in any minute.

As for Kevin Drum, he has to be soft on Beinart, as he was quite a big war supporter back in the days as well, after getting snookered by Kenneth Pollack... To be fair to Kevin however, in his case I'm sure it was a honest mistake and not a calculated tactic to stay in favour with the Washington elites.

My main point was: the substantive/rhetorical distinction doesn't help here--doesn't help to see what Drum meant, or where and about what Drum and PNH are disagreeing.

What Drum meant was: Beinart is no longer disagreeing on *first-order* issues about how we should conduct our international policy.

Having said that, Drum could perfectly well turn around and agree with PNH on the *second-order* issue of Beinart's credibility.

Issues of credbility--of who gets listened to and whose opinions shape policy--are clearly and obviously momentous and substantive. PNH is 100% right about that. I'm just not sure (once again) that Drum was denying it, either as a general rule or in the case of Beinart. (In the context of Drum's post, "substantive" pretty clearly means "related to the substance of foreign policy". In the context of PNH's post, it bears a broader meaning. Both are perfectly legitimate. But the difference in scope is at the core of any apparent disagreement.)

My final throw-away line was not meant to say "ooh you're just bad old Drum-haters and Beinart-haters so shame on you." Far from it. I myself am deeply fed up with Beinart and his wing. And I get fed up with Drum's excessive mildness when the health of our Republic is in deep danger.

Instead, my point was just that my introduction of the first-order/second-order distinction was not trying to take any stand on whether B. or D. or PNH were good or bad or right or wrong. Just trying to shed some light on the debate.

If the issue that I'm missing is that the people who led us into this catastrophe should not be listened to again for a long time, then, believe me, it is a point I took long ago.

Because that would require at least half a brain. Or, that is, at least half a brain that isn't already medicated into numbness by trash TV and video games. The bread and circus of modern times.

I think Drum is interested in winning the next election (2006 or 2008, take your pick), which he optimistically believes will be a healthy step away from "the war, the deficit, and the assault on the Constitution." He doesn't believe that kicking people who have come to oppose those things is conducive to winning that election.

Drum also thinks terror is a real issue, and to wave away (as Atrios does) the fact that some have come to believe terror either doesn't exist or is no danger, rather than a matter of "George Bush's approach," seems rather disingenuous to me.

Y'know, I was thinking about knocking down your straw man, here, but then I realized that no, terror is NOT a danger, not to the United States or to Western civilization as we know it. It's a danger to a goodly number of people, but Timothy McVeigh could come by and blow up a building every ten years and the Republic would handle it just fine.

The Republican response to terror, now... spying on our own people? Jailing people forever without trial or recourse of law? Calling for the deaths of anyone who utters so much as a peep of dissent? This is dangerous.

Terror is a bee sting. The Patriot Act is anaphylaxis.

What I may feel about Beinert's (or Drum's) credibility going forward is not terribly relevant in the real world. Fact is, they have vast audiences, and will continue to have vast audiences regardless of what kind of harsh judgement somebody like me could ever call down upon them.

When it comes to hiring national security advisors for a Democratic White House in 2009, I certainly hope that track records are taken into account. Until then, we need all the allies we can get. We need to think in the present rather than worry about past heresies.

My rule of political battles is: If you thoroughly like and trust everybody who's on your side -- that means you've lost.

Whether or not Beinert agrees with me is irrelevant. It is the "higher-order" problem - the fact that Beinert is a windsock, a person who would rather appear wise than seek wisdom - that is important. This is the problem that Kevin Drum seems to be asking us to ignore.

Why should we insist that Beinert be discredited, dress him in sackcloth and ashes, and investigate and prosecute the people he was cheering on a few years ago? Because the alternative has been tried. We've seen this movie before. Those of you who were old enough in 1973 have seen it two or three times. Bush is not the first Republican president to break the law, but he is the first to do so in public, without an apology. Many of his partners in crime are veterans of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Why are these folks still in a position to do harm? Because the Beinerts of the world won the day in 1974, and in 1994, and no fingers were pointed, and nobody was investigated, and nobody was to blame.

Winning the next election is important. But fixing the higher-order problem is even more important. Because these guys will be back.

" ***** is so awful, I wish we had _Bush_ back ... "

he needs ot go back to Driver's Ed. Maybe Kevin, too.

This is true, but it's more true in reverse: "supporting" Peter Beinert may make him like you, and may even make him trust you, but it isn't going to move him closer to your position. He will pat you on the head and keep writing what he always writes.

Beinert is not a politician. If he were, the calculus would be different: for them, "support" means "vote for" or "give money to", rather than "agree with". Ever since Hillary Clinton called my generation a bunch of lazy SOBs:

"They don't know what work is," she claimed. "They think work is a four-letter word."

... I've been convinced that I will never agree with her, fathead that she is, and I'm planning to work hard on behalf of a different Democrat. But if (God help us) the day arrives when Mrs. Clinton is all that stands between us and another Republican president, I will give money to her, and I will vote for her. Because she has power. Power that could be used to stop Republicans. And there's a remote chance that, in exchange for votes like mine, she will use that power.

Beinert deserves no such consideration. Why should I "support" him, impotent as he is? Because he knows enough to come in out of the rain?

It's not enough to say "I was wrong on these points of facts." The thing we're looking for when it comes to apologies is for the institutionalized demonizing and marginalizing of the people who were right in both facts and methods.

I wore out my throat years ago (and got called "alarmist" for my trouble.) Part of the problem, politically, is no amount of yelling is going to change the minds of the public; they've heard too much already from the crazies. The public will, in mass, only jump when what they perceive a credible alternative to current politics. Sometimes the only way to win such an argument is to be quiet, and let the failings of the policies be seen, as indeed is happening. (I do not say this is a happy thing, or a "good" thing, whatever that is. I would prefer that there had been no war.) We wait our moment, both in the next elections, and in the longer history. I hope that more of the truly powerful who are not our enemies see this.

...perhaps Al Gore does.

Now, see, this is why I keep coming here. That's a thing of beauty, that is.

FWIW, I like Kevin Drum, and always have, despite his inane early support of the war. And FWIW I agree that his point in the post in question was the first-order policy agreement and the mildly surprising fact that CW has come around to embrace reality again.

But trust the people who were right? Patrick's right -- we're just a bunch of misty-eyed hippies. My God, against war and for the Constitution and shit, what a bunch of mealy-mouthed ivory-towered soft-hearted appeasing wusses we are!

I don't think he denies that terrorism is a serious issue. My take on his position is, he believes that irrespective of how serious it is Bush's approach is emphatically NOT solving the problem of terrorism; it's exascerbating it.

As opposed to talkies and novels, the bread and circus of earlier times? Or shakespeare's plays or minstrels, the bread and circus of even earlier times?

Y'know, I was thinking about knocking down your straw man, here, [...]

The Republican response to terror, now... [...] Calling for the deaths of anyone who utters so much as a peep of dissent? This is dangerous.

A thing of beauty, that is. Michael Roberts has it right.

To me, the question is not so much whether terror per se is an issue, but rather what causes terror is serving and what outcomes those causes are promoting. Michael Falcon-Gates, above, is half-right that the nation could theoretically absorb a large number of terror attacks without it being an existential threat to either the nation or its institutions. I'm worried about the relatively near future in which terror organizations might have access to nuclear or biological weapons. Even a nuke or two wouldn't necessarily be an existential threat to the US (though it might be to Israel), but that is hardly an argument that such weapons aren't a problem and an issue.

Meanwhile, your nation loses more people to highway accidents in any four week period than it has lost to terrorist incidents between 1945 and 2006.

Your nation probably lost more people to Hurricane Katrina than it has lost to terrorist incidents. But I see no sign of the War on Bad Weather (or should I say, Global Warming?) being a major election issue.

This isn't to say that terrorism should be ignored, but basically it's a policing problem and it's amenable to policing solutions, and if your government's foreign policy apparatus wasn't in the habit of whacking on hornet's nests with a blunt stick it would be containable without all this nonsense about suspending your constitutional rights and implementing a Heimatsicherheitpolizei and internal passports to keep you all safe (except when duly spirited away in the night and mist).

Alas, the whacking-on-hornets-nests shtick tends to go with being (a) a hegemonic imperial power and (b) xenophobic (or at least xeno-bloody-ignorant) to boot. But a good start on dealing with the terrorism would be to realize that about 90% of it is reactive, and to stop doing those things that cause the violent response. This isn't rocket science; but unfortunately the US electoral/constitutional system isn't set up with foreign relations in mind, so every four to eight years a new bunch of ignoramuses get a chance to reinvent Diplomatic Cock-Up 1.0.

Sigh. (I'll shut up now, I think that's enough cynicism for one afternoon.)

Anybody who doesn’t think that terrorism isn’t a problem hasn’t grasped that this spate of terrorism is different than the IRA, Bloody Thursday, Red Brigade, Weathermen style of terrorist. Those who think we should sell our rights wholesale for protection are the worst traitors to freedom I can think of. What the heck are we fighting for if it isn’t those rights, our way of life and governance? How can we fight for extending democracy and freedom if we so willing relinquish our freedoms? At best that makes us (as a country) hypocrites.

Saying that every decade our society can absorb a Timothy McVeigh is an argument for acceptable losses that I can’t agree with. As someone who was faced with the prospect of ordering young boys and girls in uniform to die, I could accept that charge, but was never comfortable with it (fortunately I was never put in that position). But combat is not normal life.

Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the Pan-Islamists, of which Al Qada was the standard bearer but is now a small part of. This experiment on installing Democracy to initiate a “domino effect” was and is wishful thinking on the part of our current political leadership. I am a registered Democrat, I agree with the war in Afghanistan and really wish we would have finished it instead of bungling it handing the Taliban a chance to regroup and Al Qada the continuance of a haven. Iraq was the personal grudge of the Bush Family, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.

It argues that the general solution to terrorist organizations already exists and has a long history in law: treat them as pirates.

However serious terrorism is, Bush's handling of the problem has been worse than useless. Nor does the argument "There haven't been any al Qaeda attacks on American soil since 9/11 -- it must be working!" impress me. It was eight years between al Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center and the second.

nice stuff there. If there were encouragement for a solution, that is the best I've seen so far. Though he doesn't go into Bush's actions, the model of terrorists as pirates makes it pretty clear that Dubya is only making things worse.

Only behind closed doors, with the water running. Because if things get so bad that Dubya looks good, saying something like that will be sufficient to get you shipped to Gitmo.

I agree completely that any nuclear weapons in terrorist hands in the near future (pace stuff stolen in the former USSR) is likely to originated with a state sponsor, either a sock puppet or a nuclear Walmart (as NK sometimes has been for other weapons). I don't think that makes it any less of a threat; there is no reliable technology (pace Tom Clancy) for determining where a particular chunk of uranium or plutonium originated. There may be at some point: research is certainly being done. Biological WMDs don't need a state sponsor. Think, for example, of Aum Shinrikyo.

Loss of life to automobiles or hurricanes is perceived by most people as qualitatively different from losses to terrorism or war. We could obviously prevent every loss of life from either with (in)appropriately draconian bans on automobiles or building near the coastline. Clearly a similar evaluation is going on by those who think Bush's policies go too far for too little return.

In my opinion the idea that dealing with terrorists is a police-like problem is too optimistic. When terror is state-sponsored (as in fact many old-days pirates were) it has to be countered by other states, as piracy often was.

Obviously one can argue whether Bush's approach to terror is the right one, but his approach's wrongness doesn't necessarily mean other "whack 'em with a stick" approaches can't possibly work.

(And with that, lunch hour ended and the meeting began again.)

It basically doesn't provide for non-state actors with aspirations towards legitimacy trying to effect change in a state they've been expelled from.

It also makes certain assumptions about the nature of state-dom that are culturally biased towards the western model of national identity and that fit very badly in other parts of the world.

If a diagnosis of "terrorism" can't tell the difference between the French Resistance in 1940-44 -- who, you'll remember, were referred to as terrorists by the Nazis, and treated accordingly -- and Al Qaida, then it's not splitting hairs finely enough for my liking.

But it's certainly true that nobody was walking about Paris with a pistol in their pocket and a Letter of Marque in their wallet.

There's still a problem for your other examples, while the article never seems to attempt to consider the post-WW2 development of the concept of lawful combatants less formally organised than armies.

I think it is possible to make a distinction between an essentially Iraqi organisation which, as well as fighting in Iraq, makes attacks in the UK or the USA, and one which makes attacks in uninvolved countries. Not recognising that there are neutral countries is, I think, a sign of stepping over a boundary.

(OK, so unrestricted submarine warfare looks to be a step over that boundary too, but I'm thinking more of a place that isn't a battleground.)

Charlie, I can't speak for the other two examples you gave, but I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Provisional IRA seemed to spend much of their efforts in the Republic selling drugs, robbing banks and kidnapping foreign businessmen. 'Pirates' seems like a very accurate description of them. And they had strong ties to Libya/Islamic terrorists and the Columbian drug cartels too.

Pape assembled a huge database of information on suicide terrorists since 1980, and then searched through it looking for common factors. He found that in 95% of cases, the terrorism was a response to foreign occupation by a democratic state with a differing religion.

if Pape is right, then the Bush administration/PNAC strategy of keeping US bases in the Middle East is the worst way of fighting terrorism. (Or at least suicide terrorism; I don't know how well Pape's model applies to the non-suicidal kind.)

KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like that why should anyone listen to you now?

PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that. Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general--most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were--and I think Al Gore is in this category--deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people.

Playing devil's advocate: any movement that operates in pursuit of goals that lie outwith the law attracts outlaws, mercenaries, and common criminals. But to insist that such people define the movement is to rule out any hope of a negotiated settlement.

I'm all in favour of de-escallation: split the politically motivated party off from the the bandits, give the political types enough of what they want to shut down the armed struggle, then arrest the lawless left-overs who don't get the message. I'm not at all sure that designating any group as "an enemy of all humankind" is a good way to go about this, especially as the folks who get to pin the tail on the donkey are quite possibly responsible for having torched off the insurrection in the first place (see Avram's note, for example).

For any complex problem, there is almost always at least one solution that is attractive, simple, and liable to make things worse.

I was right about all three.

Yeah, me too. Kuwait, yes. Bosnia/Kosovo yes. Iraq, no. Do we get extra credit for saying yes to Afghanistan?

Trouble is, we don't have the sort of megaphone the Beinarts of the world respect. We're just internet people.

After a series of draconian laws passed by George I of England effectively banished pirates from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean corsairs emerged as pre-eminent maritime mercenaries in the employ of any European state wishing to harass another. This situation proved disastrous. The corsairs refused to curtail their activities after each war's conclusion, and the states realized that they had created an uncontrollable force

And thinking, "hey, didn't we give Bin Laden stinger missiles when he was our "privateer" fighting to Soviets in Afghanistan back in the heady days of Reagan?"

To me, the key to the end of piracy, according to that article, was when the states acknowledged that they used pirates as their sock-puppets.

I wonder if there will ever come a day when we realize that having the CIA fund stateless organizations to fight our dirty wars while we keep our hands "clean" just gets us a dirty war and dirty hands. The rise in teh use of corporate military units is not especially promising. If anything, it would seem to indicate we are on the upward slope of the bell curve, heading towards more stateless warriors, rather than the downward side.

Xopher, here's a picture of Beinart dressed as a zombie.

Iraq II: Chemical weapons and nerve gas aren't 'weapons of mass distruction', you idiots, they are terror weapons and battlefield denial weapons, and you can cook some of them in your kitchen and the rest in a basic laboratory. Anthrax isn't notably better. Why is anyone taking these morons on TV seriously? The only real WMD are nukes, and they require far too much industrial capacity to be hidden from the inspectors. As if a country that had been under sanctions for a decade was likely to be able to manage it, anyway. Jesus, my country is filled with dunces, and they vote.

Trouble is, using sock-puppet militias to disguise your actions offers the illusion of deniable power, power without accountability. Which is both addictive and corrupting. It took the European great powers close to half a century to kick the habit, didn't it? That's not a comforting thought right now, especially as maintaining the threat serves other political purposes.

(Brain fade.)

AS used Serin, a hard to make, non WMD poison that has a shelf life on par with a nice piece of salmon. The only reason it killed anyone was because it was released underground durring rush hour, and then, it only killed 12.

In my opinion the idea that dealing with terrorists is a police-like problem is too optimistic. When terror is state-sponsored (as in fact many old-days pirates were) it has to be countered by other states, as piracy often was.

DaveL, you are undermining your own argument. Piracy was virtually wiped out in the West Indies by the British simply by advancing a policing policy. Sure, some pirates were state-sponsored but they were few and had careers that lasted rarely more than a few years at best before their own governments hanged them. Sponsored pirates, like sponsored terrorists are politically useful pawns and not all that common. It’s the freelancers that are the problem.

Freelance terrorism, like freelance piracy could be controlled (but never wiped out since it will always appeal as a tactic to the desperate) with a sensible policy that incorporated cooperation with foreign governments and a concentrated effort to go after the handful of figureheads, like Zarqawi and Bin Laden.

I know the RAF trained to keep airbases operating after a chemical attack, and it was a NATO-wide training requirement. The USA was saying that they'd see such an attack as reason to use nuclear weapons. One hopes this would have been in some proportion--"tactical" warheads against airbases rather than launching the ICBMs--but it could easily have gone out of control.

Biological weapons are inherently able to go out of control, and classing them with nuclear I can accept. But using one as justification for use of the other still seems a dangerous policy. It's as if you executed Tim McVeigh by putting him in a government building in the middle of some city and setting it on fire.

Re Aum Shunrikyo and Sarin is the best argument for not worrying about chem (I'll address Bio in a moment) I can think of. The Tokyo subway was about as perfect a place for a Sarin attack as one could want (enclosed, no sunlight, no weather, no wind) and the casualties; as a percentage of people present, were negligible.

Bio is even worse. Smallpox can be treated after you are exposed. With all the anthrax the US Postal Service was exposed to there were what, three deaths and a couple of dozen people who contracted it?

All in all, terrorism is a pain in the ass, but it's an existential threat. Tearing up the Constitution to protect us from something which (all on one horrific moment) killed 1/10th the number of people we lose in car crashea in a year, and cost less than Katrina, that's a real threat.

As they say: sadly, no. During the Cold War, the US had thousands of tons of chemical munitions in Europe and Japan. They're now largely destroyed.

The WMD category was in part a political cover for a planned NATO first use of nuclear weapons. The USSR repeatedly pledged no first use, but then they didn't think they needed to - using conventional and chemical weapons, they were confident they could defeat a NATO offensive with a large armoured counterattack to the Rhine. Talking about WMD meant that NATO could pledge "no first use of WMD" in the certain knowledge that the USSR would use chemicals first anyway, giving them cover for chemical and/or tactical nuclear retaliation.

Sorry to interrupt, but I have a quick vocabulary question: I've been hearing the phrase "existential threat" quite a bit lately. I thought an existential threat was something that threatens your existence. In other words, terrorism is a material threat, but not an existential threat, because it can never threaten the existence of the United States as we know it. But threats to the constitution are existential, because they can change the nature of the U.S. to something we no longer recognize as "us."

If that's not what "existential threat" means, then what does it mean?

You are, I believe,correct in every particular, except in your failure to read the invisible "not" in Terry's comment.

Bryan, when I was a little kid my Dad would get drunk and bellicose and read Eliot's The Wasteland to me. What kind of threat is that?

I'd talk.

Not soon, it seems; it seems that a diplomat who protested the funding of Somali warlords for "antiterrorism" got transferred involuntarily late last week. Today's Newsweek suggests that the Somalis are uniting behind Islamists because the warlords, who were already disliked, are now seen as stooges of foreigners.