On the Errors of Peter Beinart: Liberating Iraq: I admire Peter Beinart's willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he's right to say that we can't be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be -- a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force -- there's another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:
It's not just that we aren't the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it's that war is not the instrument he thought it was.
You can see this pretty clearly when he refers to the "surreal period" when "the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought."... [I]t would have been worthwhile for Beinart to pay more attention than he seems to have paid to the wars we sponsored in Central America, which were neither easy nor beneficial to the people who lived in the countries where our proxies fought. Thinking about the plight of a farmer who is forced at gunpoint to serve as a guide by one side and then shot as a collaborator by another when all he ever wanted was to work his fields in peace, or of villages burned to the ground after their inhabitants had been massacred, would have been a useful corrective to the idea that wars are easy and painless.
Noting that war is, in fact, hell, and that when it seems easy, that's generally due to some combination of very hard work, massive military superiority, and sheer blind luck, is an easy lesson to draw -- and, frankly, the fact that Beinart had to learn it the hard way, after an error of this magnitude, is as good an example as any I can think of of why I think there's something badly wrong with the writers of editorials and columns in the mainstream media.
But there's another, deeper problem....
Back in 1983, I sat in on a conference on women and social change.... [T]here was a recurring disagreement about the role of violence in fighting deeply unjust regimes.... [T]he South Africans... "We need to win our freedom as quickly as possible," they seemed to say. "We realize that it would be preferable to win that freedom in the best possible way. If we could win it just as quickly through non-violent means, we would surely do so. But you would not ask us to wait if you really understood what it is like to live in slavery." By contrast, many of the arguments made by the Indians turned on the effects that achieving self-government through violence had on one's own people. "Don't do this, they seemed to be saying: once you win your freedom, you will find that you and your people have grown accustomed to settling disputes by force and to demonizing your opponents. Think now about how to use the struggle you are waging to teach yourselves how to become citizens and to practice self-government. Do not wait until you win your independence to discover that self-government requires not just political power, but political responsibility."
What made this argument so fascinating and painful to watch was that it was so easy to see both points of view. Who could possibly deny the justice of either side? And yet I thought the Indian women were right. I did not think that they had forgotten what it was like to be oppressed. I thought they were warning the others off a mistake that they knew would be tragic, however comprehensible it might be. And I had just returned from Israel, where I had spent a lot of time thinking about the many, many ways in which completely comprehensible failures can echo down through the generations.
While I was in Israel, I had also wondered what would happen to all those Palestinian kids who had grown up in refugee camps in Lebanon, who had, as best I could tell, been taught a lot about RPGs and nothing whatsoever about how to function in a world in which conflicts are not settled by violence. I found it unforgivable that the Palestinian leadership that ran the camps seemed to have given no thought to the question: how can we bring these children up to be responsible citizens of any future state?...
So one thing I thought that the Indian women saw was this:
Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.
And another was this:
Liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive government. It can seem that way when you live under tyranny. Nothing is more comprehensible than people living in apartheid South Africa, or under Saddam, thinking: if only that government were removed from power, things would be better. They would have to be. After all, how could they possibly be worse? Unfortunately, there are almost always ways in which things could be worse.
Thomas Hobbes, who actually lived through a civil war, believed that to escape from "the war of all against all", it was necessary to grant a monarch unlimited sovereignty, and that living under such a monarch was preferable to living in a state of war and anarchy.... I think Hobbes was wrong, and that we have more choices than anarchy or tyranny. But to be willing to accept and abide by established procedures for the resolution of conflicts, even when your side loses in ways that you think are unfair, presupposes a lot. In particular, it presupposes both allegiance to those procedures, and the confidence that the price of losing will not be more than you can bear. Both of these conditions exist in the US, which is why the Democrats did not go to war over the 2000 election. But they are not universal. They are an extraordinary human creation which we too easily take for granted....
When you use force to liberate a country, like Kuwait, that has only been occupied for a short time, you can hope that its people will accept their previous government, and that whatever made that government function in the past will have survived. But when you liberate a country like Iraq, a country whose people have been brutalized, you risk loosing Hobbes' "war of all against all" on its people. You remove the sovereign who has kept that war in check, without thereby creating any of the political virtues that allow alternate forms of government, like democracy, to function....
Force is not just an alternate way of getting to liberation; it changes everything. And liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive regime; it is a matter of creating a country populated by citizens who are, by and large, willing to set aside the idea of resolving conflicts by force and to respect the laws, even when they are imperfectly applied. For this reason, the problem with that South African's vision is not just that "we lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war." That's true, but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem, namely: that preventive war is not a way of remaking the world in the ways the South African and Beinart imagine.
Saying that the problem is that we lack the wisdom and virtue to do this is like saying that the problem with the USSR in the 30s was that Stalin was not sufficiently wise and virtuous to really make totalitarianism work for the people of Russia. That Stalin was neither good nor wise is beyond question. But to focus on his personal failings is to miss a broader point: that totalitarianism itself is bound to fail to do right by those who live under it.
On Race Since The 1980s: Matt Cooper... asks: "Why is America's racial atmosphere less poisonous than it was then?" And he offers a few answers: the drop in black crime and teen pregnancy, the disappearance of issues like school busing,the mainstreaming of hip-hop, Bill Clinton's ease with African-Americans and Bush's cabinet picks.... I thought I'd offer a few more possibilities....
First, whatever welfare reform's impact on poverty, I think it's hard to overstate the political effects of removing welfare from the list of perennial campaign issues. Despite the fact that the majority of welfare recipients were white, debates about welfare always seemed to devolve into debates about such topics as whether inner-city blacks actually deserved to be helped at all....
Second, I think that people, most especially white people, often imagined that the legacy of racism would be much easier to correct than it actually was -- as though as soon as legal obstacles to, say, voting were removed, everything would be OK.... I think that the simple fact that time passes has helped here: the early eighties through mid-nineties were, I think, the time at which the discrepancy between people's unreasonable expectations and actual progress was likely to be sharpest. Since then, that progress has continued, and so the discrepancy has gotten smaller.
More importantly, though, I think a lot of the credit has to go to affirmative action. Affirmative action obviously created political problems of its own. But the idea, I always thought, was that while it would obviously preferable not to have been racist in the first place, affirmative action was necessary in order to ensure that more than a few African-Americans (and others less relevant to this post) had the opportunity their talents should have entitled them to to get the jobs, training, and so forth that they needed to advance into the middle and professional classes. And this, it seemed to me, was important not only for fairness and equality of opportunity, but because the simple fact of its being normal for blacks to be in jobs and colleges and the like would help immeasurably.
America is still much, much too segregated. But it is much less so than it was when I was growing up. -- In what follows, I'm going to talk primarily about people in relatively privileged settings, because that's what I know best. I believe that similar points can be made more generally, but for now I'll stick to what I know.
When I was in high school, Boston was in the midst of its busing crisis, which means that its public schools were only then being desegregated, under court order and in the face of violent resistance. I cannot recall any black (or Hispanic, or Asian) students at the (private) school I went to for grades 1-6; there were a handful at the school I spent grades 7-12 in, but not many. When I was in college, there were very few minority students, and many of those I knew felt somewhat besieged and unsure of their welcome. This changed dramatically during the 80s and 90s: when I started teaching, the ethnic composition of my classes was vastly different than it had been when I was a student, and it is even more different today. The same is true in a lot of professions.
This matters enormously, not just for the obvious reasons of basic fairness and justice, but because it means that many more whites are familiar with blacks than they used to be. -- Conservatives often point out the various idiotic things that people say and do in the name of not being racist.... They're... right about some of the idiotic excesses of political correctness: my personal favorite example was a brouhaha about a poster that some student group had put up advertising an event that involved (iirc) "a lazy afternoon relaxing and eating burritos", which supposedly implied that Mexicans were lazy. The late 80s and early 90s were full of that stuff.
Where I differed with conservatives who made those arguments was that I thought: "well, this is what happens when people come to realize that there is something very wrong with their habitual ways of thinking about, and behaving towards, people they often don't really know at all, and try to figure out how to change their ways." It's especially likely in the case of racism, in which a lot of problems are likely to involve unconscious habits of mind and behavior. (You might think you're not a racist, but wouldn't a racist think that too?) In situations like that, people say and do stupid things. They second-guess their own motives, and they don't always get it right. They try to establish their anti-racist cred by constituting themselves as the Official Racism Police.... This is all to be expected. But it in no way implies that the attempt is not worth making, or that if we proceed with good will, we won't eventually do better.
If you're white, and you believe that racism is wrong and that you should try to avoid it, and you don't know a lot of black people, I thought, then a certain amount of idiocy is in your future. It just is.... [T]he solution to it was not, I thought, to sneer at the whole effort. It was to do your best, observe carefully, think hard, be generous, and accept the fact that you just were going to do a number of things that would, in retrospect, make you absolutely cringe. The idiocy was temporary, and born of ignorance. With time, I thought, it would fade to normal human levels of awkwardness and cluelessness.
I also thought -- and here I'm on shakier ground -- that many of the African-Americans I knew were also working out issues of their own about what it meant to be black in a world in which blacks were not forced into opposition to mainstream culture.... What did it mean to be a successful black doctor living in the Connecticut suburbs, and how did you do that without selling out or forgetting who you were? There were people who did this effortlessly and with enormous grace, but I think there were also, and understandably, people who flailed around a bit before figuring it out. I also think that the combination of such flailing and the white cluelessness I described earlier was worse than the sum of its parts.
The general point, though, is: I think that things are very, very different now.... This was always, to me, one of the main points of affirmative action: that all this stuff would just become much more normal, and, slowly but surely, we'd find our way out of the idiotic flailing phase of race relations and into something less awkward and fraught.
I think this has a lot to do with the thaw that Matt Cooper talks about, and it's a wonderful thing. We're not nearly there yet, but I think we're much closer than we were when I was young.
Barack Obama: Surprise the World Again: From the NYT:
President Obama is facing new pressure to reverse himself and to ramp up investigations into the Bush-era security programs, despite the political risks. Leading Democrats on Sunday demanded investigations of how a highly classified counterterrorism program was kept secret from the Congressional leadership on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Fox News Sunday called it a "big problem." Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on "This Week" on ABC, agreed that the secrecy "could be illegal" and demanded an inquiry.
Mr. Obama said this weekend that he had asked his staff members to review the mass killing of prisoners in Afghanistan by local forces allied with the United States as it toppled the Taliban regime there. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Bush administration had blocked investigations of the matter. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is also close to assigning a prosecutor to look into whether prisoners in the campaign against terrorism were tortured, officials disclosed on Saturday. And after a report from five inspectors general about the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping said on Friday that there had been a number of undisclosed surveillance programs during the Bush years, Democrats sought more information.
Let me add my own little millibar to that pressure. All of these things deserve to be investigated. This is not a matter of focussing on the past at the expense of the future. We will not have the future we want if government officials can break the law with impunity, safe in the knowledge that no future administration will be willing to take the political heat and investigate them. Since anyone who is reading this probably knows what I think about these questions, I'd like to focus instead on this:
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC that despite his dismay at the Central Intelligence Agency's past interrogation methods, including waterboarding, he opposed a criminal inquiry into torture, which he said would "harm our image throughout the world."
I think that is exactly wrong. People around the world are not under any illusions about whether or not we tortured people. They know that we did, and that fact has already, and rightly, done enormous damage to our image.
What they don't know is whether we are prepared to do anything about it. Do we just lecture other people about their shortcomings, or are we ready to face up to our own? Most of the people I've met abroad assume that we will do nothing. They don't think this because of any particular dislike of the United States; they just assume that that is the way things work. If we do not hold anyone to account for any of the crimes that were committed under the last administration, they will not be surprised.
If we do hold people to account, on the other hand, that will make an impression.
In thinking about this, I am reminded of conversations I had when I was in Pakistan. My first trip there was in 2007, when the campaigns were just kicking into gear. People asked who I supported; I said Obama. They asked: but can he possibly win? I said that while I was reluctant to judge, I thought that he could.
The most common reaction -- not uniform, but common -- was a combination of several things. On the one hand, I was American and they were not, so the people I talked to naturally assumed that I probably had a better grasp of US politics than they did. Besides, I was their guest, and they were wonderfully polite. On the other hand, however, they found the idea that Barack Obama -- an African-American who did not come from a privileged background, whose father was from a Kenyan village -- could possibly be elected President literally unbelievable.
It was fascinating to watch them trying to reconcile these conflicting impulses: I was talking about a country I lived in, which most of them had never been to, and I was not obviously insane, but I was saying something that could not possibly be true. And, as best I could tell, there were two reasons why it couldn't be true: first, whoever the Pakistani analog of Barack Obama might be, that person would never be elected President in Pakistan, and second, they had been disappointed in America's track record in living up to its ideals, and so were not inclined to believe that it would do so this time.
The last time I went, Barack Obama had secured the nomination. People in Pakistan were astonished, but they were also really inspired. And I don't think that this was mainly about Obama's policies. It was about us living up to our ideals: about the idea that in America, anyone really can grow up to be President, and about the idea that enough of us had managed to look past our long history of slavery and discrimination and bigotry that we might elect Barack Obama President.
It gave people hope: the hope that cynics are not always right, and that the fix is not always in.
If we're interested in our image abroad, we could do a lot worse than simply deciding to live up to our ideals: for instance, the rule of law. It's the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing.
Shameful: The Obama Administration and the Uighurs: From the Washington Post:
The Obama administration, picking up the argument of its predecessor, is opposing the release of Chinese Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay into the United States. In papers filed with the Supreme Court late Friday, the administration says a group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurz) are being lawfully held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba even though they are not considered enemy combatants.
[...]
The Uighurs' "continued presence at Guantanamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States," Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the court. The men are held apart from the other detainees, in the least restrictive conditions, Kagan said. "They are free to leave Guantanamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them," she said.
The administration's brief is here (pdf). One note: I think it's not quite accurate to say that the administration is "opposing the release" of the Uighurs in this brief; it is arguing that it cannot be compelled to do so by court order. That said:
I have no idea whether or not the administration's argument is correct as a matter of law. Moreover, I don't care. Whatever the law says about whether it can be forced to admit the Uighurs, the administration has the right to admit them voluntarily. If it cannot find another country that is willing to take them, then it should.
We set up a system that gave people incentives to turn over people they claimed were foreign fighters, whether they were or not. We then dismantled all our normal procedures for separating combatants from non-combatants. It should not surprise anyone that we ended up detaining people who were innocent.
I have no problem with the government taking some reasonable period of time to try to identify another country that is willing to take detainees who cannot be returned to their own countries. But these detainees have been held for seven and a half years. That's not a reasonable amount of time to tie up loose ends; it's a tenth of a normal lifespan.
We screwed up. We should step up to the plate and do what's right. Seven and a half years is too long.
And one other thing: the administration says this about the Uighurs: "Petitioners would like the federal courts to order that they be brought to the United States, because they are unwilling to return to their home country." (p. 11) As Registan notes, this is false. The reason we cannot send them back to China is not that they are "unwilling" to go back; it's that we believe, with good reason, that they would be tortured or killed if they were repatriated. That means that it would be illegal for us to send them back.
It's also a bit disingenuous for the administration to argue that the Uighurs are free to leave. The Bush administration has previously argued that they cannot be set free in Guantanamo, for the perfectly good reason that Guantanamo is a military base, and we do not normally allow people free access to military bases.
Why Do Women Stay?: In a post on a book about a violent relationship, Linda Hirshman writes:
It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser. Which is why, no matter how many times Steiner and Marcotte and the others tell them not to, people keep asking the question. And it's terribly important to do exactly that. Asking why women participate in destructive relationships is a mark of respect.
I worked in a battered women's shelter for five years, four as a volunteer, and one as a full-time staffer, so I might be able to answer this question. I'll try to get to the respect part in a subsequent post. Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. I knew someone once who had a bad heroin habit, and while getting involved with a guy who beat her up if she tried to leave the house would not be my preferred method of detoxing, it worked for her. (She was still clean the last time I heard.) But generalizations might be better than nothing. I will also refer to abusers as 'he', and to their victims as 'she'; this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.
In some cases, understanding why someone stays is easy. A lot of women are afraid that their abuser would try to harm them if they leave. And with good reason: about a third of female homicide victims were killed by a spouse, lover, or ex-lover; and that's not counting the women who are "merely" beaten, stalked, and so forth. Staying in a case like this, at least until you had figured out how to leave safely and cover your tracks, is not mysterious or perplexing.
Moreover, while I think the assumption that battered women stay because they are just dumb, or have staggeringly bad judgment, is wrong and insulting, there are a whole lot of battered women, and it would be very surprising if none of them stayed for such reasons. We asked women who came to our shelter when the abuse had started; one woman told me that her husband had thrown her from a moving car on their first date, at which point I wondered silently why on earth there had been a second date, let alone a subsequent marriage. But in my experience such women were a vanishingly small minority.
What is hard to understand, I take it, is why women who do not have obviously bad judgment, and who do not take themselves to be in serious danger if they leave, stay anyways. So I turn to them.
To start with, it helps to know that (last time I checked) the two most common times for violence to start were the honeymoon and the first pregnancy. By the time you reach either point, you're already in a pretty serious relationship, and leaving is not something that anyone would do lightly.
Moreover, the violence often comes as a real surprise. It's not that there aren't signs: there are. But they are often things like: he falls for you too hard and too fast, or: he wants to be with you all the time. You'd have to be either paranoid or a victim of a previous abusive relationship to leap to the conclusion that either of these things means that abuse might be in your future. (Imagine, in particular, someone whose last relationship was with someone who didn't seem to care about her: imagine her saying to herself: last time he didn't care enough; this time he seems to care too much; am I impossible to please?)
So imagine yourself, in love with someone, on your honeymoon or pregnant, when suddenly this guy just goes ballistic, often for very little reason, and hits you. For a lot of women, this is profoundly shocking and disorienting. There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they're rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you're completely crazy. Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.
What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her. And it's not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place; she questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.
Under the circumstances, it is very, very hard to say: well, OK, I am married and/or pregnant, I am in this serious relationship, but I will nonetheless decide to leave, now, because I think I have to, and I trust my judgment. Trusting your judgment at that moment is like trusting your sense of balance when someone has just poured a fifth of vodka down your throat.
Besides that, there's also the Jekyll/Hyde phenomenon. If I had a nickel for every woman who has said to me, "It's like he was two people! Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!, I'd be a wealthy woman today. When I first heard this, I didn't entirely believe it. I thought: maybe Mr. Hyde abuses her, and Dr. Jekyll turns that same abusive streak on himself, beating himself up with guilt. (Abusers are very big on heartfelt apologies.) Maybe the thought of him as two people is just easier to bear than the thought that one and the same person one loves has done this. Who can say?
Then I encountered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde myself. One fine evening, a guy I was involved with, a guy who was normally kind and decent and funny, suddenly went nuts. He started accusing me of all sorts of that were truly insane. (You'll have to trust me on this one: things that there was no reason in our relationship or my character for him to suspect me of, not a scintilla of evidence to support, and that would have been wildly implausible about anyone.) He followed me around the house, screaming and screaming, for about ten hours. (You might wonder, why didn't I leave the house? Answer: it was on the outskirts of Ankara, at night, and there was nowhere to go and no public transportation.)
In the morning I left to walk around and try to figure out what had happened, in the kind of absolute daze I described above. I was basically wandering around, all day, with a little thought balloon saying "??????" When I came back, he was appalled by what he had done, and not in the "I am beating up on myself" way I had always imagined, but in the way a normal person would be, if a normal person had somehow done something like this. It was completely baffling. It really was as though he was two people.
I did not leave then. He did it again four days later. After that I thought: right. It is conceivable to me that someone might do this once. But if he felt the way he seemed to afterwards, then having done it, nothing like that would happen again for, oh, at least several decades. The fact that it happened again four days later means that something is going on that is above my pay grade, and that I should not so much as begin to imagine that I can deal with. I flew home shortly thereafter.
But consider my advantages. While I have the usual run of horrid insecurities, underneath it all I am reasonably self-confident. Nothing in my background or upbringing would in any way make it hard for me to leave. I'm a feminist. Moreover, at this point I had been working in battered women's shelters for several years. That was crucial: I knew that this was emotional abuse, in a pretty strict sense of that term, and that that meant that it was very, very unlikely to change. I was, therefore, not inclined to second-guess myself, and that was immensely important.
With all that, I did not leave the first time.
Imagine someone who stays longer. The longer you stay, the more your confidence and your self-respect are undermined. The first time often comes out of the blue, but it is normally the beginning of a cycle, not a one-time episode. And more or less everything about this cycle is absolutely corrosive to a woman's self-respect.
Beating someone up is, obviously, itself a gesture of immense disrespect. But there's generally also verbal abuse: battered women are often told, repeatedly, that no one should listen to them, that they're ugly, stupid, hateful, bitchy, and in all sorts of ways worthless. And besides that, there's often forced sex, often immediately following the abuse. (Luckily, I was spared that.) It's hard to think of a more horrible way of saying: your feelings do not matter at all than asking someone whom you have just beaten up to have sex with you.
As I said, it's corrosive. The longer you stay, the worse it gets. And since, as before, the capacity that is under attack is the very one you need in order to get out, this makes it harder and harder to leave. And, of course, the longer you stay, the dumber you feel about staying. Many of the women I knew left not because of the danger to themselves, but because the abuse was endangering their children. I always found this both immensely sad and completely comprehensible.
There are several more things, though. First, abusers often isolate their victims. At first this can take an apparently benign form: he wants to be with you all the time; he wants to envelop you in a kind of cocoon; there isn't time for other things. Later, it's a lot less pleasant. Women who stay often try to keep the peace, and one way to do that is not to insist on seeing your friends and family. That, of course, makes turning to your friends and family a lot tougher later on.
Second, it would be a lot easier if abusers were sneering villains. But they are not. They are often charming on the outside. More importantly, they are often in genuine psychological distress. It often seems like a combination of two things: first, feeling as though if their wife left them, some truly terrifying abyss would open up in their minds and they would fall down into the darkness forever, and second, thinking that to prevent this, they need to keep her from leaving, to control her (as opposed to, say, trying to build the best marriage ever.)
(In the case of the guy I was involved with, he had been tortured, badly, and it was hard not to think that that was somehow involved in what happened.)
In my judgment, when abusers say things like: I need you, I'd be lost without you, I'd die if you left, many of them are not just kidding or being manipulative. They are serious, and they are often right. If you love someone who is in genuine distress, you normally don't want to make things worse for them. And that's what leaving looks like, up until the moment when you say to yourself: he will not change, at least not while he's involved with me; this will not get better; and that being the case, I am not helping him by staying.
At that point, you can think of leaving as helping him. Until then, it looks like kicking someone you love when he's down. Your husband or lover is in pain; he needs you; and you are going to leave. For some people, it's easier to take sacrifices on themselves than to inflict them on others, especially others they love. That is not the worst kind of person to be. But it makes it much, much harder to walk out the door.
Again, consider the example of me. I was not beaten up, and the emotional abuse did not last long before I left. Moreover, I had no doubt at all that I was right to leave, nor was I particularly confused about whose fault this was. But despite knowing perfectly well that I had not done anything wrong, I felt horribly guilty for several months afterwards. It was the oddest thing: emotions that I knew were just completely misguided, but that were, apparently, settling in for the long haul. Getting over it was very tough. I don't want to imagine what it would have been like if I had not known that I had done the right thing when I left.
I came into this with every advantage in the world. I left quickly. I got off easy. But for all that, it was very, very hard. I don't want to think how hard it would be if I had been just a little less lucky.
Operation Rescue: Here's an article on the kinds of things other than assassination attempts, vandalism, and break-ins that Dr. Tiller and his staff have had to endure for years. It's about Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue (once Operation Rescue West; the group split), who moved to Wichita in order to shut George Tiller's clinic down:
There's only one problem: Tiller is a hard man to find, let alone intimidate. After more than a decade as one of the anti-abortion movement's favorite targets, he keeps a low profile, drives an armored car and lives in a gated community in a house with a state-of-the-art security system. More pointedly, he has made it clear that he's not susceptible to scare tactics. In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion protester. He returned to work the next day.
Newman is well aware of Tiller's resilience. That's why Operation Rescue is going after clinic workers like Sara Phares. The employees have no guards posted at their homes, no cameras monitoring their yards. If Newman can provoke enough of them to quit, his job will be done. He'll effectively shut Tiller down."
Here's how he tries to get them to quit. Sarah Phares is an administrative assistant at the clinic:
A week later, hundreds of Phares' neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. "Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these." The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as "Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies" and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper's ransom note, that neighbors "beg her to quit, pretty please." The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: "Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!" (...)
Before long, protesters from Operation Rescue showed up at her house. They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with twenty-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their back yards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares' front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property. Phares, a small-boned woman with an irreverent sense of humor, joked about the exorcism. "Wish he'd held off on that holy water till after we'd put the fertilizer down," she said. But her husband wasn't amused. Since 1994, there have been five assassination attempts on abortion providers at their homes. A few days after the protest, Phares' husband got out his revolver, loaded it and taught Sara how to use it. (...)
After a brief prayer asking that Phares hear their message of "gentle rebuke," everyone caravans over to her neighborhood, five cars plastered with bumper stickers condemning abortion and extolling the Ten Commandments. Bringing up the rear is the Truth Truck. For maximum exposure, they stop on a busy street that funnels traffic toward the cul-de-sac where Phares lives. It's a treeless neighborhood, its fresh brick apartment complexes christened with optimistic names such as Cedar Lakes. The protesters display their signs for passing cars. "Phares' Choice," one proclaims, over a picture of tiny, bloody body parts. Another reads, "Sarah Phares, Abortion Profiteer," misspelling her name and giving her address. The image on Jeff Herzog's sign is particularly disturbing: a fetus being grabbed by forceps, its mouth open in a Munchian scream.
And:
Newman and his small staff of zealous pro-lifers are buzzing with the news that the clinic's office manager has quit -- a result, they believe, of their name-and-shame campaign. The manager had been accosted by a neighbor in a grocery store who recognized her from an Operation Rescue flier that featured her photo. "You're that baby killer!" the neighbor screamed at her. Then Newman, through investigative methods he'd rather not reveal, discovered where the woman's husband works. "We think that's what clinched it," he says. "He probably realized we were going to picket his workplace. I imagine he's the major breadwinner in the family, and he didn't want to risk his job."
If you read the whole story, you can find out how Newman threatened the Tillers' dry cleaner and a cab company that sometimes took patients to and from the clinic:
Newman then tells him, in the most courteous tone imaginable, that he might see a few people outside the company holding signs. Just to let everybody know what he's participating in. "It's not personal," Newman says gently.
They also go through employees' trash, and offer rewards for incriminating information. They stop children on sidewalks and tell them their neighbors kill little babies.
Scott Roeder, who seems to be the suspect in Tiller's murder, posted on Operation Rescue's website. Operation Rescue has denounced the murder. They write:
We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ."
I just thought it would be useful to clarify exactly which "peaceful, legal means" they had used, and what Dr. Tiller and his staff had had to live with.
I am strongly pro-choice, but I think it is perfectly possible to be opposed to abortion on principled grounds, and I think that it would be an enormous mistake to conflate all people who are opposed to abortions with either Dr. Tiller's killer or the likes of Operation Rescue. That said, large elements of the anti-abortion movement have never done nearly enough to distance themselves from the violent and/or crazy parts of their movement. I hope they start to now.
Dr. George Tiller: My thoughts are with the family of Dr. George Tiller, who was killed today.
I'm not sure how many doctors still perform late-term abortions in this country -- one and two seem to be the most common estimates. This is, of course, due to the campaign of terrorism that has been waged against them. I cannot imagine the courage it takes to go on doing what you think is right in the face not only of consistent harassment and death threats, but of actual attempts on your life.
Why go on doing it? Here's one reason:
Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.
We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.
Here's another:
A routine ultrasound on October 26--meant to be a time of great joy (my best friend came with us to the appointment--revealed terrible news: one of the twins had died, probably about a week before. We went from the ultrasound appointment to my obstetrician's office and were met with even more grim news. My weight had spiked up about 18 pounds, my blood pressure was soaring, and I had protein in my urine.
It turned out that I was in full-blown preeclampsia. I was admitted to the hospital immediately.
After that, everything happened very quickly. I was put on medication (magnesium sulfate) in an attempt to treat the preeclampsia and save the remaining twin until he reached outside-the-womb viability--a mere two weeks away (I was just over 22 weeks pregnant). But I got much worse overnight; my blood pressure couldn't be controlled, I had a massive headache and was vomiting uncontrollably. My kidneys shut down. I was moments away from seizures, coma, and death when the doctors came and told us the bad news: my remaining twin could not be saved. My pregnancy had to be terminated or both the baby and I would die.
You might, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, be able to imagine what it felt like to be my husband--to imagine being terrified of losing your children and your wife in one fell swoop. Ms. Clinton, you might be able to imagine lying in the hospital, so sick you barely feel any of what is happening, only knowing that the long-fought-for children you so desperately wanted are now both going to be dead.
Here's the part of the story where choice comes in. I could, of course, have gone through induced labor and delivered my tiny twins. But my blood pressure was hovering around 165/120 (often going higher), even with treatment. Can you imagine what labor would have done to my body with blood pressure that high? My doctor recommended, and I agreed, that I undergo the much less stressful intact dilation and extraction procedure (...)
As I lay on the gurney, waiting for my procedure to start, I felt a gulf of grief and emptiness the like of which I have never known. I felt abandoned by God. I lay there, crying, alone, surrounded by doctors and nurses. You can't imagine the sadness.
I was lucky. Are you surprised that I would say that? I was lucky because the partial-birth abortion ban was not yet in effect in October of 2004. If it had been, I would have been forced to undergo labor and delivery, no matter the risks to my health, and I might right now be either dead or so brain damaged I would be unable to type this.
And this:
I also know a woman who had two "partial-birth abortions," or D&Xs (dilation and extraction) as they are more accurately called. My friend Tiffany is a carrier of a terrible genetic abnormality. In addition to other defects, her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe. They were doomed. The only way to extract them without hurting her chances of ever having another baby was through a D&X.
And this essay that I will never forget, about a woman whose child died in her womb, and who couldn't find anyone to do a dilation and evacuation, the safest procedure for someone in her condition, because it was too controversial:
I could feel my baby's dead body inside of mine. This baby had thrilled me with kicks and flutters, those first soft tickles of life bringing a smile to my face and my hand to my rounding belly. Now this baby floated, limp and heavy, from one side to the other, as I rolled in my bed.
And within a day, I started to bleed. My body, with or without a doctor's help, was starting to expel the fetus. Technically, I was threatening a spontaneous abortion, the least safe of the available options.
I did what any pregnant patient would do. I called my doctor. And she advised me to wait. (...)
On my fourth morning, with the bleeding and cramping increasing, I couldn’t wait any more. I called my doctor and was told that since I wasn’t hemorrhaging, I should not come in. Her partner, on call, pedantically explained that women can safely lose a lot of blood, even during a routine period.
I began calling labor and delivery units at the top five medical centers in my area. I told them I had been 19 weeks along. The baby is dead. I'm bleeding, I said. I'm scheduled for a D&E in a few days. If I come in right now, what could you do for me, I asked.
Don’t come in, they told me again and again. "Go to your emergency room if you are hemorrhaging to avoid bleeding to death. No one here can do a D&E today, and unless you're really in active labor you’re safer to wait."
Why didn't her own Ob/Gyn do the procedure?
"I can't do these myself," said my doctor. "I trained at a Catholic hospital."
George Tiller endured decades of terrorism to help women like these, women in unspeakably awful situations whom very few people were willing to help, given the price domestic terrorists had decided that anyone who helped them would have to pay. Now he has given his life.
Neocons Vindicated?: Andrew Sullivan links to " a smashing column" by Daniel Finkelstein:
I am a neocon. Given all that has happened over the past ten years, I am sure my PR consultant would advise me to drop this label. But I don't employ a PR consultant. So, stubbornly, I cling on to the designation. It declares my belief in two things -- that in every country in the world, wherever it may be and whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy (not necessarily through the barrel of a gun) is the only real way to bring peace to the world. I believe that what we are seeing on the streets of Iran now is a vindication of these neoconservative ideas.
Hmm. If that's what neoconservatism is, then I suppose I must be a neoconservative, or something very like one. I do not believe that everyone yearns for liberty, free expression, and democracy. I think that it took a lot of time for people to work out what, exactly, a free government would be like, and that before that happened, people could not possibly be said to have yearned for one. (Did people yearn for democracy in 12th century France?)
On the other hand, we have worked that out now, more or less; and the idea of democracy is available to anyone who is in contact with the broader world. It's a natural idea to turn to when one's own government seems unsatisfactory, and once a people start asking why they should have no say in their government, I think it's hard for them to un-ask it, or to accept without hesitation a country in which their voices are completely excluded. So I suppose I am, for practical purposes, on board with this part of the neoconservative program.
Similarly, while I'm not sure I'd agree that "the spread of liberty and democracy (...) is the only real way to bring peace to the world", I think it would certainly help a lot. So I suppose I'm on board with that as well. This, according to Mr. Finkelstein, makes me, if not a real neoconservative, at least a pretty close approximation of one.
Which is, of course, absurd.
I don't have a definition of neoconservatism ready to hand. But to my mind, my differences with actual neoconservatives over the past decade or so have never concerned such questions as: Is freedom good or bad? Is an abhorrence of dictatorships a uniquely Western idea which we should not imagine that other people share? And the idea that they do is a symptom of one of the things that has consistently bothered by about neoconservatism: namely, a tendency to make arguments that either are made in bad faith or show a deep lack of interest in the details of any view but their own.
My biggest difference with neoconservatives concerns attempts to create democracies by military force. I do not believe that it is impossible to do this: we did it in Germany and Japan after World War II. But in that case, we had a really good reason both to occupy Germany and Japan: namely, the fact that they had attacked us, and they had lost. Similarly, we had a decent reason for trying to recast their political institutions: those institutions were partially responsible for the fact that they had just started a world war.
Creating a democracy requires the active participation of a lot of people in the country in which you are trying to create it, and you are unlikely to get this participation if those people regard your presence not just as undesirable, but as illegitimate. People tend not to regard our occupation of a country as illegitimate when they attack us, and they lose. But they do tend to regard it as illegitimate when we invade simply because we think they should have a different form of government, even if they themselves do not much like the government they have. For this reason, I think that even if we had the right to invade a country for the express purpose of creating a democracy, that invasion would be virtually certain to fail.
I also think that neoconservatives tend to have a wholly unrealistic view of how the United States and its allies are perceived in the developing world. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the developing world do not see America as a benevolent power generously offering the gift of liberty to people around the world, but as a country whose interventions in their countries are often self-interested and sometimes disastrous. To an Iranian in particular, I would imagine that the idea that America or the UK are primarily interested in spreading freedom around the globe would seem downright delusional.
Many neocons seem to me to have bought into their own propaganda about our country and its history. For this reason they find it much easier than I do to advocate intervention in the affairs of other countries. I believe that we have less of a right to intervene in other countries than they do as a matter of principle. But I also think that the likelihood that any particular intervention will succeed is often undercut by our own past actions.
Again, Iran is a clear example of this: we forfeited the right to expect Iranians to assume that our intentions were benign when we decided to overthrow their government and support their dictator. And any intervention whose success depends on Iranians' taking that view of us is one that we have, by our own actions, placed beyond our reach.
This is not about bashing the US. It is about having a realistic assessment of other people's views of us.
Finally, I think I have a different view of war than most neoconservatives. I think war is one of the most horrible things there is. It is not the most horrible thing there is, which is why some wars are justified. But we should never go to war without thinking very, very hard about whether it is truly necessary, and about the likelihood that we can accomplish our objectives by military means.
The kind of cheerleading for war that neocons engaged in before the invasion of Iraq was, to my mind, both utterly irresponsible and profoundly unrealistic about what can be accomplished by military force. Our army is very good at what it does. But we should not expect it to do what no army can do: change people's minds, create systems of government that depend not on force but on things like commitment to the rule of law, and so forth.
I did not oppose the invasion of Iraq because I thought that Iraqis did not want to be free. I opposed it because I thought that because we should never unleash war on anyone without a very, very good reason to do so, and that in this case, we did not have one. I thought the invasion of Iraq was both unnecessary and profoundly unlikely to achieve its stated objectives; and thus that it did not so much as begin to justify the immense costs it would impose on Iraq and on us.
Towards the end of his article, Finkelstein writes:
The mistake the neocons made is that we were not conservative enough, not patient enough. Such impatience with dictatorships is understandable, indeed laudable. But the frustrating truth is that there are limits to what can be achieved by outsiders. Instead we have to wait as national movements, one by one, stand up for their rights. And sometimes, tragically, we even have to stand aside as those movements are crushed by their oppressors.
Well, yes; that would be one way to put it. Another would be to say: neoconservatives were not just insufficiently patient; they were reckless beyond belief, willing to bring down unspeakable costs on other people without bothering to weigh the possibility that their simplistic and unrealistic views of the world might be wrong. If Mr. Finkelstein wants to change his ways and become more "patient", power to him. To my mind, though, this column, with its equally simplistic (and insulting) view of his opponents, shows that he has not changed nearly enough.
Hilzoy, lots of wisdom up there - especially the part about violent revolution. Note how the South Africans really handled their predicament: they more or less gracefully took power from the white minority without a bloodbath or retributory orgy. That was very much an expression of the singular Nelson Mandela, but many others had to accommodate him to make that work out like it did. Too bad things are somewhat rocky for them now.
Posted by: Neil B ♪ | July 20, 2009 at 12:54 PM