Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

It looks like the FBI was right.  In the words of Mark Kleiman, “If you’ve ever said ‘abortion is murder,’ be sure to use lots of soap and water when you try to wash the blood off your hands.”

The killing of George Tiller was a terrorist act, and should be investigated and prosecuted accordingly.

Update 10:40 PM: Kleiman nails it.

There is, however, a class of cases where the argument against government ownership is not as straightforward. In these cases, cost reductions for which private suppliers have stronger incentives have potentially deleterious effects on the non-contractible quality. For example, private prisons might abuse prisoners by hiring cheaper guards and failing to train them, private hospitals may refuse to treat patients on whom hospitals generally lose money, private schools might substitute less effective teachers’ aides for more expensive teachers, and so on. In such situations, strong incentives may lead to inefficient outcomes or, put differently, the efficient producer might need to have soft incentives. Ironically, the government sometimes becomes the efficient producer precisely because its employees are not motivated to find ways of holding costs down.

 

The modern case for government ownership can often be seen from precisely this perspective. Advocates of such ownership want to have state prisons so as to avoid untrained low-wage guards, state water utilities to force investment in purification, and state car makers to make them invest in environmentally friendly products. As it turns out, however, this case for state ownership must be made carefully, and even in most of the situations where cost reduction has adverse consequences for non-contractible quality, private ownership is still superior.

While the failed auto bailout plan never constituted ownership per se, it certainly would have entailed the exercise of control rights.  After all, one group in Congress pushed for requirements that would have forced automakers to invest in environmentally-friendly products– exactly what Shleifer pointed out ten years ago, but without explicit ownership.  Another group pushed for major concessions on the part of the unions.  It should not be a surprise that these two groups were mutually exclusive and that their proposed requirements hewed closely to their ideological priors.  What few people have mentioned, though, is that government regulation is in part at fault for the current situation.  I’ll go into it in depth in a later post, but it shouldn’t be hard to see that the composition of the automakers’ fleets at the time of the oil price spike was in no small way defined by CAFE standards– and not in a way that was helpful to the American auto manufacturers.

This is just to say– it’s not at all clear that any restrictions on the conduct of business by the recipients of any bailout are in the best interests of either the firms receiving the funds or their creditors.  While the government has the right to impose restrictions on the money it lends, in doing so, it will more likely attempt to pander to the biases of particular constituencies than it will achieve any useful purpose.

Sadly, the conservative movement has propagated both of these beliefs for years. Consider whether two phrases sound familiar: “liberal elites who hate America”, and “the lies of the mainstream media”. These delusions, nurtured by the conservative establishment, are corrosive to the mutual respect necessary in a democracy and may lead to violent extremism and a nation irreparably divided.

In the former category, there are those like Ann Coulter, herself a joke, who here makes a poor attempt at one:

Saddam’s barbaric rape rooms, chemical attacks and torture – those, liberals could live with. But now they want us to send troops to Darfur, a country from which no one anticipates terrorism anytime in the next millennium. If you’re looking for a good definition of “no imminent threat,” Darfur is it. The climate change “emergency,” set to start taking effect sometime during the next century, is a more imminent threat to the United States than Darfur.These people can’t even wrap up genocide. We’ve been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever – and they still haven’t finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It’s like genocide by committee. Who’s running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA?

We would, if it weren’t so ignorant, ignore the fact that Darfur is not a country– it’s a part of Sudan, which, under the rule of the National Islamic Front (which is still in power) harbored Osama bin Laden for five years. Having noted the sheer ignorance of this statement, however, we should point out that though it may not be proceeding as quickly as Coulter would like, the conflict in Darfur has claimed up to 450,000 lives. Is it a genocide?

According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

By the definition of the term– absolutely, yes, what is happening in Darfur is genocide.

In the latter category, that of those who wish to make genocide out of other situations that, while tragic, do not qualify, we have examples like the following, from a Washington Post article about violence in Rio:

“For young people, this is a genocide,” said Raquel Willadino, a director of violence-related issues and human rights for the Observatory of Favelas. “And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. It really is a genocide.”

The violence in Rio is certainly devastating– extrapolating the numbers in the article, 9 people are dying every day from violence– over 3,200 a year. It is not, however, the number dead that makes a genocide what it is. It is that the acts are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. This doesn’t appear to be the case in Rio, and so claiming it as genocide doesn’t do anything more than cheapen the word.

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — U.S. President George W. Bush said Friday the United States’ unsuccessful war in Vietnam three decades ago offered lessons for the American-led struggle in Iraq.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit,” Bush said shortly after arriving in this one-time war capital.

It’s a little worrisome that the lesson from Vietnam that our President thinks applies best to Iraq is that “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” Honestly, though, it’s far more worrisome that he extracted that lesson from the Vietnam war at all. I wasn’t alive at the time, so I’m not qualified to judge, but I always thought that even to someone who only made a cameo appearance on a National Guard base in Alabama, the war couldn’t have looked like something that we were guaranteed to win (unless we quit).

To me, a more interesting set of lessons from Vietnam to compare to our policies and experience in Iraq would be those offered by Robert McNamara, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense:

1. We misjudged then – and we have since – the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then – and have since – to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which of these lessons apply to Iraq.

I grabbed the list from the Wikipedia entry on Errol Morris’s superlative documentary, “The Fog of War”; it’s the list that inspired the movie, but it is not the one that forms the structure of the film, nor is it the one provided as an addendum by McNamara himself.

The increasing cooperation signals that this distinction is increasingly clear in the minds of some groups of Iraqis. It’s not surprising, as a comparison of our goals with those of the Iraqi people shows:

Our goals:

1. Eliminate jihadists from Iraq.
2. Stablize Iraq.
3. Rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.
4. Get out of Iraq as soon as practicable.

Their goals:

1. Eliminate from Iraq the people who keep killing innocent people in marketplaces.
2. Stablize Iraq.
3. Rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.
4. Get the United States out of Iraq, the sooner the better.

There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to figure this one out. I must say, however, that it might be a good idea to stop kidnapping people’s wives and children– it won’t exactly help win hearts and minds.

Negative:

Yesterday I wrote a FAQ explaining the illegal wiretapping point-by-point. And yesterday, Bush repeated the same disproven points again:

It is said that prior to the attacks of September the 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. So to prevent another attack — based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute — I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous Presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have, and federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed. The terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again. 

Of course, we already know that the terrorist program hasn’t actually helped prevent any attacks, and that there’s really no reason to perform the surveillance illegally. Further, we know that Bush’s definition of “appropriate members of Congress” is quite limited, and that some of those members have objected. We also know that federal courts have not approved the authority that Bush is invoking. This doesn’t matter to the President, however. He’s interested in saying whatever he has to say to be able to do as he pleases– whether or not it’s honest and accurate.

Positive:

This is the challenging part.I can’t endorse anything he said without reservation, and usually I wish he had said or promised more. However, one program he mentioned caught my attention and is worthy of note:

We’ll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. 

Yes, it’s only a research goal, and it may disappear as other promised programs did, but ethanol production from switch grass would be a major plus. Despite Alexander Farrell’s recent work arguing that corn-based ethanol production is in fact energy-positive, I still have serious reservations about the technology. These reservations stem primarily from the fact that Farrell’s logic regarding credits for byproducts assumes that each additional unit of a byproduct will displace one unit of production elsewhere, and that even with these credits included, the process is barely energy-positive. Ethanol from switch grass and other plants with high cellulose content can be produced much more efficiently than ethanol from corn, making ethanol a viable energy source, as opposed to a mere transport medium for energy. Ethanol certainly has other disadvantages, but no energy source is perfect. So for this move, however small it may be, I applaud the President.

Captain Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate serving with the 82nd Airborne Division, recently wrote Senator John McCain regarding torture of prisoners in United States custody that he had witnessed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If you you’re an American and haven’t read the letter, read it now. It’s a matter of our core values as a nation.

Senator McCain and others have taken Fishback’s words to heart, and at the urging of retired general Colin Powell, the Senate voted yesterday 90-9 to strengthen the U.S. ban on torture of detainees. The measure is attached to a defense appropriations bill, and the House version of the bill does not have such a measure attached, meaning that it might be killed in conference committee. The Bush administration, for its part, has threatened to make this measure Bush’s first use of his veto power if it passes, claiming that it would “tie the President’s hands”.

From Capt. Fishback’s letter:

“Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

“Others argue that clear standards will limit the President’s ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.”

Now would be a very good time to call your Senators and Representatives and urge them to fight to keep the anti-torture provisions in the compromise bill and to vote to override any veto.

Note: Andrew Sullivan has been following this story more closely than anyone.

The money quote: “Mr. Chairman, given the profound human suffering and ecological damage along the Gulf Coast, why are we having a hearing that features a fiction writer as our key witness?”

Jeffords also reassures us that he is not a terrorist, and then suggests that the committee spend its time on addressing problems seriously:

“In Mr. Crichton’s book, State of Fear, a terrorist ring is deployed to cause environmental destruction and bring attention to environmental issues. But I assure you, Mr. Chairman, that unlike these characters in State of Fear, I did not cause the two Gulf hurricanes in order to prompt this Committee and this government into action… 

We should be looking into the role of science in making critical response and recovery decisions. We need to incorporate scientific information as we develop programs to help prevent future flood damage. How will we determine the appropriate health and environmental standards for re-habitation of inundated areas? What does science tell us about the best ways to reconstruct in the Gulf Region? Should we be engaging in enhanced wetland protection and reconstruction to possibly protect against the severity of future storms?”

His whole statement is worth reading, at least by the standards of political statements these days. Crichton’s “State of Fear” is a pretty ridiculous anti-environmental piece of pop fiction trash, and repeats ridiculous myths like this one:

“All together, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.” 

Of course, DDT was never banned, and has actually become far less effective due to mosquitos developing resistance to it.