The Enlightened Despot

The VDH Watch is back. There are a million dishonest lunatics out there in the blogosphere, but for some reason this guy really gets to me. There is a depth of propaganda in his writing that really rewards a sentence-by-sentence treatment. So I promise I’ll (try to) lay off for a while after this, but, for now, here we go again, Victor:

Under Obama we are obliterating, by Predator-missile attack, suspected jihadists (and anyone in the general vicinity near them) in Waziristan — the last time I looked, it was a foreign country — something a little bit more discomforting to them than rendition.

The last time I looked, Waziristan wasn’t a country at all, but never mind the details. One can argue about the merits of the drone campaign in Pakistan, but only hard-core pacifists deny that there is a time and a place for firing missiles at people to kill them. Meanwhile, it isn’t rendition simpliciter that the Obama administration has rejected, but rather turning detainees over to other countries for the purpose of torture. Are there people who would rather be tortured than blown up by a missile? Sure. But that isn’t a very interesting point. Over thousands of years of human civilization, people have periodically resigned themselves to the necessity of doing their best to kill other people. Yet most civilizations have maintained that it was a moral imperative to treat their surviving enemies with some degree of restraint. If Hanson wants to argue that humanity has had this one wrong all along, he should say so. Pretending it is a novel hypocrisy of the Obama administration isn’t a serious option.

And blowing the brains out of suspected piratical kidnappers in international waters might be seen, in the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence, as something a little more extreme than bringing detainees out of their Koran- and Mediterranean-food-stocked Guantànamo jail cells for interrogations.

Victor, you’re doing it again! Whatever ‘extreme’ is supposed to mean here, it isn’t relevant. Forget getting shot, I’d choose a few minutes on the rack over life in prison without a second thought. Yet the former has been considered legally and morally impermissable since long before ‘the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence’. (Try saying that five times fast!). Also, that bit about interrogations? Also dishonest. No one has ever suggested we not interrogate prisoners. That would be crazy. What bothers people is when the interrogations look like this:

It is possible to ask people questions without resorting to this sort of evil.

I know I’d prefer to be shown some upsetting nudie magazines as humiliation to make me talk than have a bullet take apart my skull.

I’m glad you like porn more than sudden death. Me too. But, on top of repeating the confusion and hand-waving from above, you are side-stepping the fact that this sort of humiliation is designed for devout Muslims, and doesn’t really apply to you. It’s more akin to someone forcing you to read a science textbook.

Once Team Obama chose to trash Bush as a Constitution-shredder, while blinking and nodding at Spanish theatrics — all the while either not changing, or, in fact, stepping up Bush-era anti-terrorism measures — it put itself in a soon-to-be untenable position that even a fawning media won’t long be able to ignore.

Well, it sort of depends on the measures, doesn’t it? The idea wasn’t to stop counter-terrorism altogether, just the evil, illegal, and ineffective kinds. There is nothing untenable about condemning certain means of fighting terrorism while continuing to fight terrorism. That’s not all that complicated.

Who knows what’s in our future — a Spanish indictment of “judge-and-jury” Barack Obama for ordering the executions of Pashtun and Somali suspects in foreign or international territories, without an arrest warrant, habeas corpus, rights to counsel, and recourse to appeal?

I’m actually in Spain at the moment, so I asked around, and no, it turns out that Spain isn’t planning to outlaw warfare. I’ll let you know if there’s any movement on that though.