Positive Liberty

Scof has left a number of comments to my short note below on Cold War and the war on terrorism. I thought I’d bump his remarks to the top and reply in detail.

He writes,

…unless I misunderstand, it seem what is being said here is that we can’t “forget threats” but we shouldn’t go to war against those threats — this is silly to me.

What is being said here is that “forget threats” and “go to war against them” are two ends of a continuum, and that there are many, many alternatives in between. Personally, I find it rather arbitrary to conclude that we are not taking a threat seriously enough unless we’re shooting people. The Cold War is a perfectly good example of a conflict won against an undeniable enemy, using primarily diplomacy, cultural superiority, and moral suasion. (Yes, there were occasional shooting wars, but it’s hard to argue, for example, that Vietnam or Korea were really the proximate causes of the fall of communism.)

Wasn’t the Cold War particularly scary because of WMD’s?

The Cold War was particularly scary because of nuclear weapons. By contrast, the threat of biological, radiological, and chemical weapons has been grossly exaggerated.

During the entire Cold War, demonstrably evil people had thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, and they pointed them directly at the liberal nations of the world. People like Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. Monsters. Somehow, we kept relatively cool. We didn’t go around waterboarding people or asserting a president’s unreviewable right to strip citizens of their habeas corpus protections. We did a far better job back then of insisting that there was a moral difference between us and them. There were some definite slips in the Cold War, but the kind of grace under pressure shown more generally back then has often been lacking from the panicky response to 9/11.

Wouldn’t it be wise to remove [WMDs] from an avowed and active enemy (Iraq) of the United States who for over a decade didn’t comply with sanctions to remove them?

It depends what you mean, I think. Personally, I’d have no problem whatsoever with a bombing campaign against Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities. Indeed, if the military experts think that it would work, I’d be inclined to let them try. For two reasons, nuclear weapons are very different from chemical or biological ones.

First, nuclear weapons are harder to manufacture and much easier to detect; this production profile gives us a realistic chance of eliminating them with a relatively small effort. The same cannot be done with chemical weapons, which one can improvise from ordinary industrial materials. It can’t even be done in a country that we have occupied for the last three years. The idea of invading a country to eliminate chemical weapons makes as much sense as, say, invading a country to eliminate sulfur. Go ahead, try all you like.

(As a side note, we invaded Iraq in part because Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons on his own people, which was indeed horrible. But what do we do now — invade Iraq again? The Iraqi-versus-Iraqi brutality seen today is hardly different in scope from the brutality seen during Saddam’s regime.)

Second, nuclear weapons are vastly more destructive. So far as it is publicly known, no country in the world, not even the United States or the U.S.S.R. during the height of the Cold War, has ever had chemical weapons sufficient to dependably eliminate the entire population of even a single medium-sized city. Yet this is what a functioning nuclear weapon will do, every single time. As Jim Henley put it in one of the oldest but most prescient posts of the whole blogosphere,

If we’re going to think straight about WMDs, we need to clarify what will and what won’t serve to visit mass destruction. Once we start asking that question, chemical weapons appear to drop right off the list, and so do most germs.

Chemical weapons are creepy; don’t get Unqualified Offerings wrong on that score. But in terms of lethality, eh. For instance, one of the big items in the brief against Saddam Hussein is his destruction of the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons. Reading accounts of the massacre, it appears that, while it was horrific, and certainly a war crime, it remains that

o Geographically, Halabja was almost ideally suited to attack by chemicals, with mountains to the north, east and south.

o The Iraqi air force bombarded Halabja repeatedly throughout the morning of March 17, 1988.

o One account says the Iraqi Air Force also used cluster bombs - the wording suggests that these were not chemical agents but regular explosives.

o Another claims that Iraq used artillery on the western routes out of town to prevent escape.

o The same site puts Halabja’s population at 45,000.

o Casualties: 5,000 dead, 7,000 injured per that account.

Some of the injuries are horrific. Let no one mistake UO’s meaning here: Halabja was not nothing. But in uniquely suitable conditions - a fishbowl, no meaningful defenses, sustained bombardment - the kill rate was 10% and the casualty rate about 25%.

It’s just not possible for a terror attack to replicate those favorable conditions.

….You can kill people with anthrax. It doesn’t look like you can kill more people with anthrax than you can with exploding vehicles.

Smallpox has some promise as a genuine WMD, if you can deliver it. It’s very infectious, which anthrax isn’t. I think the estimates of as many as 100 million deaths in the event of an attack using smallpox in the US are the usual wild overestimates by parties with an interest in hyping the numbers. I suspect the country would quickly institute effective countermeasures to limit the spread of infection. I also think that those countermeasures would involve some nigh-ruinous economic costs. Worst-case scenario: a couple of million dead and many billions of dollars in damages.

That’s pretty massive destruction.

Smallpox, though, is extinct in the wild, and there are only two known samples of it remaining. Good riddance.

The cost-benefit analysis is therefore very, very different for nuclear weapons: It skews both toward lower costs (i.e., just bombing will often work against nukes, while even invasions can’t reliably stop chemical weapons manufacture) and also toward higher rewards (i.e., stopping a nuclear program eliminates a vastly greater threat).

But in the public mind, chemical, nuclear, and biological are all lumped together into “WMD,” an absurd package-deal if ever there was one. The public imagines chemical weapons wiping out whole population centers, which simply could not happen. They think of biological weapons — which are even more unreliable and harder to manufacture than chemical — and they picture The Stand, which is science fiction.

Insisting, then, that we faced an existential threat from Saddam Hussein’s crude chemical and biological weapons programs was both preposterous and dishonest: Arguments relying on this premise took a misconception latent in the public mind and played masterfully upon it to make the case for an unnecessary war. (As to nuclear weapons, a few well-timed falsehoods were sufficient to fill in that particular gap.) But the risks — remember the Tokyo subway attack? that killed twelve people? — were always fairly small, even in the vastly unlikely event that Saddam or any of his lackeys decided to cooperate with al Qaeda, whom they despised. Give your typical fanatic a gun, or an explosive belt, and he could easily take out more than twelve people.

So Saddam cheated on the U.N. resolutions. The proper response, again, would have been to selectively bomb the sites we thought were a problem. Europe would have whined, but they’d secretly have been happy that at least someone was taking care of things and propping up their beloved U.N. And the same would be true of many in the Muslim world, where the dictators are never so well-liked as you might imagine. A response proportional to the clearest infractions would have been vastly preferable to the months-long campaign of fearmongering and the massive, ineffective invasion that we got instead.

Wouldn’t it be wise to prevent a country (Iran) which has been causing terrorism across the Mideast via proxies Hizbollah and Hamas and the Quds force from acquiring the ability to make WMD’s? Even more so if such a country regularly spouts rhetoric that its “neighbor” Israel shouldn’t exist and the Holocaust never happened? Even more so because that country is also flouting UN/IAEA inspections - with the help of an increasingly authoritarian Russia?

At what point does such threats deserve to be confronted with more than papered diplomatic statements? Is it simply because most of their damage would be done in the MidEast (supposedly) that we should not use force to confront them?

I will say this: The American government has a responsibility to its own citizens first. It does not have any inherent responsibility to the citizens of any other nation — not Iraq, not Iran, not even Israel. We’re the ones for whom our social contract was devised; we’re the ones who should reap any direct benefits it may bestow.

Meanwhile, acting on this principle in a consistent way requires knowledge that I simply do not have, however, as most of the juicy stuff is classifed: Could we effectively stop or reduce a given threat, with an acceptably risk to our military? In the case of the Iranian nuclear program, Some observers are pessimistic, others less so, but it’s hard to say without better information.

Perhaps soon we can agree that we can learn a lesson here, not to misunderstand the threat we face. It is existential. The writings of the jihadists, Sunni or Shia, all largely echo the same theme as these words from Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.”

What makes an existential threat? It’s more than a bunch of angry words and a few fanatics with explosives. I would grant you, perhaps, that this is a threat upon our existence. But is it even a remotely credible one? If not, then “wishful” is a more apt descriptive than “existential.”

Here’s my question to you: What, exactly, would a successful “existential” attack on the United States look like? And how do we get from here to there? How many more 9/11s would it take before the United States said, “Okay, you know, you’re right. This freedom and democracy stuff is crap. Let’s all convert to Islam, establish a theocracy, lock up our women, and stone the homosexuals to death!”

One more? Two more? A hundred more? What if they nuked Los Angeles? Do you honestly — honestly — think that if LA were nuked, the liberals in the northeast would all turn to fundamentalist Islam? (My bet is that many conservatives would reach quite similar policy positions by way of fundamentalist Christianity, but that, following an initial panic, most would not. They’d be sensible enough to blame the militants, possibly panicked enough to blame all of Islam, but never delusional enough to blame American minorities.)

Not that I’d want to see even a single attack of similar magnitude, or of any magnitude. But consider the aftereffects, for a moment, on American culture. Are we really going to go over to the Dark Side?

I feel pretty confident when I say that This. Will. Not. Happen. Indeed, there is pretty much no scenario under which I can imagine the United States being converted to Islam, forcibly or otherwise. Still less can I imagine the United States being converted to militant fundamentalist Islam. And even less than that can I imagine the United States being converted to militant fundamentalist Islam through a campaign of terrorism. It’s all so preposterous that I wonder, when I hear the words “existential threat,” whether the people using the term actually understand or mean what they are saying.

The only way that we could become even remotely as evil as they are is if we panic to the point that we turn into a police state and deprive ourselves of our rights in the name of “getting tough” on terrorism. This is the only credible existential threat I see on the horizon.

Scenarios like these are easy to imagine, up to and including genocide. This would be horrible, and utterly evil — and ridiculously improbable, too — but I think these nightmares are far more realistic than seeing the American government overthrown in favor of an Islamic theocracy.

One other lesson to learn from the Cold War is the cultural pathology that leads to a double standard in the West of vehemently criticizing ourselves whilst paying much less heed, and outrage, towards what our enemy is doing. “Western “insults” to Islam — which most of the time are, as in the cartoon controversy or the Pope’s recent remarks, exercises in the precious Western value of free speech — are decried by apologists. Yet the rankest anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slander in Muslim lands, most of it emanating from government-sanctioned media or the religious establishment, are mostly ignored.

The liberals that I tend to read have not acted this way, and I recommend to you the practice of reading only the smartest of your ideological opponents. Consider Hilzoy’s response to the Danish cartoons, which I would fault only in that I don’t think the government of Denmark had any business apologizing. But if she were running the government, she would have let the contest continue, protected the rights of the editors, and insisted on only nonviolent responses — even if she would not have sponsored it as an editor. (Personally, I might have sponsored the contest as an editor, since I’m not above occasionally poking fun at religion. But I recognize that this is a personal decision and a personal opinion, not something on which to base public policy. While you’re at Obsidian Wings, you should also see her reassessment of the Iraq War, with which I agree entirely.)

Also, it’s worth remembering that you and I are members of Western society, not of Islamic society. We therefore have many reasons to discuss and criticize the former, but fewer reasons for criticizing the latter. This remains true even if the offenses of the latter are more serious to us in the purely abstract sense.

Why? First, we are more likely to be attentively listened to by our fellow westerners. Second, we’re more likely to understand what’s going on and therefore make more cogent criticisms. Third, we of the West are more likely to be implicated in a controversy if it arises within the West than elsewhere (Angry demonstrations pitting Sunni vs Shia? Without knowing more, it’s hard to see how they will affect me. Angry demonstrations pitting gays versus Christians? Now we’re getting somewhere). Fourth, Westerners tend strongly to care about the West in a way that, to be honest, we don’t care about Islam. It’s our intellectual and moral home, and we criticize it out of concern for its well-being, not out of some secret sympathies for foreign radicals.

I talk and think about the West so much not because I hate it, but because it’s my home. Simple as that.

Have some leftists gone too far in condemning free expression, in the name of placating radical Islam? You bet they have. Then again, some right-wingers have done precisely the same; consider Dinesh D’Souza and many others of the Christian right, who blame Islamofascism, preposterously, on the West’s many freedoms. This is a self-defeating approach and is no different from the appeasement of the far left.

Also, you should know that in my professional life I happen to be working to peacefully spread the ideas of individual liberty in the Arabic-speaking world. A typical day at the office consists of talking with publishers, arranging permissions to translate, suggesting articles and features for Cato’s Arabic web projects, documenting op-eds and other literature that appear in the English and Arabic press, writing letters and sending books to all parts of the developing world, reading blogs and opinion pieces relevant to the cause, and in general helping to coordinate an educational effort taking place across the globe.

Although I recognize that I am a part of the West, and that I am therefore subject to some doubt by non-Westerners, I am also a citizen of the world, and I am one of the last people who could possibly be accused of negligence with regard to individual liberty for Muslims. Have conservatives been doing anything even remotely similar? Or have they just been engaging in character assassination and anti-Muslim grousing? (When they’re not, D’Souza-style, joining forces with the enemy and attacking American freedoms…)

The Cold War proved civilizations will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together. Another lesson is that we saw millions of noble Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Czechs as enslaved under autocracy and a hateful ideology, and in need of democracy before they could confront the Communist terror in their midst.

But until the Wall fell, we did not send billions in aid to their Eastern European dictatorships nor travel freely to Prague or Warsaw nor admit millions of Communist-ruled Bulgarians and Albanians onto our shores.

But it’s worth pointing out that during the Cold War we did admit hundreds of thousands of Cubans, that is, until Cuba — not the U.S. — stopped allowing them to come over. Since then, nearly all of these new arrivals have become as American as anyone else, and they have worked tirelessly for freedom in Cuba. Our past treatment of Cuba ought to be a model for us — Let’s allow more Muslims to come to the United States, where nearly all of them will acquire a taste for freedom if they don’t have one already. Let’s shame the Islamofascists by opening our doors to the oppressed, and by seeing just how many people we can attract.

Sure, there may be a few bad apples coming over, but it’s against all principles of justice to deprive hundreds of thousands of people of their freedom, or of the chance to start a new life as Americans, for fear that some small fraction of them will do evil. It’s also against our best interests to turn away the people who may one day be entrepreneurs, educators, and ambassadors of freedom to the rest of the world: Vibrant, successful American immigrant communities from Arab and Muslim countries tell the rest of the world that Arabs and Muslims have nothing to fear from the United States.

Do they think we are monsters? Let those who waver look at how Muslims are treated in the United States. If they are honest, they will realize that it’s vastly better than what Muslims often do to one another elsewhere.

Meanwhile, you’ll get no argument from me on foreign aid. Foreign aid chiefly helps whatever government is in power, and only occasionally or incidentally helps the people it is supposed to help. I’d abolish it all if I could. Yes, even food aid.

Yet the West’s MidEast policy up to 9/11 was opposite: Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies, alliances of convenience with dictatorships (which, with Egypt for example, kind of has worked), triangulation with Middle Eastern patrons of terror, stopping the slaughter of Muslims in Kosovo, Shia Muslims in Afghanistan by the Taliban, Muslims starving in Somalia — and of course blaming the Jews– and still the threat has not abated.

I have no argument whatsoever on the cash grants to Arab autocracies; we should never have been doing this. There is a factual misconception here regarding immigration, however. Immigration from ethnically Arab countries has actually changed very little since 2001. This surprised me, too, when I was researching the topic:

Many assume that the immigration of Arabs to the United States decreased after 9/11. However, the numbers of those admitted as immigrants or those who became legal permanent residents from Arabic-speaking countries has remained level at around four percent of the total number of foreign nationals admitted as immigrants to the United States, even though there was a drop in 2003. In 2005, over 4,000 nationals from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Somalia, and Sudan, in addition to an unknown number of Palestinians, became permanent residents (see Table 2).

What has dropped drastically post-9/11 is the number of nonimmigrants who are issued visas and admitted to the United States as tourists, students, or temporary workers. The largest numerical drop between 2000 and 2004 (70 percent) has been in the number of tourist and business visas issued to individuals from Gulf countries, which include Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

Another surprising fact is that the majority (63%) of Arabic-speaking immigrants are Christians, not Muslims.

Whether visa restrictions will have long-term effects on immigration remains to be seen; it’s my guess, though, that many people become more likely to immigrate later in life if they had experience in the United States as students or temporary workers. In any event, I would also say that the Arab and Muslim immigrants we have ended up attracting are overwhelmingly the sort of people we want:

Arab Muslims, both Sunni and Shi’ite, continue to comprise a significant proportion of the Islamic community in America. Increasingly, they are highly educated, successful professionals who are also leaders in the development of a transnational, transethnic American Islam. In addition, Turks, Eastern Europeans, and emigres from numerous African nations including Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Cameroon, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Tanzania, and many others are highly visible members of the complex community that constitutes the American umma. Not only are immigrant Muslims working out how to relate to and work with each other effectively, but they also face the question of how to coalesce with members of various African-American Muslim movements. Recent African immigrants sometimes find the mix of religion and ethnicity particularly complicating.

In the early days of Arab immigration to America around the turn of the century, many Muslims - like first-generation immigrants of all nationalities - often seized the opportunity to better themselves through menial work such as migrant labor, petty merchandising, or mining. Many Arab Muslims became peddlers, a trade requiring little in the way of language skill, training, or capital. Others served as laborers on work gangs such as those involved in the rapidly expanding business of railroad construction in the West. As Muslim women began to join male immigrants in America, they often found employment in mills and factories, where they worked long hours under very difficult conditions. These early years were hard for Muslims in America; many suffered from loneliness, poverty, lack of English, and the absence of extended family and co-religionists.

Gradually, however, as they stayed longer, more and more Muslims realized that returning home was no longer a viable possibility, and they began to settle into the American context. They married one way or another - young men who could not find Muslim partners imported their brides from their home country or, in some cases, married outside the faith. They began to find employment in more permanent kinds of businesses, often relying on traditional skills to begin restaurants, coffeehouses, bakeries, and grocery stores. They learned English, began to become more economically independent, and sought out other Muslims for the formation of communities in which they could begin the religious education of their children.

This is the American story, whatever the language, skin color, or religion. This is what has worked for America in the past — with Irish, Germans, Jews, Poles, Asians, Latinos…

You come here dirt poor, badly educated, not speaking English, having lived your whole life under some brutal thugocracy.

You work hard, earn money, and — in a refreshing change of pace — you get to keep it.

You learn the local language not because anyone forces you to — shades of the Old World — but because you’ve got every financial reason to do so.

Your kids go to school, graduate, get good jobs, and marry someone with strange religious beliefs.

You get over it.

You learn how to be tolerant of others, partly because others tolerated you, and partly because in America it’s relatively hard to use the government to achieve an intolerant political agenda: We’re each from somewhere else; all of us are members of ethnic minorities, nearly all of which are non-native, and this limits the political or rhetorical power of any of us against anyone else.

Yes, of course, there are instances of anti-immigrant bigotry. But besides being collectivist, racist nonsense, over here they are hypocritical and self-evidently foolish collectivist, racist nonsense. It can be hard to dismiss a guy whose ancestors have lived in France for the last two thousand years. Yet it’s easy to laugh at the nativist pretensions of someone whose grandparents were boat people.

As author Paul Barrett put it,

– materially, educationally — Americans tend to begin to drop their prejudices and accept the “newcomers” as fellow achievers — the American Dream of success. The fact that so many Americans are the children of immigrants has helped ease the adjustment of Muslims. In France, a Muslim immigrant will probably never be fully accepted as a Frenchman. In the U.S., if you do well, the neighbors tend to respect that and before long, the immigrant is at minimum a Something-American.

If America really is exceptional, if it really is better than any country in the world, as conservatives like to assert, then it is only better because “America” is an ideal that anyone at all can aspire to.

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