"I would like to say 'This book is written to the glory of God', but nowadays this would be the trick of a cheat, i.e., it would not be correctly understood."--Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."--Soren Kierkegaard
Britain, to be exact. In case you missed it, the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq was true and could be trusted, according to the British government. Well, not according to the British government officially, you understand.
The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt. Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet.
But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust".
Another statistician agreed the method was "tried and tested."
What does this mean?
If the Lancet survey is right, then 2.5% of the Iraqi population -- an average of more than 500 people a day - have been killed since the start of the war.
Couple that with this, and what else can you say but that Iraq is better off now. Right?
WASHINGTON — Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.
When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000.
Far from a vague statistic, the death toll is painfully real for many Americans. Seventeen percent in the poll know someone who has been killed or wounded in Iraq. And among adults under 35, those closest to the ages of those deployed, 27 percent know someone who has been killed or wounded.
For Daniel Herman, a lawyer in New Castle, Pa., a co-worker's nephew is the human face of the dead.
The number of Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down, and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans' tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.
Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone.
Among those polled for the AP survey, however, the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The median is the point at which half the estimates were higher and half lower.
Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist who tracks public opinion on war casualties, said a better understanding of the Iraqi death toll probably wouldn't change already negative public attitudes toward the war much. People in democracies generally don't shy away from inflicting civilian casualties, he said, and they may be even more tolerant of them in situations such as Iraq, where many of the civilian deaths are caused by other Iraqis.
"You have to look at who's doing the killing," said Neal Crawford, a restaurant manager in Suttons Bay, Mich., who guessed that about 10,000 Iraqis had been killed. "If these people are dying because a roadside bomb goes off or if there's an insurgent attack in a marketplace, it's an unfortunate circumstance of war _ people die."
Gelpi said that while Americans may not view Iraqi deaths through the same prism as American losses, they may use the Iraqi death toll to gauge progress, or lack thereof, on the U.S. effort to promote a stable, secure democracy in Iraq.
To many, he said, "the fact that so many are being killed is an indication that we're not succeeding."
But therein lies the rub - that in Iraq today, insecurity has made it almost inhumanly difficult to conduct proper research on the harms and benefits of war. Indeed, what both media and pundits seem to never highlight as a deeply troubling anomaly is that, were it not for the work of a few courageous researchers such as the Hopkins/Mustansiriya University team, or the painstaking work of concerned members of the citizenry such as the Iraqi Body Count project, quantifying the effects of the U.S.-led intervention on human health would largely be a matter of divination.
Twenty-four hours later, the Lancet study is fast disappearing off the news headlines. Dismissing and, worse, ignoring this and other alarming findings simply because "they sound wrong" is no way to move forward - if they can't be proven wrong (or partly wrong) on scientific grounds, they must certainly stand, until better evidence emerges.
....
Indeed, coalition powers should, in the interest of public accountability and the very success of their mission in Iraq, promote and facilitate more accurate and transparent monitoring of all humanitarian law violations, and of the true effects of violence on Iraqi civilian health.
"The Lancet study estimated deaths of Iraqi civilians to be over 100,000....This is much lower [higher] than Iraq Body Count, but then, they are basing their numbers on reports, not on the kind of data gathering that the Lancet study was able to perform."
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions likely to result from Ivan Ilych's death, the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, "it is he who is dead and not I."
Each one thought or felt, "Well, he's dead but I'm alive!"
So I was in a bookstore the other evening thumbing the remaining copy of Lapham's Quarterly, where I came across Christopher Hitchens' piece on Mother Teresa. It was as harsh as I'd heard it was (I'd never read it before, and unfortunately it is not available online), and it relied mostly on the work of Robin Fox in an article about Mother Teresa for the Lancet. It was, I've since learned, an excerpt from a book, apparently more like a long pamphlet, which was Hitchens' attack on Mother Teresa and her work with the poor in India.
Interestingly, in his essay in that issue Lewis Lapham notes that: "the word philanthropy first appears in Western thought in the fifth century BC, in Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound to name an act of rebellion and denote the crime of treason."
I'm not so interested in the controversy surrounding Hitchens' critique of Mother Teresa, except as it reveals the fundamental distinction in thinking between the religious leader and the religion critic. A little Google searching reveals Simon Leys (pen name of Pierre Ryckmans) was Hitchens' bete noir on this subject. The only argument by Leys I can find on-line (I'm a lazy researcher) references a complete review of Hitchens' tirade against Mother Teresa, but I can't find it on-line. Apparently it exists in a book of Leys' collected essays, and includes this reference to Hitchens:
Mother Teresa is not a philanthropist. She is a Christian. A philanthropist is a person who has a fondness for anthropoids. A Christian is a person who loves Christ.
That is a perspective that has to be kept in mind when dealing with someone like the Blessed Teresa. Saints are very strange persons to most of us. Of her love of Christ, the reviewer of Leys' book of essays goes on to say:
This "weird belief that a dead man called Jesus is still alive should command all the deeds and all thoughts of a Christian", writes Leys, "is the key to understanding Mother Teresa's vocation". Whether or not you agree with Hitchens's assertion that religion should not intrude on good works, Leys's understanding of basic Christian doctrine exposes the totalising character - and so the narrowness - of the journalist's rationalism.
It is that "totalising character...of the journalist's rationalism" that intrigues me. Ultimately, one cannot argue that Hitchens is wrong and Leys is right, nor vice versa. We are talking about two irreconcilable views of reality; and one cannot appropriate the other. We are back to Wittgenstein's observations on believers:
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).
Or perhaps more to the point:
In religion every level of discourse must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.
In Wittgenstein's terms language games are not wrong or right, valid or invalid: there can be violations of the rules of one "game," but what makes sense in one game may be nonsense in another. Establishing a hierarchy of systems, however, is impossible.
Mother Teresa admitted, in a famous series of BBC interviews, that she was not really doing all that much to ease the lot of the poor in India. The editor of the Lancet, visiting her Home for the Dying in 1994, reported that stocks of medicine were insufficient, and that not enough was done to cure the sick or ease the pain of the dying. But Mother Teresa believed it was not “things” her patients needed; they needed to feel wanted, and to die at peace with God. The secular view of death, as something to be resisted, met, in Mother Teresa, the religious view that death should be joyfully surrendered to. Neither side could hope to understand the other.
The obituary notes that Mother Teresa's order was a Franciscan one, "dedicated on Franciscan principles to serving the destitute and dying in the slums." What little knowledge I have of Francis (not the plaster saint, but the real one) tells me she lived in strict accordance with his understanding of God, and no, it is not one most of us would find either pleasant or rational.
Which is the point: not to rebut Hitchens (others have done that more ably than I can), or to argue for the saintliness of Teresa (again, others have done so beyond my abilities). It is to point out the tension between God and the world. When we say Jesus died on the cross for our sins, it makes Jesus more comfortable for us. It means he did it for us, much the way we imagine soldiers now die for our freedom. It's a comforting mistake in understanding. But if we follow Paul's teachings, we know Jesus died for faithfulness to God; and that is a stranger and harsher thing by far than dying for us, for our sins.
It makes God wholly Other, and frighteningly other, too. It creates a tension, and not even a tension we can think of as a creative tension.
"The motif of the circle will obsess us through this cycle of lectures."
...
"Now the gift, if there is any, would no doubt be related to economy. One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this relation to economy, even to the money economy. But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return? If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation, of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics the gift must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible.
"Not impossible but the impossible. The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible. It is proposed that we begin by this."
--Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7.
Sorry to interrupt with that long quotation, but this idea must be placed precisely in context. The presence of the wholly Other in our lives disrupts all notions of economy, or a circle, of payment and reward, cause and effect. The wholly Other breaks the circle, and gives only a gift. But that gift is terrible and frightening from the view of the world; it costs not less than everything, as the poet said, and that seems no gift at all. However, the cost is what is measured by the world; it is not an aspect of the gift. This is a truly disruptive tension, a truly decisive break. This sets aside classical soteriology with its economy of repentance and redemption, payment in blood and gain in eternal life.
"A Christian is a person who loves Christ."
Yes. And what a strange, strange person that is. Such a person truly makes an act of philanthropy an act of rebellion and a crime of treason. "Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, whoever does such things." There's a reason those lines come from the "Hymn to Reason."
RFK Jr. says you can more easily afford groceries if you start eating liver instead of beef. If grocery prices are cheaper like Trump says, then why is his administration constantly telling you cut corners or go without? pic.twitter.com/evfKVQvlWE
And when demand drives the price of liver up? Or vitamin A toxicity flares up in the population that also took ivermectin to cure Covid? No big, right?
I guess we are just paying these people to fly around making workout videos and attending sporting events. pic.twitter.com/N0AxhcsK4v
But therein lies the rub - that in Iraq today, insecurity has made it almost inhumanly difficult to conduct proper research on the harms and benefits of war. Indeed, what both media and pundits seem to never highlight as a deeply troubling anomaly is that, were it not for the work of a few courageous researchers such as the Hopkins/Mustansiriya University team, or the painstaking work of concerned members of the citizenry such as the Iraqi Body Count project, quantifying the effects of the U.S.-led intervention on human health would largely be a matter of divination.
Twenty-four hours later, the Lancet study is fast disappearing off the news headlines. Dismissing and, worse, ignoring this and other alarming findings simply because "they sound wrong" is no way to move forward - if they can't be proven wrong (or partly wrong) on scientific grounds, they must certainly stand, until better evidence emerges.
Indeed, coalition powers should, in the interest of public accountability and the very success of their mission in Iraq, promote and facilitate more accurate and transparent monitoring of all humanitarian law violations, and of the true effects of violence on Iraqi civilian health.
But transparency seems to be precisely what the coalition powers do not want.
Finally connected that line to this war, yesterday. And this morning, serendipitously (or not; depends on your theology), Holden puts me in touch with some of the numbers, which are very bad:
Since July, the number of bodies counted at the mortuary [in Baghdad] has hovered around 1,000, up from 596 in March. Three quarters are male, most aged between 15 and 45.
"We have to cope with extraordinary numbers," said Faed Bakr, the facility's director.
Those are monthly numbers, by the way.
The Lancet study estimated deaths of Iraqi civilians to be over 100,000, a number widely criticized as wildly inaccurate. Apparently not, if you have the patience to listen to "What's in a Number?" from This American Life. The procedure used to calculate that figure is quite convincing, once you know what was done.
This is much lower than Iraq Body Count , but then, they are basing their numbers on reports, not on the kind of data gathering that the Lancet study was able to perform.
Number of U.S. dead, by the way, is 2048 this morning. Number of U.S. wounded, per DOD: 15, 220.
No telling what the number of Iraqi wounded are.
And proof that irony is not dead. I Googled this scripture, the easier to drop it in here. Where do I find it? Aggain, serendipity (or not):"Sunday School Sources." That's right; this is what we teach our children. Until we teach them something else; something like: "But we don't really mean it."
Appropriately, it is from Matthew, and the Sermon on the Mount (and it's the KJV) (And why is it, when we have this teaching, that we keep thinking death will teach us anything? Or teach anyone else, for that matter?):
Matthew 5:43-48 43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate your enemy. 44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; 45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? 47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? 48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (KJV)
“A Million Iraqis have been displaced," Heuvel said. "What we have done to that country is a crime.”
“What we have done to that country?” Kristol hit back. “President Bush made mistakes, he was punished for those mistakes electorally as he should have been in 2006, and perhaps in 2008. He also had the courage to order the surge in 2007, which made up for those mistakes, and left things peaceful.”
Yes, punishment has been handed out. What more could we expect?
And I still stand by the Lancet study that at least 655,000, or 2.5% of the population of Iraq, was killed due to our invasion and subsequent war.
Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right, Bill? Besides, Bush was punished at the polls for that; twice.
This NYT Magazine article ("The Evangelical Crackup") is allowing me to trot out all my hobbyhorses. Begin with what I regard as a truly shameful quote:
“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”
Good? Good? 4 million people turned into refugees; 600,000+ dead, per the Lancet study, as of 2006? 'a country completely eliminated and the region plunged into chaos from which there seems to be no good recovery? This is as much "good" as evangelicals can do? Now they'll just wash their hands of it and walk away?
Truly, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
But that is just one person's opinion; it cannot be fairly attributed to others. In other news in the article, some opinions do seem to be more widely shared:
[Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C.] told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.” (It’s a formulation that comes up a lot in evangelical circles these days.)
In my early days commenting on blogs I was forced, repeatedly, to point out I was religious not because I was against something, but because I was for the Gospels. And I pointed out that politics, being about power, was all about defending a position against other positions, which meant you were always more against something, or someone, than for someone or something. Interesting to see that coming from a person who would consider me quite liberal, both politically and theologically.
And if this is right, evangelical churches are becoming more mainstream by the day. Indeed, this could almost be said to parallel the experience of the ancestor churches of the United Church of Christ, which both started out as very conservative, and have by now become quite liberal and socially active:
For the conservative Christian leadership, what is most worrisome about the evangelical disappointment with President Bush is that it coincides with a widening philosophical rift. Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.
But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.
Of course, that shift to looking like the present-day UCC may take another 100 years or so, but stranger things have happened. And yeah, it happens as people become more a part of the social mainstream:
Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,” John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.”
Still, in case you were wondering, Jimmy Carter can no longer be considered "serious:"
“I think that a superpower ought to be the exemplification of a commitment to peace,” Carter told Hybels, who nodded along. “I would like for anyone in the world that’s threatened with conflict to say to themselves immediately: ‘Why don’t we go to Washington? They believe in peace and they will help us get peace.’ ” Carter added: “This is just a simple but important extrapolation from what a human being ought to do, and what a human being ought to do is what Jesus Christ did, who was a champion of peace.”
I mean, how could we do that an keep GE and Lockheed and all the other defense contractors in business?
I do have to say that Hybels is quoted in this article advocating for community change, but I've studied his model of ministry in seminary, and it's effectiveness as a change agent is dubious at best. His heart is in the right place, but as I've mentioned before, his results don't bear out his design. Changing hearts and minds is a much more difficult process than anyone appreciates until you try it, and I honestly believe the model of Jesus: an itinerant preacher who was executed for being a political troublemaker, is not an accidental model. Nor is it possible to reconcile it with being the leader of a mega-church; it's difficult even to reconcile it with being the pastor of a small church. It's back to that church of meaning and belonging v. church of sacrifice for meaning and belonging. Things are changing in the evangelical community, no doubt; but the more things change, the more they remain the same.
So what comes of this? I've seen it all before. The evangelical rise mirrored the power of very conservative Baptist churches in East Texas, where I grew up. For awhile the empahsis was on social issues, like desegregation or drug use or teenage sex and "free love." Then that ebbed, and even Southern Baptists I knew started to wonder about the importance of such issues in their daily, and their spiritual, lives. The pendulum just swings, back and forth. Which is not, in itself, a good thing either. To imagine you are on a swinging pendulum is to abandon all responsibility for your life and turn it over to a clockwork mechanism you can neither speed up nor slow down. There is a movement here, but it is nothing more than the natural movement of exhaustion, the flow of power out of the hands of those who thought they wielded it into other hands, who in turn will think they are in control.
And so it will always be, for those who think power is the ultimate, or even the penultimate, answer.
And then we go after “Better Homes and Gardens” for not publishing articles about “lesser homes and gardens.”
[RFK, Jr.] had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)
He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.
“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”
As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.
Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”
Proving once again Kennedy is neither a lawyer nor a scientist, because tort law nor racketeering law apply to any of his complaints. There are also issues of standing (how is he harmed?) and that pesky First Amendment. And the DOJ lawyers threatening to investigate such journals for “bias” are likely to have their licenses coming under review for abusive and unethical behavior, including abuse of authority. The free market and First Amendment solutions to journals not publishing your articles is to start your own journal. If you can’t get Poetry Magazine to publish your poetry, you can’t sue them for bias against poetasters. The government certainly can’t investigate journals (or anyone/thing) groundlessly. That’s grounds for any government lawyers to lose their licenses.
These people are literally too stupid to understand how stupid they are.
In the coming months and years, there will really be two pandemics in America. One will be disruptive and frightening to its victims, but thanks to their existing advantages and lucky near misses with the virus, they will likely emerge from it relatively stable—physically, psychologically, and financially. The other pandemic, though, will devastate those who survive it, leaving lasting scars and altering life courses.
I also think it is optimistic to imagine it will make any fundamental change to American society. Mostly because it describes America before the pandemic. Hell, it describes America before the Civil War, and the changes that war wrought didn't begin to become significant until the 1960's, and some of that significance (buh-bye, VRA. The Roberts Court says you're a relic of a bygone era) has already been eliminated.
Stephen Moore, on and off Trump adviser who’s been advocating for ending the shutdowns, on the new jobless numbers: "The new unemployment numbers with more than 20 million Americans losing their jobs should be a five alarm wake up call for Washington and the nation's governors”
DR OZ: "Schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3%, in terms of total mortality. Any, you know, any life is a life lost, but ... that might be a tradeoff some folks would consider." 😳 pic.twitter.com/aifMeKTsIv
I read this morning of a study conducted a year ago, where the hypothetical was a pandemic with anthrax. The result that stuck with me was that if there was a 0.01% chance of getting anthrax, would the participants in the study be willing to take that risk to return to "normal"? The answer was: "No." The author of the study pointed out that no amount of risk was acceptable to the participants in the study, a point he thinks carries over to the present crisis. Of course, faced with the stark reality of unemployment v. health, what will people choose? And what should we ask them to choose?
“They’re telling other old people, ‘Yeah, you’re going to have to die, get over it, we got to get Wall Street started again,'” he said. “But you’re not going to see them have family reunions in a barn in central Louisiana… they know they don’t want their family members to die. They’re going to stay cloistered behind the gates of their homes. They’re going to stay cloistered in the United States Senate.”
Not too many people are going to choose that, especially just to boost the stock portfolios of rich white men (stocks are at some point based on business production, not just speculation). But shall we, like Dr. Oz, ask parents to put their children at risk so schools and day-care can open, and parents can go back to work? Shall we ask them, and expect them to comply?
[Machiavelli] also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."
We have gladly slaughtered hundreds of thousands (mostly by willfully denying the slaughter) in Afghanistan and Iraq (I stand by the studies published in the Lancet), and sacrificed thousands of American lives as well (for which we are supposed to feel greater concern) for the sake of oil and ideas. And all, of course, without serious fear of revenge (although fear of retaliation has been used to justify our actions, and is still used to justify our military operations to this day). I've often noted that if you want to be disbarred, at least in Texas, just mess with your client's money. Even sleeping through a murder trial won't get you removed from the bar, but taking $100 of your client's money for your own purposes will.
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.
Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect. And shortsighted writers admire his deeds from one point of view and from another condemn the principal cause of them. That it is true his other virtues would not have been sufficient for him may be proved by the case of Scipio, that most excellent man, not of his own times but within the memory of man, against whom, nevertheless, his army rebelled in Spain; this arose from nothing but his too great forbearance, which gave his soldiers more licence than is consistent with military discipline. For this he was upbraided in the Senate by Fabius Maximus, and called the corrupter of the Roman soldiery. The Locrians were laid waste by a legate of Scipio, yet they were not avenged by him, nor was the insolence of the legate punished, owing entirely to his easy nature. Insomuch that someone in the Senate, wishing to excuse him, said there were many men who knew much better how not to err than to correct the errors of others. This disposition, if he had been continued in the command, would have destroyed in time the fame and glory of Scipio; but, he being under the control of the Senate, this injurious characteristic not only concealed itself, but contributed to his glory.
EVERY one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are about. Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer. If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them. Nor will there ever be wanting to a prince legitimate reasons to excuse this nonobservance. Of this endless modern examples could be given, showing how many treaties and engagements have been made void and of no effect through the faithlessness of princes; and he who has known best how to employ the fox has succeeded best.
But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived. One recent example I cannot pass over in silence. Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, nor ever thought of doing otherwise, and he always found victims; for there never was a man who had greater power in asserting, or who with greater oaths would affirm a thing, yet would observe it less; nevertheless his deceits always succeeded according to his wishes, because he well understood this side of mankind.
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. Therefore it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.
For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time.
Niebuhr:
The selfishness of nations is proverbial. It was a dictum of George Washington that nations were not to be trusted beyond their own interest. "No state," declares a German author, "have ever entered a treaty for any reason other than self interest," and adds: "A statesman who has any other motive deserves to be hung." "In every part of the world," said Professor Dickey, "where British interests are at stake, I am in favor of advancing these interests even at the cost of war. The only qualification I admit is that the country we desire to annex or take under our protection should be calculated to confer a tangible advantage upon the British Empire." National ambitions are not always avowed as honestly as this, as we shall see later, but that is a fair statement of the actual facts, which need hardly be elaborated for any student of history. (p. 84)
As for relationships between nations:
It is of course possible that the rational interest in international justice may become, on occasion, so widespread and influential that it will affect the diplomacy of states. But this is not usual. In other words the mind, which places a restraint upon impulses in individual life, exists only in a very inchoate form in the nation. It is, moreover, much more remote from the will of the nation than in private individuals; for the government expresses the national will, and that will is moved by the emotions of the populace and the prudential self-interest of dominant economic classes. Theoretically it is possible to have a national electorate so intelligent, that the popular impulses and the ulterior interests of special groups are brought under the control of a national mind. But practically the rational understanding of political issues remains such a minimum force that national unity of action can be achieved only upon such projects as are either initiated by the self-interest of the dominant groups, in control of the government, or supported by the popular emotions and hysterias which from time to time run through a nation. In other words the nation is a corporate unity, held together much more by force and emotion than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism, and no self-criticism without the rational capacity of self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical. Even those tendencies toward self-criticism which do express themselves are usually thwarted by the governing classes and by a certain instinct for unity in society itself. For self-criticism is a kind of disunity, which the feeble mind of a nation finds difficulty in distinguishing from dangerous forms of inner conflict. So nations crucify their moral rebels with their criminals on Golgotha, not being able to distinguish between the moral idealism which surpasses, and the anti-social conduct which falls below, that moral mediocrity on the level of which every society unifies its life.... [A]s Tyrell the Catholic modernist observed..."So far as society has a self...it must be self-assertive, proud, self-complacent, and egotistical." (p. 87-89)
For Macchiavelli, of course, "society" is the Prince.
What Niebuhr was arguing against was the idea of a "Christian nation," of a country (not a group of people) that would adhere to Christian principles. Those principles require sacrifice and "moral idealism" which, as Niebuhr points out, no country can aspire to or even hope to achieve. Consider how easily emotions have been stirred in this country just since 9/11. Or that I received an e-mail the other day once again denouncing "Hanoi" Jane Fonda (the past really isn't over, especially for those of us who remember "Hanoi" Jane). The Jane Fonda example is a perfect example of the "difficulty in distinguishing...dangerous forms of inner conflict." Indeed, you could say the same about the entire Vietnam War, a conflict still alive and well for those of us who lived through it, but already ancient history and a unitary, settled issue ("College protests ended the war and everybody knows it was unjust!") to those with no memory of it. Some still think Jane Fonda committed treason; much simpler to see it that way. Some don't; and many, of course, know nothing about it, or consider it at best a minor historical footnote. But if Fonda is not guilty of treason for what she did during the war, what meaning does treason have? And if some are not guilty of war crimes, or at least violations of U.S. law, for committing and directing torture, what meaning do the laws have? Perhaps it's just a matter of whose ox is being gored. Perhaps it is a matter of whether the nation acts, or demands action. Clearly it is not a matter of individual choice, except for the individuals who have the power, or who exert the influence of the dominant class.
I see something similar in the accepted history of World War II. You need only watch "The Best Years of Our Lives" to see characters who declare a new depression will follow the end of that war, and that the war itself was unjust and unnecessary and a conspiracy among dark powers, to realize the picture even then was not so simple, nor the national mind so clear and rational and united, as we imagine. To this day we imagine that war as an ethical exercise, especially as we use it to justify new wars because "freedom is not free!", or some such nonsense. Of course, no one in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, for that matter, threatens my freedom. As Osama bin Laden reportedly said, if he was fighting us because he hated our freedoms, why didn't he attack Sweden? But there was nothing ethical about World War II; it wasn't fought to end the Holocaust and establish the nation of Israel. It wasn't even fought to keep us free. We fought because we were attacked, and for no other reason. We have since decided it meant we must remain ever vigilant and truly make the world safe for democracy, and from that delusion came all of our post-war and Cold War history, right down to the current actions in Libya.
The nation Nieubuhr describes is little different from the prince Macchiavelli describes. Both must act in the interests of self-preservation, but preservation of a larger group, not of a small, homogeneous group. That reality is its own set of problems. The other set of problems comes when we cover our self-interest in self-justification, in a "higher purpose," in the decorative colors of a purpose other than our selfish ones. Perhaps at this point its timely to remember the words of Niebuhr far less famous than his "Serenity Prayer," but more appropriate:
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
“Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
“Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.
“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.
“Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."
The Trump administration is formally shutting down the United States Agency for International Development today, after cancelling 83% of its programs earlier this year.
The administration says the agency has misspent billions in funds and "has little to show since the end of the Cold War."
That argument clashes with a new study published Monday in the medical journal, the Lancet. The study estimates that USAID programs have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades. The researchers also estimate that if the current cuts continue through 2030, 14 million people who might have otherwise lived could die.
Just another day on @Twitter where a chemistry professor @Cornell with 80k+ followers is suggesting that he would kill 17 "elite scientists" for a paper they wrote in @TheLancet in 2020. Cheered on by followers.
— Kristian G. Andersen (@K_G_Andersen) June 9, 2022
A group of people largely unknown to each other rally around the idea that another, smaller group, equally unknown to them, is responsible for their discomfort and as a consequence wish that group ill?
Our country has gone to war on less. Our politicians do as much almost every day. This football coach did it just this week:
Washington Commanders Defensive Coordinator Jack Del Rio says there are “two standards” between Black Lives Matter protests and January 6th:
“We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re gonna make that a major deal.” pic.twitter.com/Nd5pd0mhTc
One group matters, one group doesn’t. Unacceptable? Clearly it should be, but it isn’t.
Besides, we’re dealing with several levels of abstraction. 80,000 followers is a number, not a conceivable set of individuals. It’s a placeholder for “large.” We literally can’t imagine it concretely, so we agree it stands in for “many.” 17 we grasp more easily, but who were they? Individuals, or just a group of “they”? And what are they responsible for? A letter in The Lancet? How many of these followers have read it? How many of that group understood it? No; it is all abstraction: the claim, the threat, the approval. It is all the actions of children afraid of the dark. The dark is an abstraction. It is where we place our fears. We don’t fear the concrete; we fear what we abstract from the concrete.
Which is why we’d all be better off if we stayed off social media, and dealt with the life and the individuals around us. As Wendell Berry advised long ago: think locally, act locally. It’s as much as you can ever hope to do.
Any more than that, and you just turn people into things.
Les Roberts has what is truly the last word on the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. He notes that their report (he is a co-author) indicates the death toll in Iraq is 4 times higher than it was before the invasion, and proposes an easy check of their study. Any interested journalist can go to 4 or 5 cemetery operators around Iraq and ask them if there has been an increase in burials since the invasion, and review the numbers (as he helpfully points out, cemetery operators keep records) to determine by how much they have increased.
If the study is just a guess, if it is "not credible," that can easily be assessed.
He also points out that in 90-95% of the cases, families were able to produce death certificates. Very little of their evidence is purely anecdotal, in other words. And it is the methodology used by the US government in counting the dead in Kosovo, and it trains NGO's to use this methodology to determine death rates in times of war. He is sure there is less than a 2% chance their number is below 400,000. This is the methodology Bush assures us "is pretty well discredited."
Interestingly, this story is getting some attention, but Bush's statement that Iraqi's "tolerate a level of violence" that is, quite simply, beyond horrific, is getting no attention at all. But, as Roberts points out, Bush was asked about the first Johns Hopkins study (which estimated 100,000 died in the invasion) 14 months after that study was released. Bush was asked about the second study 4 hours after it was released.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
...the traditional media took no notice of Bush's assertion about tolerating violence. It wasn't in any of the major newspaper stories. The NBC Nightly News actually aired that sound byte, but without comment.
The American ambassador in Iraq said today that more than 100 detainees had been abused in two Iraqi detention facilities, more than had been previously disclosed.
Also today, just ahead of nationwide elections, a Sunni Arab candidate was shot and killed, and the American military said four soldiers were killed just north of Baghdad.
The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was speaking at a news conference in Baghdad just days before the country goes to the polls on Thursday to select a full-term government. Early voting started on Monday for soldiers, hospital patients, prisoner detainees and Iraqis abroad.
Mr. Khalilzad was asked about two Iraqi detention facilities from which some detainees had been transferred to the hospital, and to comment on remarks from some Iraqi interior ministry officials characterizing the handling of the detainees as slapping. Mr. Khalilzad said he has received reports that pointed to more extreme treatment.
In an investigation that followed the discovery in November of the first detention center, called Jadriya, "it was determined that over 100 of them were abused," he said, according to a transcript of his remarks released later. He said that close to 170 people had been held there.
Another facility inspected three days ago was, according to reports he had received, "overcrowded and not in good conditions."
"I have seen figures that said 21 or 26 people who were assumed to have been abused," he said.
"I think I can say that based on reports that I have received, that it was, many instances with regard to the over hundred that we talked about it, was far worse than slapping around," Mr. Khalilzad said.
The American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance - and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing.
When the air war shows up at all in our press, it is never as a campaign, but as scattered bare-bones reports of individual attacks on specific targets, almost invariably based on military announcements. A typical example was reported by Reuters on December 4th: "Two US Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided bombs" which, according to a military spokesperson, killed two "insurgents" after they attacked an army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad. On the same day, Reuters reported that "a woman and two children" were "wounded when US forces conducted an air strike, bombing two houses in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad."
And even this minimalist version of the American air war rarely makes it into large media outlets in the US.
Author and media critic Norman Solomon asked the following question recently: "According to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase 'air war' appeared in the New York Times this year with reference to the current US military effort in Iraq? As of early December, the answer is: Zero." Solomon went on to point out that the phrase "air war" had not appeared in either the Washington Post or Time magazine even a single time this year.
Curiously enough, US Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) reports are more detailed than anything we normally can read in our papers. On December 6, for example, CENTAF admitted to 46 air missions over Iraq flown on the previous day - in order to provide "support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities."
Albeit usually broadly (and vaguely) described, and seldom taking possible civilian casualties into account, these daily tabulations by the Air Force often flesh out bare-bones reports with a little extra detail on the nature of the air war. On that December 6th, for instance, the report added that "Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Balad and Ramadi."
Not surprisingly, given their source, such reports glide over or underemphasize potentially damaging information like the fact that bombing runs of this sort are regularly conducted in heavily-inhabited areas of Iraq's cities and towns where the resistance may also be strongly embedded. Oblique statements like the following are the best you are likely to get from the military: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations focused on creating a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections."
As a result, aside from reportage by one of the rare western independent journalists left in Iraq or the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the US, the American air assault on Iraq remains devastatingly ill-covered by larger outlets here. This remains true, even as, militarily, air power begins to move center stage at a moment when large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops are clearly being considered by the Bush administration.
The matter is underscored by Bush's infamous estimate of the number of Iraqis killed since he started this war:
"I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," he said. "We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."
Notice how that is phrased: "initial incursion" (as if we just stuck our toe in some water, rather than jumped in the deep end and then decided whether or not we could swim), and "the ongoing violence against Iraqis." Violence, of course, for which the U.S. is not responsible; at least, in Bush's view.
In other words, we have not been morally culpable for any deaths of Iraqis since. Nice bubble, if you can live in it.
And I still think the Lancet figure is the most accurate, and will ultimately be borne out as correct.
