Tom Hilde

The Civil War in Iraq as a War Crime

Tom Hilde — 2007-01-30T18:54:15Z

I strongly urge you to read this report from the Brookings Institution, Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War by Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack. It's a .pdf, downloadable here. Here's the blurb from the Brookings page:

This Saban Center Analysis Paper examines the history of some dozen recent civil wars to reveal the general patterns by which such conflicts can "spill over" into neighboring states, causing further civil wars or regional conflicts. Historically, six patterns of spillover have been the most harmful in other cases of all-out civil war: refugees; terrorism; radicalization of neighboring populations; secession that breeds secessionism; economic losses; and, neighborly interventions.

From this history, the authors propose a set of policy options that the United States could employ to try to contain the spillover effects of a full-scale Iraqi civil war. ..

You might not like Brookings; you might think they're the cat's meow. But this is an important report. Read it. (...)

More War, More, More, More

Tom Hilde — 2007-01-05T02:00:46Z

Against the advice of military leaders, US public opinion, and soldiers on the ground in Iraq, Bush is about to increase the number of troops in Iraq by 15-20K. As has been the norm throughout his presidency, he has fired those military officers - Generals John Abizaid and George Casey today - who have disagreed with his policy (and possibly even Condoleeza Rice down the pike?). The recent purge clears the way for escalation. The surge/escalation is, as we know, intended to provide further firepower with the goal of tamping down the steadily increasing violence in Iraq. The notion floating around the media is that this is a temporary stopgap measure designed to provide a pathway out of Iraq. (...)

The Wrong Geometry

Tom Hilde — 2006-11-11T12:05:41Z

We are not lines; we don't and shouldn't fall along a linear political trail comprised of the detritus of past ideologies. Yet, we see the world in these terms and we're increasingly worse off for it. It's inescapable in many ways since there is no such thing as a total revolution of consciousness. But we're not doing too well with the possibilities of human imagination unless we can sell the product or rally enough troops into marching off the cliffs.

Left-Center-Right. That is largely the extent of our flaccid political imaginations. Why not trapezoids? Roughly-hewn circles and marvelously vertiginous spirals? Feedback-loop evolution? Hilbert space? Asterisks embedded within asterisks? The unprovable proof that there is no mathematics to politics, ethics? (...)

The New Domino Effect

Tom Hilde — 2006-07-20T23:37:28Z

Newt Gingrich said recently that we may as well call the mess in the Middle East "World War III." He may be more accurate than he thought.

Remember the "Axis of Evil"? Those were the good old days, the ones where the US administration felt on top of the world, yodeling from the Alps of global power. The US could pick out a few countries it really doesn't like, turn them into larger-than-life threats to America and Humanity and open up political and military fronts along their borders. One of them was invaded and occupied. The other two have taken the threats to heart. North Korea - at the time engaged in "sunshine diplomacy" with South Korea (which is still angry at the Bush administration for screwing that up) - now practices its missile launches, thus prompting the US to say "see?" Iran develops further its nuclear technology, discovers the US is more bark than bite now that it's bogged down in civil war in Iraq and fighting a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, and takes advantage of the situation to play itself up as the major regional power it has long aspired to be. (...)

The Big Dare

Tom Hilde — 2006-04-11T23:48:00Z

Ahmadinejad announces that Iran is able to enrich uranium. The stated level of enrichment is enough to develop nuclear energy, but not yet enough to develop a nuclear weapon. It comes right at the moment that Hersh's article in The New Yorker makes waves, the responses come a mile a minute, and Bush feels the need to back off the nuclear strike rumors as "wild speculation."

I have to say that, although many call Ahmadinejad a kook or "insane," Iran is playing this high-stakes game quite well; indeed, rationally. (...)

Hypocrisy and politics

Tom Hilde — 2006-03-12T19:04:51Z

One thing I try to avoid here - though I do it too, obviously, hypocritically - is dwell on political and moral hypocrisy. I'm not a fan of blogs or any other avenue of expression that do so either, although many spend nearly all their linguistic space presenting and mocking the hypocrisy of whatever political side they oppose. You will have noticed that I'm not interested here in dealing with O'Reilly, Limbaugh, or Coulter. Blogdom in particular seems like a gigantesque ad hominem buzzing hivemind at times. So and so in the political world says something or another with self-righteousness (William Bennett, Claude Allen, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, etc., etc.), and then they do something that contradicts what they've been saying! This is easy. It's always easy, no matter the political persuasion. It preys on simple political emotions, turning politics into sports. Pop the popcorn, pop open a beer, cheer the smackdown pops, check out Janet Jackson a-popping at halftime - look closely at the breast, but disdain its presence there for all to see. Sometimes it feels good to call someone else an idiot because they say one thing in one context and something else in another or even change their mind. Makes you feel strong, manly, right, just, consistent, and above the fray of poor logic and the guano-stained batcave of political rhetoric. (...)

What to do? Iraq

Tom Hilde — 2006-03-08T18:24:39Z

Tough stuff from Gary Hart:

"Our army is in danger," he said. "If all-out civil war breaks out, we could lose our army. If Sunnis and Shiites take to the streets by the thousands, it could literally be impossible to get [the soldiers] out. ... I know that sounds apocalyptic, but it's not out of the question. We need an exit strategy. We have no choice. We're making things worse. Ninety percent of the insurgents are Iraqis who don't like the fact that we have occupied their country. ...

"I know we can't just pack up and leave right away, but we're still acting as if we hold all the cards over there. We don't. We're losing control of the situation. ... The British occupied Iraq for 35 years and finally had to leave because there was a constant insurgency against them. We haven't learned anything."

What is the answer, folks? Yes, we have a lying, cheating, incompetent president and administration who have created one of the worst foreign policy blunders in US history, have no answers of their own, and, frankly, don't have the brainpower to do anything further. They've emboldened America-haters, destroyed US legitimacy, dismantled civil rights protections, made American democracy less democratic and less transparent and the administration itself less accountable and vastly more corrupt. And they continue to fail over and over, lie over and over, and continue spewing increasingly alarming platitudes in place of doing any kind of decent policy at all. Generations will face the negative consequences of this presidency's actions. This president ought to be impeached, and there have never been more solid legal and moral grounds for impeachment of a US president. (...)

Fascism's faces

Tom Hilde — 2006-01-26T19:50:00Z

Riffing about Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming book with the funny self-explanatory title, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton....

Fascism, among fascism scholars, is notoriously difficult to parse as a political phenomenon. Richard Golsan is one of these scholars and he has always insisted that there are elements of the left as well as the right, and not necessarily anti-Semitism (as in variants of early French fascism), in historical fascist movements. Our two prime examples are, of course, Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Both, we can say, were anti-liberal and fascism has often been a revolt against liberalism. In fact, given liberalism's devotion to equity, equality, and liberty, it's a rather large leap to combine "liberal" with "fascism." Of course, this would never stop an intellectually insignificant writer such as Goldberg from making such a flaming claim in the very title of his book. (...)

Venezuela, compare contrast

Tom Hilde — 2005-12-03T04:46:00Z

As mentioned below, I spent most of November in Venezuela at the invitation of Andrés Bello Católica University and the Polar Foundation (both of which are terrific institutions, which happen to be centers of opposition). There's an earlier update from Caracas here that Barba kindly edited from my emails in my absence. I've also briefly discussed the bizarre boycott of elections by the opposition. This Sunday, Chávez's party will take control of congress due largely to the opposition boycott (the media, which is mostly opposition, calls on anti-Chávez voters to go to church instead).

So, now, some more on Venezuela. I'll write some about the opposition in this post and more later on Chávez and "The Process." (...)

This is the reality

Tom Hilde — 2005-11-05T05:05:00Z

There's been a lot of talk about Europe erupting into Muslim-on-Christian warfare. This talk comes from the right, from the racist, from the fear-mongerers, from fundamentalists of various stripes. France had immigration programs in the 1960s for workers from the former French North African colonies, which served to create a large Maghrebian and sub-Saharan population especially in the big cities — Marseilles and Paris in particular. The rightist Front National grew out of racist hatred for the burgeoning immigrant population (not Russians and Poles, but Maghrebians and black Africans) and its later generations — kids with Algerian or Tunisian or Senegalese parents or grandparents who are born and raised in France — under the guise of burdens on the French social system, etc. The same sorts of arguments we hear in the US along the border with Mexico. "France for the French," goes the rightist refrain. But the rest of France, the vast majority, has nevertheless always allowed immigrant families to remain marginalized, despite France's grand homage to the principle of equality. Parisian ghettoes are not like American ghettoes. In France they are "outer city" rather than inner city, rings of Le Corbusier "cites" [with the sharp accent on the "e"] around Paris where second and third generations have few jobs, few opportunities for jobs, and do indeed live off of the generous French social welfare system. But... they are French, after all. During the daytime and nighttime, groups of youths with nothing else to do hang out on street corners, in parks, next to the small late-night convenience stores dubbed "Arabs" in French (which are the most significant outward signs of any Maghrebian "prosperity" in Paris). Violence, drug use, and petty theft has increased, but not nearly at the scale of similar American situations. Only in the past couple of years, for example, have guns come into play and they remain few and far between. The US has more gun deaths and injuries than France by a factor of precisely one gazillion. (...)

Political Fear

Tom Hilde — 2005-09-21T01:01:18Z

A few years ago and for two years, I was living in DC (as I am now), but commuting to work at New York University (a few days in DC, a few days in NYC). Those were the days of the constant red-alert, orange-alert, Ernie-and-Bert terror warnings from Homeland Security. Absolutely no one I knew believed the alerts were anything other than fear-mongering. We see now that the colors corresponded nearly precisely to the political polling vicissitudes of the administration. Sick people, these fear-mongerers, except that no one believed them. Maybe in the hinterlands, trained in the mushroom clouds of the Cold War 1950s, people went to the basement with a month's supply of canned baked-beans, but in DC and NYC people did whatever they were going to do anyway regardless of the color code of the day. Go to work, buy a book, sit in a cafe and chat, play violin in the subway. (...)

Iraq management and strategy

Tom Hilde — 2005-09-13T12:27:11Z

On a recent article by Matthew Yglesias at TPMCafe on "Catastrophic Success":

First couple of paragraphs: a) we've known for about three years that bombing Sunni cities, towns, neighborhoods, wedding parties, and so on makes Sunnis really unhappy about pretty much everything having to do with Americans, let alone the American-installed Green Zone Shiite-dominated government (check out Baghdad Burning, Raed, and others for some descriptions of life near the Green Zone citadel). In fact, there's good evidence that has long suggested that a large part of the insurgency is not pro-Saddam Sunni, but anti-American Sunni; b) Juan Cole already reported (if we can trust him on this — but who better?) that Tal Afar is basically empty, most insurgents having left the area through a system of tunnels and speedy footwork before the real bombings began. (...)

On International Legitimacy

Tom Hilde — 2005-09-10T04:50:00Z

I've recently reviewed a terrific, though not faultless, book on Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford University Press, 2005) by Ian Clark for the London School of Economics journal, Millennium. I also teach a graduate course on International Agreements. These both provided the occasion for thinking a bit further about the issue of international legitimacy, a vague and misused and misunderstood concept (and practice, as Clark has it).

A discussion of legitimacy also serves not only to understand the worries the American population has about the American image abroad, but also what kinds of claims and intentions underride this administration's foreign policy or any nation's standing in the international sphere. (...)

The global weapons market

Tom Hilde — 2005-09-01T03:55:00Z

The US sells more weapons to developing countries than anyone else. You may think, "so what, it's a free market and if someone wants to buy them, we should be glad to sell them." If you think a little bit further, you might have reservations about stinger missiles shooting down American helicopters in the future or M16s killing American troops. If you think even further, you might wonder if flooding the world with more arms makes sense in a time of rising terrorism. One step more and you might say to yourself, this isn't the kind of world I want to live in. But there are even greater global ramifications to this. (...)

Religion, morality, and sheep

Tom Hilde — 2005-08-26T02:59:00Z

I've been thinking about the relation between morality and religion some more given Robertson's comments the other day, and then his lies to try to twist out of the PR gaff. One might wonder whether religion is actually an obstacle to moral inquiry and behavior. Further, a Foreign Policy study recently showed the disconnect between church-going and generosity. America's public religiosity can often live a downright lie. (...)