McFreedom

Eugene Volokh has a very thoughtful post on nuclear deterrence. It underscores the fallacy behind most reliance on nuclear deterrence (as opposed to intervention with conventional weapons) to prevent an attack on the US with a weapon of mass destruction: The moral obligation of one who has power is to go to great lengths to avoid using it. "Never kill when you can maim, never main when you can injure, never injure when you can walk away." Deterrence is not a goal. It is an effect. A detterent is successful only if you never use it, but not using it requires a lot of work.

With great destructive power comes great responsibility. Not just to be judicious using that power, but to be judicious about when you should use lesser power to prevent eventually having to pull the trigger. A lesson I think many of us have forgotten is in the use of negative sanctions (sanctions of course being a general term here; invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein is a "negative sanction") as part of communicating intent. I've made mistakes in the past where I was extremely forgiving of someone's errors and faults, and eventually let it slip until that person did something so terrible I had to drop a "nuclear weapon." As a manager, for instance, my first instinct with people was to stand way back. When someone made a mistake, I'd point it out gently, but take no sanction, write no report, threaten no action. Unfortunately, inevitably, some major error would occur - or the person would be directly insubordinate - because my lack of sanction was taken as tacit approval of poor work. At that point, my only recourse was to "drop the bomb" and fire them. This happened to me a couple of times, and I think both people were extremely surprised to discover that, while I rarely give direct, "top down" orders, disobeying one is completely unacceptable. Had I made more clear my displeasure - via sanctions - with more minor transgressions, they might have understood better that, while I prefer to simply trust the people in my organization, I do expect high standards of quality and conduct, and violations of those standards will not be tolerated. While I had told these people that I expected them to follow the few orders they received, I don't think they believe I'd actually use the threatened deterrence, because my previous "nice guy" behavior had led them to believe I was a pushover.

From a management perspective, firing someone is almost always a failure not of the person fired but of the manager; your job is to get people to accomplish a task, and if you fire them it is because they were unable to accomplish them, which means that you were unable to accomplish your job. I've always felt awful about every employee I've fired, and after a few times, I learned that, in fact, providing sanctions to the early mistakes is the nice thing to do. Because otherwise you may have to fire them, later, and neither of you want that. If the application of the final deterrent becomes necessary, you want to be able to ask yourself, "Did I do everything I could have to avoid that?" and have the answer clearly be "yes." And we're just talking about firing someone, here - if we are forced to destroy a city, how much greater our obligation to do everything we can to avoid it is!

One of my favorite scenes from the movie Star Wars is when Obi-Wan Kenobi is in the cantina at the beginning. A thug is harassing the farmboy Obi-Wan is with, for no real reason. Rather than intimidating the thug, Obi-Wan puts his hand on the thug's arm, and says, "This little one's not worth the effort. Come, let me get you something." Obi-Wan knows what his deterrent is - it's maining the guy with his lightsaber. The guy doesn't know what's going to happen to him if he continues down the path he's on, so Obi-Wan's only deterrent isn't useful. Instead, recognizing the moral responsibility he has to try to prevent this guy's arm getting cut off, Obi-Wan tries to buy him a drink. He'd rather buy him a drink than cut his arm off, even though he's an apparently awful man who claims to have the "death penalty in twelve systems." When his entreaties are refused and the man threatens Obi-Wan, of course, he is forced to cut the man's arm off. But he can sleep soundly at night because he knows he did everything he could - in the brief time he had - to prevent cutting his arm off.

Our application of force now will let Mr. Hussein (and, since he won't be in power after this, other would-be threats) know that we are serious about this and will not tolerate someone releasing a weapon of mass destruction on our soil. It is the nice thing to do, because if we don't, we'll eventually have to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. If we have to do that, it will be the biggest failure America has ever had.

Saw a story on CNN.com, "Study: Most Americans oppose vouchers." Sounds pretty conclusive, doesn't it? And it's by Reuters, the news agency so impartial, they won't even call Osama bin Ladin a terrorist! The first line of the story is, "Most Americans oppose the use of public funds to help parents send their children to private or church-sponsored schools, according to a study released Tuesday." It's not just that the headline writer was looking for a catchy grab; that's the main thrust of the story.

Everything I've read on the voucher issue indicates to me that we are a nation - as they say - deeply divided on the issue of vouchers. So, I clicked through to see how conclusive the data was. You know the result? 52% reject vouchers; 46% are in favor with 2% undecided/other. Oh, and the poll had a margin of error of +/- 4%! It's mathematically possible that for the general population, 48% oppose vouchers and 50% support! Any honest, competent reading of those numbers would generate the title, "Study: Americans split on voucher issue."

But, it gets better. I checked Gallup, looking for the original question to see how it was phrased, since the story doesn't provide much information, there. Gallup doesn't have much up on the study, though. I decided to check out Phi Delta Kappa, who comissioned the study. In their detailed results page, they give the questions used. And, it's interesting. The question about vouchers which ended up with 52% of the population opposing and 46% supporting was, "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Immediately after that, though, they asked another question on the same topic: "A proposal has been made that would allow parents to send their school-age children to any public, private, or church-related school they choose. For those parents choosing nonpublic schools, the government would pay all or part of the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal in your state?"

For the second one, 52% support, 46% oppose. The exact opposite of the first question. Even if you didn't understand statistics, how could any human being smart enough to work a word processor decide, while trying to be "objective and unbiased," that this study says Americans oppose vouchers? On one question they barely did and on the other they barely didn't. Either of them could be the opposite of reported because of the margin of error. Even worse, look back at the first line of the story. Now look at the second question. Clearly the reporter read the second question - it's where he got the wording for the opening line. But that second question is the one a majority supported.

Did the reporter and I read the same study results? Or is he so incompetant he didn't realize it was 52% opppose on one and 52% support on the other? Or, maybe - just maybe - did he let his own personal bias about how the study should have gone color his reporting?

James Lileks describes a picnic lunch at the lake, and how nice it was, and ends by observing, "God knows how smug we'd be if winter didn't humble us yearly." Hmmmm. Come to think of it, that probably explains a lot about California...

Sasha Volokh asks, "at the risk of sounding morally bankrupt," what exactly is so bad about suicide bombers, anyway? His question is two-pronged:

What's the problem with suicide bombers? Is an otherwise acceptable act of war unacceptable because the guy kills himself in the process?

and

What's the problem with targeting civilians? Is the claim that you should never target civilians, or that targeting civilians is a strike against your side which you need to make up for with (a) an exceptionally worthy cause or (b) an inability to go after military targets? If we're against Palestinian terror on those grounds, do we have to be against having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima too?

I think it's pretty obviously that the instinctive anger felt at the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv doesn't come from the fact that the perpatrator commits suicide as well as mass-murder. If we imagine a world in which the Palestenians had merely been hiding bombs in buses (instead of carrying them on) I don't think most of us would be any less angered by their actions. I think most Americans (perhaps even most Westerners) are repulsed by any political movement that would routinely ask their members to commit suicide as part of operations. But, to turn my hypothetical situation the other way, if the Palestenians were protesting their plight by blowing themselves up in empty fields, I think most people would be bewildered by it, but there would not be the outcry there is today. Much like the Buddhist monks protesting in Vietnam by setting themselves on fire, I believe that such self-sacrifice, absent any terrorist civilian casualties, would cause puzzlement and a sense of a vast gulf of civilizations - but not moral outcry about the suicide per se.

Which leaves the second question, "What's the problem with targeting civilians?" Sasha then goes on to suggest what I believe to be a false duality of answers (either it's never alright or it's something you have to jusitfy by [another false duality] either having a very just cause or not being able to strike at the military). He then wonders, "[D]o we have to be against having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima too?"

To begin with, I'd like to look at the Allied justifications for the intentional civilian casualties we infliced in World War II:

1) We were stopping their production. This justification was used in both Japan and Europe. The idea was that, with a modern war-making economy, the support of the army was industry, and the support of industry was the workers. World War I had ushered in the era of "total war," where a nation's entire economy was shifted to support the effort. In this environment, it is arguable that the baker, the steelworker and the millworker were in some sense "rear-echelon" troops who were valid military targets.

2) We were getting revenge for their having targeted our civilians. This rationale is primary one found in the European theater; the Japanese never had much chance to target US civilians (although they certainly weren't very nice to the civilians in the places they conquered). Germany, however, in some sense "started" attacks on major civilian populations in World War II with the Blitz on London. I believe that the action closest to an atrocity perpetrated by the Allies in World War II - the fire bombing of Dresden - was largely intended as revenge of some sort, and to send some sort of message to any other potential combatants that future bombing of Allied civilian populations would bring forth similar punishments.

3) It was a military necessity. This justification is primarily used for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interestingly, I think why these bombing happened actually has a lot to do with Japan's own use of suicide warriors - the kamikaze. In the battle of Okinawa - the operation setting the stage for the invasion of the Japanese home islands - 350 kamikaze inflicted 5,000 US casualties. To the American mind, these were the proof of a totally comitted enemy. An enemy who was not afraid to die, as long as he took some US soldiers with him. As a result, American planners became convinced that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would involve the entire population fighting to the death rather than surrendering. Faced with this, they decided to move decisively to show the Japanese that such a house-to-house fight would never be allowed to occur. Seperately - and I've never really seen this discussed, anywhere - I believe that they really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't really understand the number of people who were going to die, or how horribly they were going to die. The Trinity test looks quite impressive out there in the desert, but trying to map that onto a civilian population with no experience to back it on - is an impossible task.

After all that, I believe the second question is a bit of a straw man. At the time, I think the justification of the bombing of Hiroshima was possible. But it is certainly not something we would do today, absent hundreds of thousands of our own civilian casualties. Direct, intentional, indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations is something we have not done since the Korean War (and, honestly, I'm not all that familiar with that war - we may not have done it then, either). Yes, there have been civilian casualties by American hands since then. But, even in Vietnam, we bent over backwards - much to our own military detriment - to avoid targeting civilian populations.

So, when is it acceptable to intentionally target civilians? I think the three justifications above sum up the situations I can think of: To crush production, when a portion of production is crucial to your opponent's war effort; In revenge for (and as a deterrant to) people killing your civilians; and Because your opponent is so fanatical that all his civilians are soldliers. Obviously, the last one is a bit tricky to define in a morally objective way. In fact, all of them are, and slippery slopes abound. I personally think the atomic bombing of Nagaski was unjustified, and the firebombing of Dresden was probably unjustified (except perhaps as a deterrant). But I understand why they targeted Hiroshima, and why the Allies bombed many German cities.

How do the Palestenians stack up against my Moral Decree Handed Down From On High? Well, they blew up a University cafeteria, recently. Clearly the students there were not involved in production. It perhaps arguable that it could be in revenge for Palestenian civilians killed by Israelis - but, in that sort of tit-for-tat accounting, Palestenians have killed a lot more Israeli civilians than vice versa. And the vast majority of the Israeli civilians killed were directly targeted, while the vast majority of Palestenian civilians killed were accidentally targeted. Finally, I think it should be fairly apparent that the Palestenians do not need to fear fanatical Israeli University studients fighting to their last breath rather than surrender.

Happy Fun Pundit has an automatic caption generator for the recent picture of an Iraqi "suicide" squad. Here's the original (his is cropped):

I have to say, what I first saw the picture, I thought, "Hey, Aziz! Did you hear the new suicide squads get triple rations?"

I mean, seriously. These guys live in Iraq. Everyone is starving from the sanctions, remember? I'm guessing Mr. Hussein offered extra food to anyone who'd join the suicide squad, and these guys are just hoping the CNN reporter they surrender to has a bag of cheeseburgers stashed in her news van.

Turns out beer is good for you!

Recently, Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit published an email accusing him of a lack of patriotism because of his criticism of "Homeland Security." If I may paraphrase the rather lengthy discussion, essentially Mr. Reynolds' critic says that, if he were a real patriot, he'd be happy to put up with anything the government asks him to in order to "beat our enemies" - just as Americans in World War II happily dealt with shortages, less liberties, etc., to bring ultimate victory. Mr. Reynolds responds that his complaint is not in fact with the hassles, the lack of liberty, nor even with government incompetance, but with a government that acts in bad faith, and seems more concerned about bureaucratic ass-covering and fief-building than it does with actually catching terrorists.

This was, of course, a problem in World War II, as well, and the men in the Army coined a term for it: chickenshit. From my New Dictionary of American Slang (Edited by Robert L. Chapman, Harper & Row 1986):

chicken shit fr. WW2 armed forces 1 n phr The rules, restrictions, rigors and meanness of a minor and pretentious tyrant, or of a bureaucracy: The new regulations are so many parcels of chicken shit 2 n phr An excessive display of authority; a hectoring insistence 3 adj: a chicken-shit requirement / chicken-shit new task force

The above definition is probably accurate for usage when the dictionary was published, but based on my other reading, I suspect it misses some nuances the term had in World War II. I believe that, at that time, the phrase meant something more like "rules, regulations or people that at best demean the people trying to win the war and at worst actively prevent them from doing what is necessary to win."

I think "chickenshit" as a wartime epithet is something we need to revive. Confiscating tonail clippers at airline security is chickenshit. A Homeland Security Department that spends time figuring out whether we're in condition Yellow or condition Orange is chickenshit. TIPS is chickenshit. Any time some unelected administrator comes up with a plan to do Something, Anything, to increase the number of employees in his department - when any two year-old could see it won't keep a single terrorist from killing more Americans - that's chickenshit.

The issue isn't that They want me to do my part. I'm happy to. It's that They want me to feed their egoes and buraucracies, all while They do nothing about the root problems. And that's chickenshit.

I just saw Barry Bonds hit #600 in his career. First clue that the guy writing this story for CNN/SI doesn't come to Giants games much: "The chilled crowd at Pac Bell..." Second clue: "The cool seaside air was in optimal condition for homers..." This was the warmest night Pacific Bell Park has ever seen. I wore shorts, and I've never worn shorts to a Giants game. Not even a day game. It was 74 at 10:20PM (according to their scoreboard), and it's often not 74 at Pac Bell Park at 2:00 in the afternoon. This is San Francisco, after all.

And, on the subject of reporting, "The arcade on the right-field wall...was choked throughout the night with fans hoping to get their hands on...[one of the] balls..." They closed the arcade to anyone not holding a ticket for the arcade. It was unusually quiet up there tonight; most nights, you can see people moving up there constantly, walking around the park and looking at the bay.

Finally, "Bonds' achievments have come during an era of smaller ballparks..." Bonds takes half his at-bats in one of the most pitcher-friendly parks currently in play. And last year he hit half his homeruns, here. It's not the park size that's what's doing it.

Sorry, didn't intend this to turn into a media critique, but, as I've said before, I've never been a part of a single newsworthy thing and then seen a story about it later that didn't make a significant error of comission or omission.

Blake, like many two-year-olds, overly enjoys washing his hands. Once he starts, you have to actively work to get him to stop. On the one hand, that was kind of useful, because hand-washing was the "reward" for potty training. On the other hand, now that he's trained, every time he goes, someone has to go in and make him stop washing his hands.

Lately, he's gotten into "brushing his teeth," which involves no toothbrushes, but leaning over and drinking from the tap and "dribbling" (his word) the water out. I was working in my office, which is right by the upstairs bathroom, when I heard Betsy say, "No dribbling unless you're brushing your teeth!"

She then stuck her head in my office with an exasperated look. "He says he's pretending to brush his teeth."

I said, "Well, then, I guess he'll need to pretend to dribble, won't he?"

I guess it takes Logic Man to outdo Logic Boy.

Blake, like many two-year-olds, overly enjoys washing his hands. Once he starts, you have to actively work to get him to stop. On the one hand, that was kind of useful, because hand-washing was the "reward" for potty training. On the other hand, now that he's trained, every time he goes, someone has to go in and make him stop washing his hands.

Lately, he's gotten into "brushing his teeth," which involves no toothbrushes, but leaning over and drinking from the tap and "dribbling" (his word) the water out. I was working in my office, which is right by the upstairs bathroom, when I heard Betsy say, "No dribbling unless you're brushing your teeth!"

She then stuck her head in my office with an exasperated look. "He says he's pretending to brush his teeth."

I said, "Well, then, I guess he'll need to pretend to dribble, won't he?"

It takes Logic Man to outdo Logic Boy.