This week, once again, the big international news is the continuing progress of Iran’s nuclear program.  It seems fair to assume that the ultimate goal is to create nuclear weapons.  Why else would they risk the inevitably painful economic and political consequences?

Most news stories and magazine articles simply take it as a given that Iran having nuclear weapons is a bad thing.  At one level, of course it is.  No matter how small the chance of any particular government using nuclear weapons is, more countries means a greater chance of some city being devastated.  It may also be that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will lead other countries in the region to step up their own efforts to counter it.

Some worry the danger of Iran having nuclear weapons is that it might hand off nuclear weapons to international terrorists.  This is specious.  Iran has a functioning state, and no government is likely to hand its most important weapon to a bunch of guys in a cave and tell them to do what they like with it.

Finally, there is the most important argument.  A nuclear Iran would change the balance of power in the region, fundamentally threatening the interests of Israel and the United States in particular, and the other states in the world more generally since everyone is dependent on the oil.

Iran is within range of at least six nuclear states: Israel, America, Pakistan, India, China, and Russia.  Of these, Israel and the United States are implacable enemies.  Both have made multiple military strikes in the Middle East, and each has invaded and occupied another country in the region in the past 25 years.  Pakistan is an unsteady neighbor — a possible threat to become an anti-Shia theocracy at any time.  India, China, and Russia are currently business partners, but none of these connections probably looks too reliable from the Iranian perspective.  How could any Iranian government not pursue nuclear weapons?

The current western solution to the problem is to punish Iran if it doesn’t submit to manifestly inadequate conditions.  This is stupid.  Given Iran’s military position, no punishment is likely to be strong enough.

Another option is to provide some guarantee of Iran’s security, as well as some serious consideration of its demands concerning the regional political order.  This would need to come from the United States, which is clearly the most frighteningly aggressive and hostile threat.  It is also the one power that could ensure that Iran would be safe from the others.  The American government needs to realize that sticks will never work and start offering a whole bunch of carrots.

Otherwise, there will be a nuclear Iran, and the U.S. and Israel will need to learn how to deal with a true regional power unlikely to be very sympathetic to their designs for dominance.  It’s not immediately obvious that this situation would be worse for the locals than what is happening today.  A stalemate of non-interference might be the result.

America needs to decide now which course it prefers.  The current situation is untenable.  Waiting much longer to offer a non-nuclear future will guarantee the opposite.

Pete DeWan

Much of the progressive left in America believes that the state should not legislate on sexuality.  Because we cannot all agree on what is moral, it is a private concern.  In this sense it is an anti-moral position.  Being pro-choice relies on a similar argument.  Because we do not all agree on when life begins, the state should back away and let individuals make up their own minds.  In the broadest sense, these are applications and extensions of the historic liberal argument for the separation of church and state.  Where there is disagreement on morals and no individual is being harmed by another, the state should not impose one view.  This logic is part of a grand tradition associated with John Locke.

Most of the left also believes that diversity in the population is broadly good.  This can be purely for aesthetic reasons.  New York City is simply more exciting than Topeka.  (I know this from personal experience.)  However, this argument can be taken further.  The claim can be made that diversity is necessary to a basic freedom to develop ourselves as individuals in the way that we desire.  For this freedom to be meaningful, there must be options.  Were everyone the same, there would no longer be any choice.  This is an elaboration on principles articulated most artfully by John Stuart Mill.

A principled libertarian would be unlikely to take issue with these ideas.  Progressives would also want to agree.  Unfortunately, they would be wrong.

True diversity implies disagreements on moral questions.  The liberal solution is to make these private rather than public.  As diversity increases, this necessarily means that the range of public morality decreases.  One can imagine the conclusion — it becomes impossible to impose any morality at all.  This seems fine for the left when the question is one of gay rights.  However, there is no reason to stop there.  Why should the broader society be responsible for helping the unfortunate?  This is a moral position as well.

The contemporary left approaches this in two ways.  The most common is to press for state support of their particular progressive beliefs.  This contradicts the first principle, as many individuals are forced to support with their taxes a morality they do not agree with.  The second is to reduce diversity.  In other words, make everybody a progressive.  Perhaps effective propaganda could make the entire country into Cambridge or the Upper West Side.  But what would happen to our freedom of choice then?

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma.  What appears to be happening in the United States is a slow but steady erosion of the possibility of public morality.  One might celebrate the decline of the repressive establishment.  But nothing has replaced it.  The right responds to the vacuum by trying to eliminate the church/state separation, reduce diversity, and prevent the ascension of the progressive ideal.  The basic contradictions in progressive politics makes this battle difficult to fight.  Without new ideas of politics and society, it seems unlikely that it can be won.

Pete DeWan

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was riding my moped from the outskirts of Boston back to Cambridge.  My father had just called to make sure that I was no longer in New York City.  I stopped to see the burning World Trade Center on a 40-inch flat-screen television in a storefront display.  The rest of that day was a nightmare of trying to find my girlfriend across the overloaded cellular circuits of New York.

Like everyone, fear filled me those next few nights and days.  Repeated calls and emails finally got a response from an Egyptian-American friend of mine, who told me what was happening to her in New York City: “A kid that was a friend of the family was stabbed to death in Bay Ridge and another girl was stabbed, but she managed to survive. Two of my aunts have been harassed and their scarves were pulled off their heads. My mother has remained home since the incident … and as we were in the mosque on 96th, there was a bomb threat and everyone was evacuated.  It’s been a real shocking experience that has just caused me to be in a state of disbelief.”

With this on my mind, I began graduate school and soon was pursuing the research that would end up being my dissertation, an exploration of the experiences of Muslims in America.  Initially, I thought that the situation would be far more dire than I eventually learned.  As the research has progressed, I have become more and more optimistic.

I had planned to write this in a non-academic setting.  Unfortunately, Spencer Ackerman has beaten me to the punch.  His piece is well worth reading, and my research has led me to agree broadly with his conclusions.  However, one thing missing from his work is the fear that so many Muslims felt and continue to feel.  

What is striking about the Muslim response to this fear is how they are able to maintain optimism about their future in America.  The key to this is crucial to the experience of Muslims in America, and quite different from Western Europe.  Our long history of immigration has been colored by many negative incidents, for Chinese, Irish, Italians, and finally and most awfully, the internment of Japanese Americans.  Those of us on the political left often tend to fixate on the negative qualities of America, making it easy to forget just how good America is at integrating immigrants.  

Today, what we see and what a Muslim immigrant sees, is that these were followed by slow acceptance and eventual success in American society.  This is an invaluable ideological resource.  The tribulations of today do not have to be the reality of tomorrow.  When the mosque is firebombed, when your cousin is assaulted, you know that this is just a passing phase.  Endure.  Even if it is no rainbow, at the end there will still be a pot of gold.  For so many of those I spoke with, their future in America shines so brightly that even the darkest corners of the present are illuminated with hope.

Pete DeWan

In the last few weeks, the relationship between Germany and the United States faced a test.  It failed.  U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Berlin for the first high-profile meeting with the new coalition government.  Serious questions about the secret CIA prisons in Europe and Germany’s role in facilitating their operation were already on the agenda.   The publication of the story of the abduction of Khaled el-Masri in The Washington Post forced this issue into the discussion as well.

The story has been in the German media and various other outlets for some time.  In 2003, el-Masri claims he was abducted from Macedonia by U.S. officials after being arrested by Macedonian police.  From there he was shipped to Afghanistan, held incommunicado and subjected to imprisonment in inhumane conditions.  As it turned out, el-Masri was mistakenly held and later released.  To avoid exacerbating problems in the relationship between Germany and America stemming from Germany’s refusal to support the invasion of Iraq, the two governments agreed to keep the issue quiet.  It turns out that various actors in the German government were complicit in the act, creating a furor in the Bundestag.  States have a fundamental responsibility to protect their citizens from these types of incidents, and the public outcry in Germany is forcing the government to take action.

This comes at a time when a warming of the relationship between Germany and America seemed likely.  After weeks of negotiations following inconclusive election results, the accession of Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats to the German Chancellorship was gratifying to the American government.  The former Chancellor, silver-tongued Gerhard Schroeder of the Social Democrats, had enraged Washington with his decision to campaign on a pledge to keep Germany out of the Iraq adventure.  The changeover from left to right political control seemed as if it might make a partial return to the prior understanding between Berlin and Washington possible.

Facing the threat of the Soviet Union and the partition of Germany after WWII, the United States and Germany formed strong ties, with Germany playing the part of junior partner.  On various occasions throughout those years, American policy and German public opinion diverged quite substantially, just as they did over the invasion of Iraq.  Most contentious perhaps was the argument over the placement of nuclear missiles in Germany during the Reagan administration, which engendered massive protests.  However, each time a disagreement arose, German leadership chose to side with the American government rather than its own population, recognizing the importance of the United States in the battle with Soviet communism.  When this threat dissipated, it seemed only a matter of time until events forced a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship.  This happened in 2003.  Germany moved along a scale from a position much like Poland, generally supporting American initiatives, to one more like France, in which the government will oppose American actions if it seems in their best interests.

Although complete rapprochement is improbable, America had its best chance with Angela Merkel, a conservative and market-oriented politician from the East.  Raised under communism, she may be more likely to see the security relationship between the two countries as crucial.  Free-market conservatives also have a natural affinity for America’s less regulated capitalism.  

However, closer ties would likely have required quiet and slow steps.  The German population is still strongly against the war in Iraq and American positions regarding terrorism and global warming are broadly unpopular.  A quick survey of articles in Der Speigel shows this is not the case.  Instead, the incident has blown up, even threatening the cohesiveness of the German Grand Coalition.

Instead of a partial rapprochement, we are seeing the solidification of a more distant relationship, with Germany independently asserting its strength as a mid-range power and a voice for Europe, and the United States helpless to do anything other than accept this as the new reality.

Pete DeWan

The debate over the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act has been heating up over the past several weeks.  Senators are busy making overblown speeches about the nature of America.  Pundits throw factesque invective at each other.  Some, call them the security-minded, think we haven’t done enough.  Others, call them the liberty-minded, claim that increased law enforcement powers are a step too far.  The rhetoric has mostly been about values and principles, and those political conflicts are notoriously difficult to settle.

A better option is to begin with some pragmatic questions.  All can agree that there is some tradeoff between civil liberties and security.  Without taking a principled position, we can ask how much extra security we are getting for the liberties lost.  It’s one thing if the FBI takes library records and ends up preventing New York from getting nuked and quite another if it’s only for harassing teenagers who want to read The Anarchist Cookbook or Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.  For me, that’s where it starts getting personal.

About twenty U.S. citizens and permanent residents who could plausibly be connected to anti-American terrorism have been captured in the last four years.  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was tortured by the Saudis into confessing that he had some conversations with a now dead man about assassinating Bush.  Some members of the Lackawanna Six seem to have spent a couple weeks at a training camp before finding the whole thing too dirty and distasteful.  Lynne Stewart helped pass some information along for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.  James Ulaama and friends proved their stupidity with discussions of a possible training camp in rural Oregon.  The smart militant would of course go to Montana.  Yasser Hamdi and John Lindh were caught in Afghanistan, Hamid Hayat attended a camp in Pakistan, and Soliman Biheiri provided funds to the suspiciously named Muslim World League.  Jose Padilla has his own story, but we would need to resurrect Foucault for a proper narration.  Finally, Iyman Haris, a man described by his wife as unbalanced, has withdrawn his guilty plea for providing sleeping bags to Al-Qaeda.

That’s four years of the PATRIOT Act and other assorted intrusions on the Constitution.  That’s all.  Even if we make the doubtful assumption that all charges are true, the civil liberties of 290 million Americans are being eroded to catch a few blowhards, poseurs, and garden-variety thugs.  This isn’t the Justice League of America.  New York has not been saved.

Let’s be practical.  We should start the discussion with an agreement that the provisions do not apply to American citizens and permanent residents.  Perhaps more surveillance is appropriate for visa holders, perhaps not.  The FBI should definitely take a second look at shady characters with expired student visas for flight schools.  Regardless, narrowing the scope of the argument would make it a lot easier to resolve.  Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be nearly as good for Senators needing sound bites for the evening news.

Pete DeWan