Tag Archives: freedom

A Geopolitical Misunderstanding

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…if The Wall Street Journal‘s interpretation is accurate, and a lack of political courage [emphasis added].

A solution to the Ukraine crisis is still far off, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Saturday, as his Russian counterpart accused the West of seeking to create chaos in the Kremlin’s geographic sphere.

And

Steinmeier said that a few weeks ago “we were on the brink of direct confrontation” between Russian and Ukrainian armed forces but that diplomacy had “prevented the worst.” However, he said, “I am under no illusion. A political solution is still a long way off.”

Last things first. Diplomacy has “prevented the worst?” Only if the worst is taken as the conquering and occupation of Ukraine as a whole, which is not an implausible view. However, diplomacy has failed to prevent the near-worst: Russian occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, together with a drive along Ukraine’s Sea of Azov coast with a view toward opening a land route to occupied Crimea, solidifying militarily the occupation.

Diplomacy alone—talking alone—can achieve very little beyond abject acceptance of these military facts. Diplomacy, to have any material effect, must be backed by, must be animated by, force—economic, military, and/or their combination. To date, there has been no force backing the West’s…diplomacy. The West has been too timid even to apply economic force against the Russians, only pin pricks that give western leaders a means of comforting themselves through the night.

Now to this:

[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] reiterated the conditions Moscow requires for the crisis to be resolved, including acceptance of Ukraine as a “neutral and non-bloc country,” meaning one that would remain outside of the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This brings us back to the first thing. Neither Ukraine, nor any other of the nations bordering on Russia, belong in any way to Russia or to “the Kremlin’s geographic sphere.” These are sovereign nations, and they’re free to chart their own course—including aligning themselves with the West, joining the prosperity of Western free market economics, even taking in the essential sovereignty of a people over their government. No matter how uncomfortable this might make Russia.

And no, Mr Lavrov, not all cultures are equal, and neither are all polities morally equivalent.

Liberty, Security, and Encryption

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Moves by Apple Inc and Google Inc to put some smartphone data out of the reach of police and the courts are raising alarms inside US law-enforcement agencies, current and former officials say.

Of course the government is upset. Heaven forfend anything should interfere with its convenience in fishing for wrong-doing in our private correspondence. Privacy, though, is a necessary component of individual liberty and responsibility.

There is a trade-off, to be sure, between that and government’s ability to do the job of protecting us from others and from extra-national threats that we’ve hired it to do, but we must be very wary about how much of our liberty we surrender and how much of our responsibility we foist off, and we must be extremely chary of the trade-offs we make in that regard.

One Justice Department official said that if the new systems work as advertised, they will make it harder, if not impossible, to solve some cases. Another said the companies have promised customers “the equivalent of a house that can’t be searched, or a car trunk that could never be opened.”

“Harder to solve,” perhaps. “Impossible,” though, is a coarse exaggeration: our cops are better than that. Additionally, it’s long been American philosophy that it’s better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man gets locked up. Today’s threats aren’t enough to walk away from that bastion principle of liberty.

As to that second plaint, it’s another exaggeration. The searches might get harder, but the devices are easily controllable, and get a warrant.

And this:

Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence. Apple is “announcing to criminals, ‘use this,’ ” he said. “You could have people who are defrauded, threatened, or even at the extreme, terrorists using it.”

However. It isn’t Apple that’s being accused, or suspected, or against whom probable cause is being alleged, it’s the cell phone owner. Searching Apple’s facility because the light is better there is…faulty.

Weissman also ignores both the right of an American citizen to protect himself against a government that has shown itself increasingly intrusive, avaricious, and controlling, and the fact that a warrant must be obtained on the one hand, and on the other, once a warrant has been obtained, the government can use its own facilities to conduct the search. These facilities include both the ability to sanction the phone’s owner for not providing the password and the use of government’s IT facilities for cracking the password.

Then there’s another question. Government cannot assume our responsibilities in our place morally. If government does assume our responsibilities in our place legally, we will have lost our individual liberties and responsibilities.

Without individual liberty and responsibility not only can there be no security, there can be no hope of security.

DoJ Doing a Racial Bias Study of Police Departments?

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That’s rich.

[T]he Justice Department has enlisted a team of criminal justice researchers to study racial bias in law enforcement in five American cities and recommend strategies to address the problem national[.]

Notice that: not researchers, not social science researchers, not social science of conflict researchers, not social science of culture researchers, not urban social science researchers, not…. Criminal justice researchers specifically. AG Eric Holder already has made up his mind on this one.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ led by a man who insists that

in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ led by a man who

dismissed voter intimidation case against two members of New Black Panthers, whose victims were white, even after those two had conceded the case by refusing to answer it.

This study will be overseen by a DoJ that’s openly racist in its civil rights enforcement.

A DoJ with its mind already made up on race expects to be trusted with a study of racial bias in police forces around the nation. This is, indeed, (trigger alert) chutzpah.

Obama Gave a Pretty Speech

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As he often does. But what did President Barack Obama really say? I’ll elide his bald claims regarding his having “consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country.” Threats like ISIS; like the terrorists who destroyed our Benghazi consulate and butchered our Ambassador there, along with three of his security detail; like al Qaeda in the Maghreb and al Qaeda in Yemen; like the Taliban in Afghanistan, from which—and whom—we’re retreating; …. Yes, yes, we’ve killed a few key players in some of those gangs, but we’ve not damaged the gangs themselves in any material way. But enough of that.

Obama said,

ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.

But Islam does condone the killing of innocents, when they’re unbelievers, infidels. Oh, wait—Islam doesn’t consider them innocents.

Obama said,

…following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat.

And again,

America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners.

But who are the members of this broad coalition? Who will lead the surface forces? Who will lead the air forces? Who will lead the economic forces? Oh, wait—

…in the coming days [Secretary of State John Kerry] will travel across the Middle East and Europe to enlist more partners in this fight, especially Arab nations….

There isn’t a coalition, after all. What’s he going to do, then, if the coalition doesn’t materialize? Walk away from the problem? Again?

Obama said,

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

I’ll ignore the fact that this is the Bush Doctrine. I do note that he said this in the context of contesting with ISIS. But it’s also a broad, uncaveated statement. Is Obama now saying that he’ll attack al Qaeda in the Maghreb? That he’ll step up his attacks on al Qaeda in Yemen? That he’ll resume attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or is this just more of Obama’s muddled messaging?

Obama said,

[I]n Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters.

What assistance? He’s been resistant all along to arming those whom he derided as recently as August as being “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth.”

He’s also maintained all along that he needs no “authorities” from Congress to deal with the al Assad régime or to work with the Syrian rebels (although having Congressional comity would be nice, he’s also said). What’s changed?

And then there’s this. Obama opened his speech thusly:

I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

What does he mean by “degrade?” We “degraded” ISIS with the limited air strikes we made to help free the Yezidis, to help the Kurds retake the Mosul Dam, to help the Sunnis (!) defend the Haditha Dam.

What is his definition of “destroy?” Rome “destroyed” Carthage, and the Allies “destroyed” NAZI Germany. Within Obama’s penchant for treating terrorists as common criminals, the Federal Courts have, more or less, “destroyed” the lives of a couple of terrorists brought to trial.

What, exactly, are Obama’s victory conditions? He’s always provided his exit conditions, even to the point of announcing in advance when he would exit. He’s always said what he won’t do to achieve “victory,” or an enemy’s “degradation,” or an enemy’s “destruction.” But he’s never said what, in his mind, constitutes winning.

There’s also a subject he chose not to address Wednesday night: funding. In many respects this is the most important: no conflict (Obama still won’t call this a war, and Kerry, the day after this speech, told CNN that we’re not at war with ISIS; it’s a “significant counter-terrorism operation”—so, what, the FBI will be the lead agency?), regardless of the conflict’s national life-or-death importance, can be fought for free. Just ask the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

How will this conflict be funded? What spending will be reallocated, what taxes imposed, what borrowings engaged?

Certainly, most of these questions need not have been answered in Wednesday’s speech, but we’re already two days later without answers. He must answer these questions in the next few days. If answers are not quickly forthcoming, Obama’s claims in his pretty speech will be shown to be of a piece with another of his claims in that speech:

From Europe to Asia…we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity.

Just like his administration has stood for the freedom, justice, and dignity of Russian-occupied Ukraine.

A transcript of Obama’s speech can be read here.

With Whom Among the Kurds Should We Work?

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How about with all of them?

President Barack Obama appears, finally, to be agreeable to arming the Pershmerga of the Kurds’ Iraqi Kurdistan in northern Iraq and to be working a little more closely with them in where the US takes its potshots against ISIS forces—the Mosul Dam effort comes to mind in this context.

But that can’t be all of it, if ISIS is to be destroyed. That will require attacking ISIS in Syria as well as more serious efforts against ISIS in Iraq. That more serious effort in Iraq also will require working along the Kurds’ Iraq border with Turkey in addition to working with the Peshmerga to the west of Iraqi Kurdistan.

There are two other groups of Kurds, then, that come into play. One such is

a Kurdish force inside Syria called the Democratic Union Party [the PYD].

We need to deal more closely with this group, too, at least in the context of destroying ISIS. The PYD has been actively fighting ISIS and other jihadist terrorists in Syria for some years, as well as fighting the Syrian government. The US has been reluctant to deal with the PYD because of alleged difficulty telling the good Syrian rebels from the bad ones. Something about needing a scorecard. It’s not that hard, though, except in the minds of the Obama administration.

The other group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, is the group of interest along the Turkish border of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks object to the PKK, and so the US has too, because of the violent nature of the PKK’s objections to Turkish treatment of them. However, the PKK appears to have greatly moderated its violent techniques (though this isn’t certain), even if they are still zealous partisans for their autonomy. That they still have autonomy arguments with Turkey need not concern us here given that apparent temperance, and given Turkey’s open support of terrorists elsewhere—like on Israel’s southern and eastern borders. In addition to this, the Turks are working an accommodation with the PKK, so Turkish relations with the PKK is rapidly becoming a non-entity as well as merely irrelevant.

In the end, the enemy of our enemy certainly can be our ally, and at least one of those enemies of our enemy can be an outright friend, and at least one of those other enemies of our enemy can continue to be an ally.