Gornick has written a review, marked by genuine curiosity, of Sandel’s new book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The book tours through the philosophical history of justice from the ancients to Rawls and beyond. Gornick, though, admits that she is a newcomer to the subject, and considers a general puzzle: how does all this theory square with the imperfection of the real world? More precisely, Gornick observes that for all the attempts that religious leaders and scholars have made to codify the norms of justice, real people tend to break the rules consistently. She has her finger on an important problem in political philosophy and ethics, and one that often widens the gap between the theory of justice and practical matters like living a just life and creating a just community. The problem is moral psychology.
Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon is a book in which history, and the experiences of its author, pass in cycles. Read the rest of this entry »
Counterinsurgency’s Comeback, a piece by Nasser Hussain published in the January 2010 edition of the Boston Review, discusses the effects of various counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq and other wars in the past going back to Vietnam. Hussain also outlines the long history of counterinsurgency methods from various field manuals and publications that illustrate step by step methods for how to “win over” the “host population” in the country at hand. Such a task has proved to be nearly impossible in recent history, often due to issues of legitimacy, according to Hussain. Legitimacy is arguably the most significant reason that the majority of counterinsurgency tactics mentioned in this article have failed; they cannot win over the “host population”. Hussein mentions that almost every counterinsurgency tactic has a goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of the population, yet it is often very difficult for those in the country to see the US presence as legitimate. Why does the US fail to convince the host population that their presence is legitimate? Read the rest of this entry »
While today is a holiday, it is by no means one to rest and forget. Under the radar in recent news is the parallel policies of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments, particularly when they concern dissidents. As Google’s threat to pull the plug on its Chinese operations continues to stir conversations in Beijing and Washington, many do not know about similarities between Beijing and Hanoi.
Two days from today, Nguyen Tien Trung will face trial on charge of treason by the Vietnamese government. Trung, a French-educated pro-democracy blogger and software engineer, had first been drafted by the Vietnamese army following his return from France and arrested the day after his dishonorable discharge. He is founder of the Young Vietnamese for Democracy Association and, according to government media, a member of the banned Democratic Party of Vietnam.
Trung’s was part of a series of high-profile summer arrests that included Le Cong Dinh, Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, Nguyen Si Binh. The first is one of Vietnam’s top human rights lawyers and a former Fulbright scholar at Tulane, the second is chairman of a top Vietnamese Internet company, the third is a Vietnamese-American democracy activist. The American government, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have all called for their immediate release.
Government media has also been particularly preoccupied with these cases. VTV, the government’s central news channel, devoted a significant amount of prime-time to air the four’s public confessions. Similarly, many major national newspapers carried the full text of their confessions. While the Vietnamese government is no stranger to human rights-related arrests, the extent of official attention it has showered on these four is still surprising.
The spotlight is shifting away from Le Cong Dinh, the American-educated lawyer with an international reputation, towards Nguyen Tien Trung, as the latter’s trial date nears. Trung is merely 26 years old, far younger than the other three middle-aged men. Trung graduated from Le Hong Phong High School, southern Vietnam’s academic powerhouse. He then went on to graduate school in computer science in southern France, where he was an outstanding student. His profile eerily matches that of many young Vietnamese who have the opportunity to study abroad. Many will surely be watching the outcome of his trial, where he may face the death sentence.
In a recent article, the New York Times highlights the simmering tension between Google’s 80 million Chinese users and their government. At the same time, Vietnamese Facebook users have had trouble accessing the site for months and blame the government for this partial block. With a former Fulbright scholar in jail and a young blogger on trial, Hanoi’s suspicious eye on Beijing, bauxite and imperial past notwithstanding, may just relax.
“Something is rotten in the state of banking.” Alright, that isn’t quite how the Bard put it, but you take my point. Our nation’s ongoing financial crisis – just shy of a year in the making – is far from over. Indeed, with unemployment and budget deficits at record highs (the ‘worst since the Great Depression’, as the official administration line goes) it seems like we’ve just skimmed the surface and Americans are madder than they’ve ever been – a point about which congressional Democrats, with eyes fixed on 2010, are rightfully nervous. But even as populist anger has surged in the months since the first bank bailouts, there is scarcely a consensus about how lawmakers ought to proceed – that is, to curtail the excesses of the banking industry and its ability to send shockwaves through the larger economy. Of course, there are some (particularly on the right) who would take issue with the problem, stated as such, but as the evidence mounts it’s becoming harder to ignore the implications – that, as Dean Baker concludes in his recent piece, “The Big Bank Theory”, the complicity of the banking industry is incontrovertible and regulation is not merely prudent, but necessary.
In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail. Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.
In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.
In spite of what you’ve heard before, there isn’t any one ‘third rail’ in politics. If social security reform is the partisan lighting rod du jour, then immigration reform is a close second. Moreover, if Tom Barry’spiecein the November issue of the Review is any indication, it may well be gaining. Writing about a little-known area of law he calls ‘criminal-immigration’ whereby immigrants – legal and otherwise, convicted of non-violent crimes and possessing legal family members in the US – are sentenced to jail time in so-called ‘public-private prisons’ before their inevitable deportation. Part of a ‘get tough on crime’ mantra coming out of the Bush administration – and one the Obama White House has been reluctant to modify in the midst of an already thorny healthcare battle – these newly rebranded ‘criminal-aliens’ face sentences lasting anywhere from a few days to several years before deportation, thus effectively punishing offenders twice for the same crime. So much for the Fifth Amendment. Read the rest of this entry »
As violence diminishes in post-civil war Iraq, sectarianism is becoming entrenched in the political institutions of the country according to the first of a two-part series by Nir Rosen in our November/December 2009 issue. What does this say about Iraq’s future? A government rife with corruption and authoritarian tendencies begins to appear increasingly threatening when sectarianism is thrown into the mix. Although the decrease in violence over the past two years is certainly something to be happy about, it shouldn’t cloud the necessity to foster minority protection rights. Sunnis and Shias have tired of violence and recognized the legitimacy of the central government for now, but ten years down the road, when Shias are receiving all the civil service jobs and Iraqi schools are imposing a Shia-based education on its Sunni students, can we be sure that another civil war won’t break out? And this isn’t even considering the volatile north, where the central government stands by watching the Kurdish authority committing human rights abuses against Shabaks, Yazidis and other minority ethnic groups.
The Obama administration’s attention is currently solely fixed on Afghanistan, and understandably so. The President has rejected all of the proposals set before him by his war council and continues to ponder over whether or not to employ an Iraq-styled “surge” in Afghanistan. While considering the question of whether to increase troops or not, he should also ask if the “success” he would be looking to replicate with the surge is the type of success he wants. The decision facing Obama has been compared to the dilemmas faced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with respect to Vietnam. “Eikenberry’s stand” gives the President some time to continue to weigh the pros and cons of a troop increase. During this time, he should not only refer back to the consequences of Johnson’s decisions in Vietnam, but also to what is shaping up to become an untenable peace in Iraq.
As reported earlier, a judge found Ezra Nawi guilty of assaulting two members of the Israeli border police during the 2007 demolition of a Palestinian house. Nawi, a human rights activist, was finally sentenced on October 21. According to www.supportezra.net, Nawi will serve one month in prison and must pay a fine of 750 shekels, plus 500 shekels in compensation to each police officer involved. Additionally, Nawi will serve a six-month suspended sentence if arrested again within the next three years for “unlawful assembly” or for “interfering with a policeman carrying out his duty.”
David Schulman notes in the aforementioned BR article, “[Nawi] will not be the first imprisoned for defending the defenseless.” Today we salute not only our veterans but peace activists who work to make suffering and war unnecessary. Read more about the current state of Israel’s peace movement in “Peace Out” by Helena Cobban, from the July/August 2009 issue of Boston Review.
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