Frank’s Case Book

The World Organization for Animal Health recently certified Britain to be rid of the foot-and-mouth disease that had devastated the British meat industry. Unfortunately, the certification applied only to agriculture and not to the infestation of foot-and-mouth disease in the British media. The British press, especially the tabloid press, has deliberately distorted the nature of the detention a few hundred al Qaeda and Taliban from Afghanistan at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, Cuba. They have selectively presented information and suggested that Americans may be using torture against the detainees.

Much of this began with a Defense Department photograph showing detainees kneeling and shackled right before they were placed in cells. The photograph suggested to those predisposed to believe the worst that the United States was deliberately humiliating and mistreating detainees. We were reminded that the use of legirons harks back the days of American slavery. It turns out that additional restraints are used when the detainees are moved, not while they are in their cells. To not use these additional restraints with these dangerous detainees, in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, would be “stupid.”

The Mirror provides an obvious example of such deliberate distortion. They ran a headline “Vietnam War Hero Condemns Camp X-Ray.” The veteran in question, Col. James Hughes, had once been captured and paraded around by the Viet Cong. If you read the quotations from Col. Hughes, you see someone unwilling to make any accusation, because unlike the British press, he doesn’t pretend to be informed. The worst he could say was that, “I just hope that they are not being treated like animals… I am enormously concerned about the welfare of anyone who’s being held in captivity.” The statement is an eloquent expression of generalized concern by a former victim of brutality, not any a specific condemnation of US actions as stated by the headline.

Much of the furor has died down and explanations about Camp X-Ray have been provided. The International Red Cross has visited and British officials and a US Congressional delegation have not found mistreatment of the detainees.

The real question is why the British press was so apparently anxious to accuse the United States of brutality, why even members of the British Parliament rushed to judgment. When thousands of Americans were killed in the September 11 attacks, almost all Europeans truly felt anguish at the loss of life. However, there was a small minority, irritated by the United States as the only superpower, smug in the realization that perhaps the United States had got its comeuppance. So long as Americans are victims, so long as Americans are being pulled from ruble, Europeans are sympathetic. When the United States exercises its right of response, some of the European Left gets squeamish and accusatory.

This anti-Americanism on the Left is not exclusive to Europeans and began as soon as US military action began. At the end of last year, there were exaggerated reports of civilian causalities in Afghanistan. Using press reports, Professor Marc W. Herold, of the University of New Hampshire, estimated civilian casualties of nearly 4,000 people. Given that the death count at the World Trade Center has been difficult to determine even in a open society and the fact that it is difficult to identify the civilians and Taliban and al Qaeda, it is foolish in the extreme to use press reports (many from papers unsympathetic to the United States) to compute a civilian casualty count. Herold’s civilian casualty total exceeds that of that claimed by the notoriously mendacious Taliban. Now the British press cites Herold uncritically as if he has a definitive casualty count.

A report from Edward Cody of the Washington Post Foreign Service illustrates the difficulty in untangling was it really going on in Afghanistan. On December 29, 2001, US forces destroyed a number of brick homes near Qalai Niazi, Afghanistan. Was this an attack on civilians or a legitimate military target? According to Cody, “Journalists who arrived here [Qalai Niazi, Afghanistan] on Sunday found a large store of ammunition that filled one little house, from boxes of rifle rounds to stacks of antitank rockets. But, by today, [Thursday] it had been hauled away, and people now swear it was never here in the first place.” One can understand how locals might want to distance themselves from the Taliban and al Qaeda, however, this motivation tends to diminish their credibility.

The foreign press has a positive obligation to examine every country critically, including the United States. No one supportive of liberty wants a lapdog press anywhere in the world. However, the zeal with which the British and European media have leapt to assert the worst on the basis of thin evidence reveals more about these media outlets than it does about the US military.

Patriotism does not imply a slavish and uncritical acquiescence to everything one’s country does. Love of country, like love of another, means expecting and wanting the best from the object of love. Criticism from the “loyal opposition” is an outgrowth of the love of, not the hate of country. The 1960s provide examples of important and thoughtful criticism born of love of country and condemnation borne of contempt. Strong feelings polarized Americans and blurred the meaning of American symbols like the flag.

One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was so persuasive a voice for white and black Americans was because he placed American shortcomings in the context of aspirations of what America could and should be. Rather than berating America for its sins, he awakened consciences. King did not condemn America as evil as much illuminate the inconsistency with America’s premises and the treatment of black Americans. In his famous, “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King explained:

“When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

Black Americans were just asking the rest of America to live up to its promises. King’s Dream was that “…one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” King’s criticism of US civil rights policies was an ultimate act of the love of country, a love that was often unrequited.

The anti-war movement was somewhat different. If possible, the Vietnam War was more polarizing than the Civil Rights Movement. Though opposition to the war in Vietnam came from all political quarters, there was a strong anti-American undercurrent in the anti-war movement. For some, Vietnam may have been a mistake where the US faltered. For others, the US was an inherently evil and immoral country and the Vietnam War was just the most conspicuous evidence of this wickedness.

Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and a Democrat by birth, recounts an incident illustrating this attitude. Noonan was on a bus trip to an anti-war demonstration in 1971. Soon Noonan realized that she was not with a group that shared her love of country. She observed from others on the bus not patriotism, but loathing and contempt for America. The US was to these people not a good and great country trying to extricate itself from a ground war in Asia, but a “racist, genocidal nation with an imperialistic lust for land…”

The passions of the time were so strong that the nation’s symbols started to blur. Some on the far Left began to burn the American flag as a sign of their displeasure. Those in favor of the war waved the flag that much harder in response. Soon, it was impossible to display the flag without the implication that one supported the War in Vietnam and disrespect for the flag became a conventional way to show anti-war sentiment. In one famous photograph from the time that illustrates misuse of the flag, a person assaulted an anti-war protestor using a flag as a weapon. This so of symbol misuse exacerbated the polarization of the war. To be anti-war carried the implication of being anti-American.

After the attack of September 11, the flag again became a symbol of American unity and support for the victims. Flags were plastered on bumper stickers, festooned over windows, pinned to lapels, and proudly flown over homes. US Flags sprouted across the land like wheat on the plains of Kansas. While some might expect flag-waving sentimentality by primitives in the mid-west, flags spontaneously appeared even in sophisticated and progressive cities like New York and Los Angeles. Goodness, the next thing you know, people might even offer up prayers.

Americans under 40 could rush to the flag at a time of stress unburdened by the self-consciousness of the baby-boomers. Not everyone is so fortunate. Trapped by the attitudes of their politically formative years some pundits and the legions of university thought police whined that waving the flag might somehow suppress different viewpoints. One can only imagine the chagrin of those on the Left when chants of “USA! USA!” greeted George Bush at Ground Zero in New York City.

Those fearful that the flag might become a club to enforce lock-step conformity ought not complain when others wave the flag. Rather, they should wave the flag in the midst of whatever critique they have. To do otherwise is to allow patriotism to be appropriated by only one side. This is unhealthy for political dialogue. Maintaining the tradition of the loyal opposition requires that opposition to grasp even more strongly at national symbols.

Of course, this suggestion is moot for those who really do hate America.

Perhaps the lowest order measure of whether circumstances are improving for the bulk of mankind is life expectancy. Thomas Hobbs described life before civilization as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,and short.” In the Stone Age, the average human life expectancy was 25 years. Largely because of improved sanitation, the increased availability of untainted food and water, and medical advances, life expectancy over the last century has radically improved. In the United States, for example, life expectancy increased from 48 years in 1900 to a current 76.9 years.

Around the world there are pockets of problems. The spread of the lethal AIDS virus in Africa threatens to reduce life expectancy in some countries and Russia has experienced a decline in life expectancy. Nonetheless, globally life expectancy is on the rise.

It is easy to understand how life expectancy increases with improved environmental factors and greater medical knowledge. However, it is also possible to conceive how progress might lead to increase war deaths over time. The US Civil War marked perhaps the beginning of the application of mechanization to the art of war. Although in the Civil War, like previous wars, disease killed more than enemy action, both sides managed to kill a total of over 200,000 people in action. The same science and technology that helps improve life expectancy has made humans more effective and efficient killers. This skill, in principle, could put downward pressure on life expectancy.

One might anticipate an association between population density and increased chances for conflict. As the world population increases, there is more opportunity for friction and conflict and dispute over resources. Fortunately, it seems that, the likelihood of being kill in war is at least stable. The only exceptions are World Wars I and II, when failed political systems collided with human ingenuity and managed to accumulate a death total of over 25,000,000 people. The Peace Science Society International at Pennsylvania State University, whose stated institutional goal is to “encourage the development of peace analysis and conflict management,” has accumulated statistics on inter-state war casualties over time.

Coupling these data with world population information, we can plot per capita war deaths as a function of time, as shown below. The data are averaged over ten year-increments to reduce statistical fluctuations. The values on the vertical axis represent the likelihood of death within a ten-year period. It is clear, that despite increases in population density, an increased capacity to wage war, and except for the World Wars, the likelihood of a human dying in war has remained relatively constant. During the decade encompassing World War II, there was a 1 in 121 chance of becoming a war causalty. Typically, over the last century this probability has been less than 1 in 3000.

Ironically, increased military technology may be responsible for the stability in war deaths. Nuclear deterrence in large measure prevented direct conflict between the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War. In the present conflict between the US and forces in Afghanistan and in the recent conflict in Kosovo, high technology has permitted the direct application of force with minimum unintended collateral damage. If World War II technology had been applied in either conflict the number of both civilian and military deaths would have been much higher. Conservatives are congenitally disinclined to optimism. However, perhaps the relatively constant per capita rate of war deaths, despite the improved ability to wage war, is a cause for such optimism.

Unfortunately, while inter-state war deaths may be stable, the same may not be true of intra-state genocide. Genocides in the manner of Cambodia in the 1970s and Rwanda in the 1990s may be increasing. Indeed, the Jewish Holocaust in Germany is lumped in the totals for World War II, but might more accurately be categorized as internal genocide. In a world that tends to respect the boundaries of sovereignty, the opportunity for local tyrannies to run amok remains.

At the end of the last century, the publishers at Random House constructed a list of the 100 best novels and 100 best non-fiction works of the twentieth century. The non-fiction list was particularly instructive. Actually, there were two lists. One list represented the consensus of a blue ribbon panel with many notables including Daniel J. Boorstin, Shelby Foote, Stephen Jay Gould, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, and. Gore Vidal. The other list was the result of a poll of 194,829 readers. Admittedly any such public poll is self-selected and likely to reflect strength of opinion rather than breath of consensus. Nonetheless, it is instructive that Ayn Rand, the laissez-faire economist and novelist, had three books of the top six books in the reader list and, yet, did not even make the top 100 selections of the blue-ribbon panel. A little further down the reader list at number 16 was Friedrich A. Hayek’s, The Road to Serfdom. The Austrian economist also did not make it in the top 100 of the blue-ribbon list. This is quite a shame since Hayek’s book ought to be required reading for any educated person.

The modern Conservative reader may miss Hayek’s originality and innovation because much of what he presented in the relatively short The Road to Serfdom is now part of the conventional wisdom of Conservatives, especially free-market Conservatives. The fact that the ideas do not seem surprising or remarkable is a measure of how thoroughly the ideas in his book have been felt. Indeed, much of his warnings against the effects of central planning were borne out by the Communist experience in the last half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, when the book was written in 1943, memories of the Great Depression, what was then considered a massive failure of free markets, still dominated economic thought and an unplanned economy seemed dangerous. Centrally directed economies appeared to be an inevitable next step in the evolution of industrial societies.

Hayek’s argument focused less on the economic efficiency of markets, and more on the nature of freedom. Hayek is the champion of individualism over collectivism. Central planning must necessarily limit the scope of freedom. A key Hayek observation is that central planning reverses the centuries old trend toward the rule of law against arbitrary authority. Moreover, in collectivist societies the worst elements inevitably rise to the top. As political power rather than market competition decides success and failure, political power rather than economic superiority becomes the goal.

Hayek is no Ayn Rand absolutist. He freely acknowledges the need for society to act collectively to provide a minimum level of subsistence for those incapable of providing for themselves. Hayek believes in competitive markets so much that he sees the need for government to limit monopoly market power when necessary. He, however, does not want the government to become that monopoly.

Perhaps Hayek’s most enlightening contribution is his analysis of the rise of the Nazi political movement in Germany. To many, Socialism and Fascism represent opposite poles in the political spectrum. Since Socialism has typically had an internationalist sympathy and Fascism emphasizes nationalism, they were thought to be radically different.

However, the National Socialists of Germany did not self-identify themselves as Socialists merely to borrow the cachet of an intellectually popular political movement. Hayek, who personally experienced the rise of National Socialism between the wars, traces the intellectual history of Fascism in Germany from Marxists Werner Sombart and Johann Plenge. They saw the necessity for economic organization and planning rather than markets as necessary for German resurgence after the humiliation of World War I. Indeed, the “patron saint of National Socialism,” Moeller van den Bruck, considered National Socialism as the vanguard in the “fight against capitalism.” According to Hayek, “van den Bruck’s Third Reich was intended to give Germans a socialism adapted to their nature and undefiled by Western liberal [read libertarian – FMM] ideals.”

Read by a modern reader, the most important contribution of The Road to Serfdom is its identification of Fascism as Super-Socialism. At their core, Socialism and Fascism are the two Rottweilers from the same litter, regardless of their superficial differences. To the extent that it is necessary to recognize the threats to individual liberty to defend against them, The Road to Serfdom is required reading. Perhaps if some on the Left were to recognize the intellectual affinity between Socialism and Fascism they might be a little more sympathetic to Conservative concerns about collectivism. When individual rights are subordinated to collective goals, tyranny is the danger.

Israel is an unlikely state. It was formed by the return of the Jewish people into an inhospitable land after centuries of the Jewish Diaspora. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine from the sixteenth century. After World War I, the League of Nations made the area a protected mandate under British control. Improvidently, the British had made conflicting commitments about the future of Palestine. In return for help against the Ottomans in World War I, the British promised statehood to the Arabs. In return for Jewish support, the British in the Balfour Declaration promised at national Jewish homeland. After World War II, the weary British gave up and tossed the problem into the lap of the United Nations. Attempting to forge a compromise, the United Nations in 1947 divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas, essentially present-day Israel and Jordan. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence and the formal creation of the Israeli state. The surrounding Arab nations attacked, but were rebuffed in the Israeli War for Independence.

That was more than 50 years ago and the problems have lingered largely because of a persistent refugee problem. There are conflicting estimates as to the number of Arabs who fled Israel after the country declared independence. The numbers are less than 1 million, but certainly more than 500,000. A roughly corresponding number of Jews in Arab nations fled to Israel and Israel’s Jewish population swelled as European and other Jews from the West migrated to Israel.

The popular mythology of the Palestinian Arabs is that Arabs fled because they feared persecution by the Israelis. Israelis claim that Arab leaders urged fellow Arabs to leave to make it easier to exterminate the Jewish state. Whether or not the Palestinians should have believed the promises made by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, that Arabs in Israel would be granted full citizenship if they remained in Israel, the fact is they did not and fled Israel.

Jewish refugees that fled to Israel from other nations were welcomed as brothers and sisters and assimilated into the fledging state. Indeed, they have become the backbone of modern Israel. By contrast, surrounding Arab nations did not accommodate Palestinian Arab refugees. They were, instead, deliberatedly concentrated into refugee camps where their anger was allowed to fester.

In yet another attempt to seize the land of Israel, the Arabs initiated a new war in 1967. The war lasted six days, after which the Israel controlled the West Bank of the Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Through years of negotiation, Israel has gradually relinquished land back to the Arabs in the hopes of purchasing peace with land. Of course, the tragic irony is that if there had been no 1967 War, if the Arabs had accepted their half of the Palestine mandate, Israel never would have controlled the land occupied after the Six-Day War (or Jerusalem) and the Arab Palestinians would be negotiating with Jordan for the creation of a separate Palestinian state.

The price of independence and freedom for Jews in Israel has been to live in constant fear of war and suffering under scourge of deliberate terrorism. The Palestinian Authority encourages in its Arabic broadcasts and publications anti-Semitism and argues not for accommodation with Israel, but the destruction of the Jewish state. The real question is not whether Israel can accept an independent Palestinian state, but whether Palestinians are prepared accept the Jewish state.

The American response after years of duplicity on the part of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership, is to pressure Israel to be accommodating, to not respond to terrorist acts against civilians, and to stop “the cycle of violence.” All this, despite the fact that last year, Israel offered the Palestinian authority as much as it could hope for: control of the area outside of Israel proper and even partial control of Jerusalem. The Palestinian response was not a counter offer but increased civil unrest and terrorist attacks directed at civilians.

The attacks on the United States on September 11 made Americans victims of the same terrorist extremism and may have changed American attitudes and created empathy on the part of Americans to the predicament of the Israelis. In recent weeks, the Palestinian terrorist groups have initiated a number of devastating suicide bombings in Israel. In proportion to their relative populations, it would be as if the United State had lost 2000 civilians in terrorist attacks.

The United States has recognized the moral imperative of dealing with terrorism and states that protect and sponsor them. The United States could not very well initiate military operations to topple the Taliban government that sponsors anti-American attacks and not grant Israel the same right of self-defense. Rather than continual pleas for restraint to Israel not to respond, White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer said, “Israel is a sovereign government. Israel has a right to live in security.” It is amazing how such an obvious statement has come to seem remarkable.

References

• BBC News, The Birth of Israel.
• Mufson, Steven, Sharp U.S. Reaction Signals Exasperation With Arafat, Washington Post December 4, 2001, Page A01.

Montgomery County, MD abuts the northwest corner of Washington, DC and it is one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The county resembles Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” The county has no transit troubles and the average commute is a five-minute stroll from the front porch. There are no drug problems, no spousal abuse, no homelessness, and no poverty. Indeed the problems that plague other jurisdictions do not exist and the poor county council struggles to find problems to address. What else can explain the recent events in the county?

A couple of weeks ago, the county council passed legislation that drew national attention. The county would make it punishable by a fine if a person smoking in his own home annoyed a neighbor. There were no quantitative restrictions on the level of particulates that could permissibly escape from one property to another. Annoyance was the criteria.

After national ridicule, the county executive, after initially supporting the legislation, vetoed it. It became clear that the law would just become one more tool that squabbling neighbors could brandish against one another. Perhaps the clincher was the argument that since minorities smoke at higher rates, they would be disproportionately affected by the new regulation.

Just when that commotion started to die down, Kensington, MD, a town in Montgomery County, dispensed with the services of Santa Claus in lighting a holiday tree. A couple of people had perennially claimed that Santa was a religious symbol that should not appear at a publicly sponsored event. They finally had their way. The First Amendment argument against Santa had no merit. Even the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Arthur Spitzer, conceded that he doubts that “a court would tell Kensington they could not have Santa Claus.”

Fear not, Kensington, there will be a Santa Claus. Santa will be there, as Francis Church would say “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist [1].” Whether or not Kensington will have an official Santa, throngs of locals have vowed to show up dressed in Santa costumes, demonstrating that common sense has not entirely fled the county. Indeed, the whole commotion has guaranteed that even more attention will be devoted to Santa at this year’s celebration.

These two events are bound by the common thread of excessive solicitousness to vocal minorities intent on bullying the majority. In the case of Montgomery County, the issues were relatively minor and squelched by the ridicule they deserved.

What happened recently a country away was far worse. At Orange Coast College in California, Political Science Professor Kenneth Hearlson was suspended without a hearing and told not to return to campus, after several Muslim students complained Hearlson had called them personally “terrorists,” “Nazis,” and “murderers.”

The knee-jerk reaction of the college again was excessive solicitousness. Hearlson was punished summarily and the validity of the complaints was accepted without question. Fortunately for Hearlson, a couple of students taped the September-18 class. The transcript clearly shows that Hearlson criticized some Muslim leaders for not speaking out against the September 11 attack on the US, but he went out of his way to point out that not all Muslims are responsible for the events of September 11.

Despite the transcript, Orange Coast College President Margaret Gratton, as of the end of November, had not reinstated Hearlson or issued a formal apology to him. The students who made the demonstrably false and malicious allegations have not been punished. Mooath Saidi, one of Hearlson’s accusers, when confronted with the transcript, argued, “…if some of the allegations I made were not maybe right, if my memory was shady, this is not the first time anybody brought anything against this teacher… [Hearlson] has a history, and he obviously hasn’t learned and he needs to be taught a lesson. [2]”

Chilling.

1. Church, Francis P., “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” Editorial Page, New York Sun, 1897.
2. Schemo, Diana Jean, “New Battle in Old War Over Freedom of Speech,” N.Y. Times, November 25, 2001.