instapundit - Quaker Ranter

Spying in times of terror

Martin Kelley — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:27:35 +0000

A new poll out there shows that only 64% of Americans believe that “the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States”:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/NSA.htm. One wonders what the numbers would have been if “people living in the United States” were replaced by “Americans.” Even so, 64% approval is pretty low in these fear of terrorism times.

Some random chatter on the blogs: Americablog’s “New domestic spying poll numbers are very bad for Bush”:http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-domestic-spying-poll-numbers-are.html, Ezra Klein’s “Trust, But Verify”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/trust_but_verif.html & Stephen Kaus at Huffington’s “Popping the Wrong Question”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-kaus/popping-the-wrong-questio_b_12982.html, Instapundit’s cryptic “I guess Kaus was right”:http://instapundit.com/archives/027738.php and Michelle Malkin’s “Sorry NYTimes: America is OK with the NSA”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004176.htm.

Almost Famous

Martin Kelley — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 12:52:28 +0000

Conservative godfather of the internet Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org the other day. He didn’t like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs’ critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here:

Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender.
Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a United States warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at Enola Gay and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.

Confessions of an Anti-Sactions Activist

Martin Kelley — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:10:09 +0000

There are a bunch of fascinating rants against the contemporary peace movement as the result of an article by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly challenged his former colleagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilderness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feelings that Saddam Hussein used the peace group for propaganda purposes and he challenges many of the cultural norms of the peace movement. I don’t know if Brown realized just how much the anti-peace movement crowd would jump at his article. It’s gotten play in InstaPundit and In Context: None So Blind.
Brown’s critique is interesting but not really fair: he faults Voices for having a single focus (sanctions) and single goal (changing U.S. policy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no significant budget? Over the course of his work against sanctions Brown started studying Iraqi history as an academic and he began to worry that Voices disregarded historical analysis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of departure.” But was he surprised? Of course an academic is going to have a longer historical view than an underfunded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a welcome anomaly in the peace movement and gave it a strength of a clear message. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I understand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do better in the world. It was Americans taking responsibility for our own people’s blindness and disregard for human life. That Iraq has problems doesn’t let us off the hook of looking at our own culture’s skeletons.
What I do find fascinating is his behind-the-scenes description of the culture of the 1990s peace movement. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dramaturgy.” He’s undoubtedly right that peace activists didn’t challenge Baathist party propaganda enough, that we used the suffering of Iraqi people for our own anti-war propaganda, and that our analysis was often too simplistic. That doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanctions that most Americans knew little about.
The peace movement doesn’t challenge its own assumptions enough and I’m glad Brown is sharing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gentler and suspect he’ll look back at his work with Voices with more charity in years to come. Did he know the fodder his critique would give to the hawkish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative playbook, he could had offered his reflections and critique with an acknowlegment that there are plenty of good motivations behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I wonder if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will eventually find his new hawkish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, historical myopia, and propaganda propagation as the people he critiques.
Voices in the Wilderness has done a lot of good educating Americans about the effects of our policies overseas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a climate that didn’t support peace workers either morally or financially. The U.S. is a much better place because of Voices and the peace movement was certainly invigorated by its breath of fresh air.