How will we stop an preventive attack on Korea or Iran?

I'm having flashbacks to 2002. The government is marching towards war, and the American people have not grasped that fact. I was slow to grasp what was going on, but my eyes were opened by this article at the Intercept:

John Bolton Chairs an Actual “Fake News” Publisher Infamous for Spreading Anti-Muslim Hate

 This made me realize that Bolton is not just a hawk -- not just a guy with different opinions about how to solve a problem -- he's a genocidal liar. Based on the material published by the Gatestone Institute, he will whip up fear using brazenly fallacious arguments. For people in his position, credible arguments are not needed, because repetition and political power will be enough to persuade a large number of people to support his agenda.

We have to assume that the Trump administration is preparing to attack North Korea and/or Iran, and we need to put every possible roadblock in their path. People from diverse political and moral schools of thought recognize that what they intend to do is illegal, immoral, and pretty much insane.

Now we need to raise the alarm, and organize a response.

I've found the following groups to be speaking out against preventive wars:
1. Buchanan conservatives (The American Conservative)
2. Catholics academics (Unclear about the conference of bishops, but they likely would come out against invasions)
3. Libertarians (Ron Paul, Rand Paul?)
4. Your standard anti-war, anti-state leftists.

We Will Breathe the Ashes of the Dead for the Rest of Our Lives

The Holocaust statement

I'd heard the fuss over the fact that Trump did not mention Jews on Holocaust remembrance day (while simultaneously blocking refugee entry to the US), but only looked at his statement now. Perhaps just as disturbing is how he frames the Holocaust as an issue of the relative military strength between "good" and "evil".

Here it is (I underline the major quotes):

“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.
“Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest.‎ As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.
“In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.”

This contrasts with with the more conventional calls for self-reflection, presenting the Holocaust as the consequence of German cultural/moral collapse (and the failure of other nations to provide refuge). Obama emphasized this strongly in 2015 (the only other statement I looked at):

On the tenth International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the American people pay tribute to the six million Jews and millions of others murdered by the Nazi regime. We also honor those who survived the Shoah, while recognizing the scars and burdens that many have carried ever since.
Honoring the victims and survivors begins with our renewed recognition of the value and dignity of each person. It demands from us the courage to protect the persecuted and speak out against bigotry and hatred. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris serve as a painful reminder of our obligation to condemn and combat rising anti-Semitism in all its forms, including the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust.
This anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made confronting this terrible chapter in human history and on our continuing efforts to end genocide. I have sent a Presidential delegation to join Polish President Komorowski, the Polish people, official delegations from scores of nations, and many survivors, at today’s official commemoration in Poland.
As a founding member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the United States joins the Alliance’s thirty other member nations and partners in reiterating its solemn responsibility to uphold the commitments of the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. We commemorate all of the victims of the Holocaust, pledging never to forget, and recalling the cautionary words of the author and survivor of Auschwitz Primo Levi, “It happened, therefore it can happen again. . . . It can happen anywhere.” Today we come together and commit, to the millions of murdered souls and all survivors, that it must never happen again.

Peace between Israel and Palestine is impossible

After the recent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, some pundits are calling for a renewed effort to establish peace between Israel and it's Palestinian/Arab/Muslim enemies. I believe that such peace is impossible. It does not take an expert to see that the barriers to peace are insurmountable without radical changes to the cultures of that region. That is not to say that there is no point in trying to contain the conflict, but I think that we should be realistic about what can be achieved with the traditional strategies, and then we should think about alternative strategies.

Below, I'll spell out the barriers to peace from each side.

Israel:
1) No reasonable Israeli would be willing to live under a state that is dominated by Palestinians (or Arabs or Muslims). The political cultures of those societies are frighteningly primitive. Add to that the Jewish experience as a minority in Europe and the decades of hostility from Arabs, and Israelis could not expect to have any freedom or security in an Arab-dominated state. They will rightfully fight to preserve Israel's independence and Jewish (or Western) majority.
2) Semi-reasonable (nationalist) Israelis will go to great lengths to preserve their own security, even at the expense of the security of non-Israelis. They will occupy neighboring lands if these lands can be used as staging grounds for attacks. They will limit the mobility of the residents there, close their borders, and occasionally launch military incursions if they feel threatened. Unless terrorist attacks from the occupied territories end for a substantial period of time (a decade or two), the occupation will not end.
3) Fanatical Israelis will attempt to annex the neighboring lands and create a "greater Israel".
4) Outside fanatics (largely in the US) will support Israel under all circumstances, even when it is promoting fanatical policies.

Palestine:
1) No reasonable Palestinian will tolerate living under Israeli occupation, particularly when it severely infringes on security and social/economic activity or pressures them to leave their current homes.
2) Semi-reasonable Palestinians will resent the Zionist invasion of Palestine. If their family was exiled, they will demand the right to return to areas within the 1967 borders, and/or a large compensation. They will not trust Israel.
3) Fanatical Palestinians/Arabs will demand that Israel be incorporated into a Muslim-dominated polity, where Jews will at best be second-class citizens.
4) Outside fanatics will support the Palestinians regardless of what they do.

The consequences:
Even if everyone were reasonable, this would be difficult to resolve. The Israelis and Palestinians would have to find a way that each of them could live in their own community without infringing on the other. Given the intermixing of their settlements (particularly in and around Jerusalem) and the differences in their political cultures, and the duration and intimacy of their conflict, this would be a challenge.
However, most people are not reasonable, in that they are strongly biased towards members of their own group (I call this "semi-reasonable", because they can still empathize with the suffering of outgroup members, but they discount it by a substantial factor). Combine this fact with the existential threat felt by each side, and peace is nearly impossible.
But it's worse than that, because fanatics are influential on each side (these people take no consideration of outsiders), and these fanatics are egged on by outside support and their ranks are swelled by each flare-up in the conflict.

The traditional strategy:
One strategy is to address the outside actors. The Neocons place their focus here: they hope to eliminate the outside support for the Palestinians, thereby weakening the fanatics and their military capacity. They hope that this would create an absolutely one-sided military situation on the ground. I think that such ideas are pure fantasy. It would essentially require that the USA occupy the entire middle east, and Israel establish a totalitarian regime over the Palestinians (which would inevitably have cracks).
Another strategy is to establish cease-fires that will allow trust to develop (allowing the semi-reasonable people on each side to come into alignment). This has worked in other conflicts, but as described above, I don't think it would be nearly sufficient here.
A more radical strategy is to develop compassion between the warring sides by building friendships between Israelis and Palestinians (essentially, making people reasonable). While this is a noble endeavor, I don't think that it can make sufficient inroads to have a strong political impact on its own.

An alternative strategy:
I can hardly say that I have a strategy. Maintaining cease-fires and building cross-group connections will probably be helpful under any circumstance, even if they cannot create lasting peace. The only peaceful outcome that I can envision is a radical change to the Israeli and Palestinian group identity. For instance, this could arise from a threat from an outside enemy that they each view as especially foreign and threatening, but I cannot provide any realistic prediction of what that enemy might be (robots? aliens? zombies?). The best that I can think of is for them to be absorbed into some sort of post-national cosmopolitan society. To the extent that such a society is developing, the Israelis have a decent connection to it. The issue is more how to entice the Arabs to refocus their attention to this society and give up their ancient obsessions. Even after the fundamental political and economic changes occur, it will probably take a generation or two for the old group identity to weaken sufficiently to allow peace to be established between Israel and Palestine.

To Israelis and Palestinians

I don't want your fucking war.

Don't try to sell it to me. Don't tell me how evil or barbaric "the other side" is. Don't try to delegitimize entire nations or deny their right to basic freedoms -- whether individual or communal. When you do that, you only discredit yourself.

If you want me to respect you and your institutions, then don't allow fanatics to gain influence in those institutions. I will not support any institution that implements the agenda of fanatics. I don't care if "the other side" is more fanatical.

Your nationalist squabble is on the other side of the planet. Don't bring it here.

The "War on Terror" and the "Reign of Terror"

A stray comment at Swords Crossed has driven me to read up on the French Reign of Terror. Upon reading quotes by Maximilien Robespierre, I recalled a conversation from earlier today with an Indian friend regarding the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. He asserted that the Indian government had made a mistake in repealing some laws relating to terrorism (apparently,the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act of 1987, which allows prolonged detention without trial and expired in 1995 following accusations that it was being abused; alternatively he may have been referring to the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance passed in 2001, updated in 2002, and repealed in 2004 after assertions of abuse).

Anyway, his basic attitude was "terrorists don't deserve procedural rights"--of course, assuming that the government is rigorous and honest in its identification of "terrorists". I've seen this same attitude in Americans who say that they wouldn't care if the government methodically tapped our phones to gather information about terrorism. Today, I saw the same basic attitude reflected in quotes from Robespierre, the architect of la Terreur. For instance:

The revolutionary government has to summon extraordinary activity to its aid precisely because it is at war. It is subjected to less binding and less uniform regulations, because the circumstances in which it finds itself are tempestuous and shifting, above all because it is compelled to deploy, swiftly and incessantly, new resources to meet new and pressing dangers.

The principle concern  of constitutional government is civil liberty; that of revolutionary government, public liberty. Under a constitutional government little more is required than to protect the individual against abuses by the state, whereas revolutionary government is obliged to defend the state itself against the factions that assail it from every quarter.

To good citizens revolutionary government owes the full protection of the state; to the enemies of the people it owes only death.

These ideas are in themselves sufficient to explain the origin and the nature of the laws that we term revolutionary. Those who call them arbitrary or tyrannical are foolish or perverse sophists who seek to reconcile white with black and black with white: they prescribe the same system for peace and war, for health and sickness; or rather their only object is to resurrect tyranny and destroy the fatherland.

 On Revolutionary Government (1793) in The Human Rights Reader

He goes on with the accusations of treason, and concludes by  calling for the reorganization of a special court, the Revolutionary Tribunal. Replace "revolutionary government" with "wartime government" and I wouldn't be able to distinguish this terrorist's rhetoric from George W. Bush's -- though in modern America there is no such thing as peace (In the 63 years since the end of WWII, we've had only 11 years in which we were not involved in either the Cold War or the War on Terror--and during all but two of those years we were at war with Iraq.)

From Wikiquote:

Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs. 

and...

We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror. 

I like to think that Americans are less susceptible to these rationalizations of power than the 18th-century French were, but given how far we've gone when faced with a threat that is totally insignificant relative to what they faced (or even what the US faced at that time), I may lose some of that faith.

The Siege of Iraq

I am sick.

I am sick of the righteous indignation of the right-wing militarists, proudly on display in last night's Republican debates. "America is innocent!", they cry ("Israel is innocent!" is the companion cry). They should study a little bit of Christian theology--none are innocent. We are all sinners. They claim that "America is the victim"; that there is no good reason for anyone to dislike us; that there is nothing that we could have done to reduce anyone's desire to harm us.

They are full of shit, and it's making me nauseous. Sean Hannity dismisses the suffering of the Iraqi people during the 1990s by invoking our "moral obligation" to drive the Iraqi army from Kuwait and then lay siege to Iraq. Hannity implies that we have a moral obligation to use violence: we never have a moral obligation to use violence. We sometimes have the right to use violence, but even that is questionable if our violence will engulf non-aggressors.

If there is any chance that you are buying into the (American) militarist myth that we only fight wars against "evil despots" and never against the subjugated people, then you need to refresh your memory about the Siege of Iraq. From 1991 to 2003, the USA blockaded and bombed Iraq. By the time we were done, the society had collapsed. It's hard to say that the people themselves were simply collateral damage in this strategy--just like strategic bombing in WWII (culminating the the atomic bombing of Japan), this strategy is designed to destroy the society's ability (or will) to field a military by destroying the entire economy of that society. The people are the target, just as much as they were on September 11, 2001.