The Cure for Martyrdom

There is truth in the concern that if you kill an ideological opponent you risk creating a martyr: a symbol that could strengthen and unify your opponent. In this war against militant Islam the United States and Israel are often cautioned not to kill certain opponents lest we create a martyr. I don't think this concern makes sense in war. In war, the best way to negate the martyrdom phenomenon is to water it down. In a nutshell, you create so many martyrs that your enemy cannot keep track of them, much less revere them.

Upper Hand

Israel got the upper hand in its battle with the Palestinians in early 2004. The reduction in effective attacks against Israel was very abrupt, much more abrupt than I expected. I think that there were two reasons for the success, one that has been widely identified and another that has not. The one that has been widely identified is the wall. Israel began to wall-off itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank. The West Bank was the place from which almost all of the effective Palestinian terror attacks emanated (the other territory, Gaza was already walled-off). As the wall progressed, the Israelis had fewer and fewer infiltration points to monitor, resulting in closer monitoring of the remaining locations.

The monitoring worked. The Israelis were able to intercept more of the bombers and the Palestinians are trying less because of the increasing futility. There is no sneaking, negotiating, whining or cajoling your way around a wall.

This reminds me of an incident I had in raising my eldest son. He was about three or four years old and was just being moved to a bed from a crib. One of the first nights he realized that he could get out of the bed (unlike the crib) and leave his room, which he did, over and over again. My wife and I tried to keep him in the room and he kept coming out. He was bull-headed. We fought a running battle with him for most of that night. Parents grew more and more angry and more and more desperate. Yelling and threats of punishment were no use. We spent much of the night up, as did our other children. The next night the same thing happened.

The following day I installed a latch on his door (I still feel guilty about this) that would allow the door to open a bit but not enough for him to get out. The result was remarkable. That night he pulled at the door and shouted for ten minutes (the door would open a bit and he could see the latch). Then, he retreated to his bed and slept soundly the rest of the night. We never had another problem. I realized that before the latch he believed he could get a concession from is parents and the possibility of that made him continue his hopeless quest. When he was confronted with the latch he very quickly realized that it would grant no concessions and he abandoned his quest.

I think the wall is the latch for the Palestinians. I pray the Palestinian people exhibit the wisdom of a 3-year old by abandoning their counterproductive quest.

The other reason Israel has gained the upper hand is that they stopped respecting a Palestinian fiction. The Palestinian terror groups (especially Hamas) had long maintained that they had a military wing and a political wing. Since the first Intifada, Israel had respected that distinction, despite the fact that the political wings clearly supported the military wings. That all ended on March 22, 2004. On that day, Israel killed the leader of the Hamas political wing, Ahmed Yassin, with a missile strike. Several weeks later his overconfident replacement was also killed. After each killing, many Palestinians shrieked black vows of revenge and the media amplified them with apocalyptic predictions about the security of Israel. Yet, the threatened response never materialized. I think I can guess why. The political wing leaders do not want to be martyrs and they can control the military wings. You don’t spend years and years clawing your way to the top of an organization (can you imagine what kind of horrific struggle that would entail in a violent organizations like Hamas?) just to trade all of that effort for martyrdom. Political leaders crave power and power is only fun if you are alive to wield it. Start killing them and the remaining ambitious ones will seek accommodation even as they jockey to fill the vacant post.

Killing the military functionaries does not create a deterrent. These positions are filled with wanna-be martyrs. The sick Palestinian culture will always supply more brainwashed youths for these positions.

When Giving is Taking (or The Danger of Privacy)

It seems counter intuitive, but Supreme Court cases dealing with abortion are not about whether abortion is right or wrong. Indeed, the case of Roe v. Wade was not decided on that basis. The main issue the court was wrestling with was whether the “Right of Privacy” that emanated from a prior Supreme Court decision would make any law limiting abortion unconstitutional.

The majority of the court concluded that a woman had a privacy right to make medical decisions about her body and that this meant that the government could not pass laws that would unreasonably interfere with her medical decisions related to abortion. The remainder of the decision related to what constituted an unreasonable interference with that right. That portion of the opinion consisted of a fascinating and ingenious balancing of the rights of the unborn child and the mother’s right to make decisions about her body. In the end, the Court concluded that the state’s rights to interfere with the mother’s decision increased over the length of the pregnancy as the viability of the unborn child increased.

As you can see, there is no place in this analysis for a discussion regarding the rightness or wrongness of abortion. That is why it is nearly irrelevant for any Senators to ask a Supreme Court nominee about whether he or she believes abortion is wrong. That issue will never be central to any Supreme Court case on abortion.

From all of this you may get the impression that I agree with Roe v. Wade. I do not. While the opinion of the court is an ingenious bit of analysis it is based on a false premise. It is like a beautiful building built on deep mud. What’s more, I think that it is dangerous.

The false premise is the “Right of Privacy”. Search the Constitution and you will not find a right of privacy anywhere. So, how did the Supreme Court find it? It inferred it from other express rights in the bill of rights. Excerpts from the following amendments are cited as the basis of the Right of Privacy:

4th. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

5th. nor [shall the people] be deprived [by the U.S. govt] of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

9th. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

14th. nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

The argument of the court regarding the right of privacy is seductive. It is true that there is a very strong indication of a concern for privacy in the 4th amendment. However, if the framers had wanted to create a broader privacy right why didn’t they. Why did they limit it to searches and seizures?

It is also seductive that the liberty rights secured in the 5th and 14th amendments would seem to allow a woman the liberty to have an abortion. However, this argument is deeply flawed. The liberty right referenced has almost always been interpreted to be limited to the freedom of movement (literally a ban on “imprisonment”) and only has relevance to a criminal or civil case against an individual (the reference to “due process” means the right to a fair hearing). It certainly cannot be deemed to have any bearing on a state’s legislative process in passing a law prohibiting abortion. To find otherwise would be an absurdity. If a state could be barred by the 14th amendment liberty right from passing a law banning abortion, how could so many states have managed to pass seatbelt laws or motorcycle helmet laws (limiting individual liberties where the state has no compelling interest)?

The last and most seductive argument for the privacy right found by the court (and, I think, the real reason that it was invented and has not been overturned) is: what is the downside? Certainly it seems great at first blush to secure an additional right for the people, doesn’t it? After all, what is the harm?

The harm is hidden but very real. Which gets me to the heart of this long meandering post. The framers wisely chose not to create any more rights in the constitution than they thought were necessary. They recognized that each right to which they granted constitutional protection effectively limited the peoples’ ability to order their society though the democratic process. By inventing a right of privacy, the Supreme Court, the least democratic branch of the government, has taken power from the legislative branch of government, the most democratic branch of the government.

Now, thanks to Roe v. Wade, the legislatures of the States and Congress cannot perform their democratic function of determining whether abortion is wrong (and should be banned), absent an amendment to the Constitution. Note: the legislatures are free under Roe v. Wade to conclude that abortion is ok and allowed.

Thanks to other cases interpreting the “Right of Privacy” legislatures are not able to define marriage in any way that does not include the marriage by people of the same sex. They are also not able to pass laws banning sodomy (or rather, laws prohibiting sodomy that have existed for ages are suddenly not binding anymore). There is no indication that the Court’s "Right of Privacy" will stop there.

The irony is that the Supreme Court’s invention of a “right” from a reference to liberty (in the 5th and 14th amendments) has taken away a true constitutionally-guaranteed liberty right of the people to make laws governing their society utilizing the democratic process.

Betrayal

The proposed Flight 93 Memorial has gone terribly awry. Flight 93 was the 9/11 flight where passengers tried to retake the plane from the hijackers. The plane eventally crashed in a field in Pennsylvania during the struggle. The passengers' efforts spared our country from another devastating blow on that awful day.

The design for the memorial calls for a red crescent that Wretchard at the Belmont Club has calculated would point towards Mecca. You can do something about it though. Let the U.S. Park Service know that the design is unacceptable here.

My comment to the Park Service was as follows:

Please reject the "crescent of embrace" design for the memorial. The use of a crescent would come too close to making it a memorial to the Islamic militants who hijacked the plane and would, thereby, betray those brave passengers of Flight 93. Why not something based on "Lets Roll" instead?

My comments are much more tame than my true feeling on this.

Mark Steyn has weighed in.

Presidential

When President Bush arrived in Louisiana the first time after the hurricane he was met at the airport by Mayor Nagin of New Orleans. Mayor Nagin (and many of the state and local government leaders in parts of Louisiana) had recently had a very public nervous breakdown about the situation in New Orleans. On several occasions in the space of a short interview the Mayor went from swearing to belligerence to exaggerating and to crying. He said a world of horrible things about the President and the federal government.

Given this background, I watched closely as the President got his bearings on the tarmac and worked his way over to the Mayor. I hoped somewhat (being the vindictive type that I am) that the President would give the mayor the cold shoulder or an icy stare and withhold his handshake. I was disappointed when he lightly patted the Mayor on the back, separated himself and the Mayor from the pack of other people on the tarmac and intimately and earnestly talked with the Mayor as they walked toward some waiting transport until the coverage stopped.

Today blogger Sensible Mom, brought to my attention an article by Mark Steyn in the Telegraph where Mark quoted two lines from a poem by Kipling as follows: “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The poem entitled “If” goes on:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools:…..
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

It takes a Man to be a great president. George Bush is a Man, he proves it time and time again. He is lied about and hated and he does not give way to hating. He is a Man and he is Presidential.

It is a quiet personal power he wields. He has shamed me (for my vindictive nature) for the better in the course of a photo op. With his silence and understanding in the face of others' rage he has shown these lesser persons for the children that they are.

Katrina's Lessons

Liberals criticizing the government response to the damage and flooding from Katrina in New Orleans are ultimately proving a principle of conservatism correct: Government does not do anything very well. One lesson liberals should learn from this is that government is not always the best solution. They won't though. Instead, they will avoid questioning one of their central beliefs and claim that government does do everything well, it is just that government by conservatives does not do anything well. In this way they are identical to the useful idiots (also liberals) of the cold war who unerringly defended Communism despite is consistent failures believing, with each instance of failure, that the only problem was that Communism had not been implemented correctly.

Stay behinds in New Orleans are learning the hard way a lesson that conservatives and self-reliant people already know: It may be wise to heed a government warning, but do not rely on on the government to take care of you. Those who heeded the mandatory evacuation order and took care of themselves did not suffer the misery of those who stayed and gambled that the government would take care of them if something when wrong. One has to wonder if the fact that New Orleans is a city with a very high percentage of welfare-reliant persons contributed to he catastrophe. Does welfare kill self reliance? I suspect so.