“The wicked ones, who are constantly being born amongst us, are often distinguished by appearing as angels of light and wit and intelligence, charming and fascinating beyond usual mortal endowments, apparently loving and always exciting love even among those who are of a usually cynical nature. In truth, they appear most lovable and amiable, for it is their diabolical genius to be all things to all men, grave among the grave, gay among the gay, sympathetic in the company of those of sensibility, never openly hostile or belligerent; flexible of temperament, of an open countenance and invariably possessed of great magnetism. –More of these wicked ones are born in each generation than we know of, but those who are unfortunately of their blood know that they entertain a demon, and not unawares. May God preserve you and me from encountering one such in marriage or among our children!”

~ Marcel Proust

For some odd reason I woke up with a mild urge to comment on the Casey Anthony murder trial. I thought well, if I’m going to I ought to do it now because a verdict should be in after the holiday.

Though as affected as any other decent human being by this, I don’t share the obsessive interest much of the public seems to have in this sad spectacle. It is no surprise to me that evil exists in the world. Nor do I share the career-minded journalists’ delight in covering such a juicy story. I’ve covered a child murder story, and it about killed me.

But for what it’s worth here’s my opinion. From everything I’ve seen of the story on the news, all evidence points in one direction.

Casey Anthony is guilty. She killed her adorable little girl because she found her inconvenient. She could have given her up for adoption, or just dumped her with her grandparents. Instead she smothered her and buried her body in the woods, after leaving her in the trunk of her car long enough for advanced decomposition to set in, just like the prosecutor said.

The defense is offering a series of wildly improbably scenarios, including not one, but two variations of the notorious “Plan B”: Blame somebody else, and blame childhood sex abuse (the Menendez defense.) One can hardly blame them, they’ve got bupkiss to work with – though I sometimes wish there were sanctions for defaming the innocent to defend the guilty. (I believe there are in military trials, at least when defaming an officer.)

Testimony has shown beyond dispute that Anthony is a serial liar and fantasist. Not just in this case, but as part of a long history of lying. Moreover, she lies in a particular way. An example from news reports: she told her parents she had a cool job at Universal Studios, and actually took them there, talked her way past security and only copped to the lie in the corridor of a building at the last possible moment the lie could be maintained. And that’s only one example, not related to the web of lies concerning the case itself.

I know this pattern.

Yes, her parents have been caught in lies and contradictions. The difference is, there is a straightforward comprehensible motive in their case. They know their daughter is guilty, but they don’t want to see her die.

Casey Anthony is something I’ve seen before. To be precise, in the brother of an old girlfriend, the wife of a close relative, and in a martial arts colleague I had only passing acquaintance with. I’ve also had the opportunity to discuss the type with a cop who’d studied the type at the FBI school, and a social worker who had an interest in such.

I used to call the type a “sociopath.” I’ve had arguments with people who say the correct term is “psychopath.” Now I find the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders says both are wrong and the correct term is “Anti-social Personality Disorder.

I rather like the old British legal term “morally insane.”

The DSM has this to say about it (thanks Wikipedia):

A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following:
1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
2. deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
3. impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead;
4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;
B) The individual is at least age 18 years.
C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

New evidence points to the fact that children often develop Antisocial Personality Disorder as a cause of their environment, as well as their genetic line. The individual must be at least 18 years of age to be diagnosed with this disorder (Criterion B), but those commonly diagnosed with ASPD as adults were diagnosed with Conduct Disorder as children. The prevalence of this disorder is 3% in males and 1% from females, as stated from the DSM IV-TR.

One important disagreement, I flat don’t believe that 3% males and 1% females figure. In my entire life I’ve met precisely three individuals I was sure of, with perhaps a few borderline cases. There are lots of other ways to be screwed up than this, some of which have some of the same characteristics, but even 3% plus 1% would stand out far more.

Some personal observations:

* These people appear to be born this way, and by “this way” I mean born without what we call a conscience. In all cases known to me, their families have seen this since the earliest age.

* They can be very charming. Having no sense of embarrassment can evidently enable one to be a master manipulator.

* By seeing what effects the lack of a conscience has, it appears that conscience is somehow related to the ability to imagine the future as real, i.e. to understand the idea of consequences.

It’s been years since I’ve read it, but in a book called “Powers of Mind” (1982) by a financial writer who used the pen name “Adam Smith” there was a description of an experiment allegedly performed on both normal people and ASPD’s serving hard time in prison.

Note, I can’t confirm this at present, and I believe this experiment could not be replicated under current protocols for experiments on human subject. Then again, neither could the Milgram Experiments.

What the author claimed was, an experimental subject would be strapped into a chair with his/her hand on an electrode, then given a painful shock. They were then told they’d get an even more painful shock in X seconds (I believe it was from 30-60 seconds but don’t remember) – or they could push a button and get it over with now.

The alleged result was, most people nerve themselves up for a few seconds and push the button. The ASPD/sociopath always, as in always, waits and gets it when the time’s up.

As I said, I can’t find this, but it jibes with my experience.

What would you say about a person with above-average intelligence who tells a lie that is certain to be discovered within a short period of time, to gain a relatively trivial advantage? Who takes an airplane across the country to cover a hot check with another hot check? (When asked for something more substantial than his word and a check, the individual drew himself up in high dudgeon and said, “What kind of man do you think I am?” The receiver of the check found out, within 24 hours.)

I believe it was also Smith who said in prison interviews with this type, the prison shrinks are sometimes discomfited when probing for early life experiences when they hear offhand remarks like, “That was the time I smothered my bratty little brother with a pillow. Parents thought it was crib death.”

* No remorse, for sure. The then-wife of a close relative at a family gathering once swiped a diamond ring belonging to a guest at the house they were staying in. She was found out when her husband picked up her jeans and it fell out of a pocket. Confronted she just shrugged, “Big deal.”

* Acting on impulse, ditto. This can make them very good at stealing. If you or I for some reason decided we had to snatch something, how good do you think you’d be at it? Likely blow it I’d guess. You’d try to nerve yourself up, get over your hesitation and choke when it came down to it. You’d have to practice hard to be a good thief. The way it works for these people is: see it, want it, take it.

My Gung Fu brothers and I called this the “Wu-wei of stealing.”

* If you’re not careful they can always be a step ahead of you in their thinking. I was visiting with one of my relatives when she got a phone call from a telephone operator, saying a friend was stuck somewhere and asking permission to charge a long-distance call to her. (Remember when you could do this? Can you still, or has this gone the way of party lines?)

We resumed our conversation for a few minutes when it struck us, “Hey, wait a minute! Why didn’t she call her parents?” Phoned the alleged caller. Nope, she wasn’t stuck anywhere. It was the ex-in-law of course, just a few minutes ahead of us.

* There is no therapy that has any effect on the true sociopath. My relative used to say of her in-law, “Her family isn’t getting her the help she needs!”

I told her, “There is no help, and they know this.”

I once asked my old gf’s grandmother about her grandson, “I don’t mean to intrude, but have you considered taking him to a psychologist.”

“We did,” she said, “they said there’s nothing wrong with him.”

A friend who’d been a research psychologist said shrinks don’t have a lot of experience with the type, because they don’t generally see them in their practice – they see their victims. On the rare occasions they do, such as in prison settings, the reaction they get is, “There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s all the no-good $#!+s around me.”

* What my cop acquaintance told me was that it’s been observed sociopaths (that’s the term he favored) may tend to grow a conscience around middle age. Unfortunately by that time they’re usually doing hard time in the slammer. It is thus an open question of whether they’ve actually developed a conscience or just learned to fool the shrink.

* An interesting thing the social worker told me was, there is such a thing as a “well-adjusted sociopath.” (He also preferred that term.) They have enough smarts to stay out of prison and find a niche where their… talents, can actually benefit them in a more-or-less legitimate way. In particular, he said they tend to gravitate into two professions.

One is lawyer. But you guessed that already, didn’t you? Care to guess the other?

High-pressure salesman. The kind who can pour on the charm to sell you something you don’t need at a price you can’t afford.

I have to say I think these are heading into the only marginally legal cons these days. Most businesses have discovered that high pressure sales is counterproductive in that the customers may buy, but tend not to return.

* One of my Wu-wei Gung Fu brothers came up with the most perceptive diagnostic tool for the laymen wanting to identify ASPD.

He said, “Look out for someone who has no old friends.”

This was incredibly perceptive I thought. If you or I have lived in a certain place for 20 years, we’re going to have some friends we’ve known about that long.

Sociopaths usually have lots of friends and admirers, it’s that charm thing. But they have to constantly replenish their supply, because people do catch on and drift, or run, away.

“May God preserve you and me from encountering one such in marriage or among our children!”

Note: There are two classic literary treatments of the ASPD child that probably gave birth to the “evil children” genre of horror fiction. One is “The Bad Seed,” (1953) by William March, subsequently made into a play with a screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, and a movie in 1956.

The other is a lesser-known book by Taylor Caldwell, “Wicked Angel” (1965) which begins with the quote from Proust above. “The Bad Seed” is about a little girl, “Wicked Angel” about a little boy.

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Note: Cross-posted on my newspaper blog at the Marshall Independent. I don’t have a column there as I did at my former paper, I have a blog. You might be interested in how I adapt my writing style to different audiences.

In a report leaked to the press and reportedly confirmed by Danish Foreign Minister Lene Espersen, the Kingdom of Denmark is going to ask the United Nations to be recognized as the owner of the North Pole.

The Copenhagen Press reports, “The kingdom is expected to make a demand for the continental shelf in five areas around the Faroe Islands and Greenland, including the North Pole itself.”

There are five countries with coasts along the Arctic Ocean: Denmark, Russia, Canada, Norway, and the United States. But none of the others are pressing claims, or seem to have any plans to object to Denmark’s claim, even though the U.S. could press a claim based on prior right of discovery. Either Matthew Peary or Frederick Cook got to the Pole first, or maybe neither of them hit the Big Nail exactly, but in any case Americans have been going up there by dogsled and nuclear submarine for a while now.

Denmark qualifies through it’s ownership of Greenland, which they owned as a colony from 1814 until 1953, when Greenland officially became an equal part of the Danish kingdom. In 1979 Greenland gained home rule as part of a federal union in which Greenland exercises autonomy in a number of areas, while Denmark handles defense, laws, courts, international relations. Not to mention a subsidy of $633 million, or about $11,300 per inhabitant per year.

Greenland has an area of about 836,000 square miles, most of it covered by ice, and a population of about 56,000, 88 percent of whom are native Inuit, the now-preferred term for the people we used to call Eskimos. Danes make up most of the other 12 percent, and pretty much run things by all accounts.

In case you wondered, that’s a population about one-hundredth that of Denmark, living on an island fifty times the size of that country. That’s three times the size of Texas, or the size of Sweden, Germany, France, Spain and Great Britain put together. The capitol city Nuuk, is a little bigger than Marshall, Minnesota and is not known as a happening place.

One wonders why the Danes bother with Greenland, seeing as how it’s a money-losing proposition for them. The U.S. offered to buy Greenland in 1946, but the Danes said no. Perhaps they’re still kicking themselves for selling the Virgin Islands to the U.S. back in 1917. It does seem bad judgment to let a tropical paradise go and keep the big icebox.

The Danes may be hoping to tap oil and mineral resources below the continental shelves.

Well good for them I say. Because it’s not likely anybody else could get away with it.

Consider, the U.S. government makes oil companies jump through expensive hoops to drill offshore and/or in the arctic to the point it’s just not worth it for most companies. But the U.S. would fight any Russian claim tooth and nail, Norway has offshore oil closer to home, and Canada just doesn’t seem interested.

Plus, there is that imperialism thing. Greenland’s overwhelmingly native population is to all intents and purposes ruled by a European governing class. What other European country could get away with that these days? We certainly couldn’t.

The Danes are just too gosh-darned nice to picture as imperial oppressors, and their near-monopoly of government in Greenland seems to stem more from the Inuit people’s indifference to government than any evil designs on the part of the Danes.

But the important question is, would Danish ownership of the North Pole make Santa Claus a Danish citizen?

There has long been a strong claim Santa is Sami. That’s the now-preferred term for the indigenous peoples of the European arctic previously called Lapps. They’re the pale, blond, blue-eyed people who get such funny looks whenever they show up at international conferences of indigenous peoples.

But maybe Santa is Danish. After all, he traditionally wears the Danish national colors.

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My family is still back in North Dakota until the end of the school year. In the meantime I’m ettling into new job and new house – and thereby hangs a tale.

I was looking for a house with two, maybe three bedrooms if it wasn’t too dear. First I stumbled across a smallish two-bedroom that looked OK, because it had a lot of storage space in the detached garage.

Too bad it had water in the basement. That’s a deal-breaker, we had to move out of one place after the basement got damp, because my son seems to be highly allergic to mold.

Then I found a beautiful place with a fenced yard on a cul-de-sac. Oops, missed it by less than a week.

So one evening I checked out a movie, and afterwards wandered into a bar.

No, no, no! A respectable bar filled with middle-aged people.

At any rate, some were talking about real estate, how tough the rental housing market was, and how those with houses to rent kind of didn’t like the fact the primary customer base is college students.

Do I have to explain to anyone students are kind of hard on houses?

At any rate, I was shooting the bull with a gentleman who turned out to be a real estate guy, who said, “I think I can get you a house.”

Boy did he ever!

An elderly gentleman retired and moved into a smaller place. He had a house on the market for a year – not moving. The agent talked him into renting it out for a year to see if the market might recover in that time.

It’s got four bedrooms upstairs, a wood-paneled study to die for, a huge living room, attached garage that’s going to be my martial arts school, (my bud Terry Gibson started out that way,) and a basement I can move into during the winter.There’s a nice yard, but not so big it’ll be a hassle to take care of.

Price?

Less than we’re paying for the cramped duplex in Valley City.

I told my wife, “You’ll love it, but don’t get used to it. This fell out of heaven into our laps.”

There is one teensy little caveat, it’s heated with fuel oil. You have to buy that in big lots evidently, like a three-month heating bill that falls on you all at once. However I’ve found a company that has a plan you can estimate a year’s average consumption and spread the payment out on a month-to-month basis.

So next steps:

1) Get family moved.
2) Get martial arts lessons advertising.
3) Get moving on plans to self-syndicate columns.

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Well President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, and Birthers, prominent among them Donald Trump, have egg on their faces.

The President is looking rather like the proverbial cat that ate the proverbial canary.

“So why didn’t he simply release this before all the fuss?” I hear you say.

Do I really have to answer that? For one, the Birthers have furnished the president with a handy club to beat his political opponents with. These nutballs were a gift from heaven Obama wasn’t going to give up right away. The Republicans had their turn when it was revealed Van Jones, the president’s pick for “Special Advisor for Green Jobs” was a “9/11 Truther.”

However the inconvenient truth about the Birthers and Truthers is, Birthers are found only on the right, while Truthers are found on the right and the left, and indeed overlap quite a bit. Many conspiracy fans are both.

For another, while the Birther controversy was always wildly improbable, requiring one to believe in a conspiracy stretching back to Obama’s birth announcement in the Honolulu newspaper, it conveniently distracted from other things the President has been less than forthcoming on, such as his SAT scores and his grades in college.

And by the way, why is he reticent about those? Scores and grades might be embarrassing, but a lot of the giants of political history have had poor academic records. Winston Churchill comes to mind, and if you ever had a look at Andrew Jackson’s correspondence you’d see he was barely literate.

Furthermore, place of birth does not necessarily determine native- born citizenship status. The child of American citizens is an American citizen from birth, no matter where he’s born. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. George Romney, father of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was born in the Mormon Colonies of Mexico to American parents. When he threw his hat into the ring for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 he just ignored the native-born citizen issue, and nobody called him on it.

Now here’s the interesting issue that nobody has brought up to my knowledge. My son was born in Warsaw, Poland, to an American father (moi) and a Polish mother. We registered him at the appropriate government office in Warsaw and the American embassy, and got him two passports. He has been a citizen of both countries since his birth.

Can he grow up to be president?

We don’t know, the Constitution doesn’t address the issue. Dual citizenship must have been very rare back then, if it even existed legally. Heck, it’s only been since the late 19th – early 20th centuries that North American and West European governments routinely required passports to cross their borders.

So what I wonder is, Barack Obama’s globe-trotting mother married first a Kenyan citizen, then an Indonesian citizen. At any time in his life did she ever claim dual citizenship for her son, or did he ever travel on a passport issued by another country? That wouldn’t show up on birth records. Neither of my son’s passports says anywhere that he has another one.

And would it matter? Again, we don’t know.

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To Marshall, Minnesota to be exact. I’ve got a newsroom gig at a larger paper in a bigger town.

Trucking paid the bills while I found another writing job, but I must say the romance of trucking palls a bit come winter in North Dakota. I was home on weekends only, not really eating well in spite of all attempts to keep healthy food on hand, (I must tell you about my hard tack recipe sometime,) and not getting any exercise.

About time too, Valley City, ND is holding back high water again. Been there. Done that.

I’m looking for housing right now, living out of a motel room. My family will join me after the school year ends.

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Over at the Wall Street Journal is an interview by Bari Weiss with Bernard Lewis, who at age 95 is still sharp as a tack and the preeminent scholar of the Islamic world.

The article is entitled, ‘The Tyrannies are Doomed,’ which gives you Lewis’ opinions in a nutshell. Read it anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff in it, starting from the obvious truth that while the tyrannies may be doomed, there’s no guarantee that anything better is going to replace them.

Well I say obvious truth, but evidently it isn’t so obvious to a fair number of people.

“And yet Western commentators seem determined to harbor such illusions. Take their treatment of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. The highly popular, charismatic cleric has said that Hitler “managed to put [the Jews] in their place” and that the Holocaust “was divine punishment for them.”

“Yet following a sermon Sheikh Qaradawi delivered to more than a million in Cairo following Mubarak’s ouster, New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick wrote that the cleric “struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching.” Mr. Kirkpatrick added: “Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.”"

Heavy sigh. The New York Times again…

There is some fascinating stuff on how traditional institutions moderated the power of Islamic rulers throughout history, until seriously weakened by modern technology. Lewis cautions against imposing an Anglo-American model of democracy where it doesn’t fit into the local political culture, and cites post-WWI Germany as an example of a bad fit.

He also has some interesting things to say about Women’s Lib for the Islamic world, which by chance Kathleen Parker also has a few things to say this week. See her endearingly entitled, “‘Women aren’t pet rocks’.

According to Lewis:

“My own feeling is that the greatest defect of Islam and the main reason they fell behind the West is the treatment of women,” he says. He makes the powerful point that repressive homes pave the way for repressive governments. “Think of a child that grows up in a Muslim household where the mother has no rights, where she is downtrodden and subservient. That’s preparation for a life of despotism and subservience. It prepares the way for an authoritarian society,” he says.

Amen. And see the Parker article to read how George and Laura Bush, whatever missteps George’s administration may have made, have always realized this and continue to work for women’s emancipation in the Islamic world to this day. Something that counts for zero among left-wing American feminists, who evidently think a western woman’s right to an abortion trumps an eastern woman’s right not to be genitally mutilated, beaten, or murdered for getting uppity. And by the way, women in Islamic countries can’t get abortions either.

The really important point Lewis makes is that in the transition to a free society, elections should be last in order.

Others have made this point as well. Thomas Sowell has said the rule of law must be established before elections take place. Milton Friedman used to point out that Hong Kong as a Crown Colony was free, but definitely not a democracy.

And any anthropologist should be able to tell you that if you have a state composed of tribal/ethnic groups, the state is going to become the possession of the largest, if it has a majority, or the largest coalition of tribes with a common interest. In this case, if the state is a major distributor of wealth (such as oil revenues,) the permanent minority may see no other alternative than violence to seize the state or secede from it. The rule of law must be established to prevent a newly established government from reverting to feudalism, the default state of civilization, or chaos.

Yet I think there is something beyond the first free and fair elections, a point at which everybody stops holding their breath and dares to hope freedom may have gained a sure foothold in their country. I saw this in Poland in the first years after the fall of communism or it might never have occurred to me.

It’s not the first free and fair election that matters. It’s the first election in which the party in power loses and steps down of their own free will, reasonably confident they will not be prosecuted – or executed.

I think that’s why we in America are so reluctant to begin criminal prosecutions against officials of past administrations, even in the face of some pretty obvious criminality.

Everybody can think of their own examples. I’m among those who would like to see Janet Reno, and very possibly Hillary Clinton, face charges, and I mean capital charges, for the murder of those harmless religious lunatics in Waco, Texas.

But the trouble is, different people have different views about who should be prosecuted for what. For example, soon after Obama took office there was some loose talk about prosecuting certain people for renditions and such – before the usefulness of renditions was discovered by the administration.

Perhaps it’s best not to open that can of worms, even if we have to grit our teeth and let some pretty flagrant injustices pass unavenged.

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Courtesy of the most articulate man ever to occupy the White House.

“That’s why building this international coalition has been so important,” Obama said. “It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.”

OK, I’ll say it.

It’s not that anybody hates Obama, get that out of your head. Nobody hates Obama, because you have to respect someone to hate them.

What it is, is a growing feeling of uneasiness.

And it’s not “because he’s black,” as his diehard True Believers keep insisting to the country full of people who voted for him, most of them because he’s black.

We liked the idea of capping the long march to equality and justice with the election of a black president. So we knew less about the man than we know about the early life of George Washington. (Not an exaggeration, I invite you to do your own digging.) Mostly we wanted this whole racial thing to be over.

If you believe, as I do, that the color of your skin is the least important thing about you, then can we for Christ’s sake stop yammering on endlessly about it? I want to talk about how smart and charming I am, not how white I am.

And not that many people think he’s a diabolically clever mastermind working his secret plan to impose One World Socialism on the U.S. and make us a junior partner in a gigantic UN, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah.

Would it were only that!

No, the most outstanding, and alarming characteristic of this presidency is the sheer goofiness of the man. It’s like Chance the gardiner is occupying the Oval Office.

And like Chance, sometimes there is something so terribly sweet about the man, in all his cluelessness. Until you contemplate who’s finger is on what button…

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I went to Fargo yesterday to consult with an ENT my primary care physician referred me to.

Cool side note: my grandfather, who I never met due to him dying before I was born, was an EENT back in the barely post-pioneer days in Oklahoma, when they still had the first “E.” What’s really cool was, decades ago I went to a dentist in Norman, Oklahoma who got to maundering about his first contact with the medical profession, who turned out to be – my grandfather!

I’ve been having a problem with my sinuses since mid-December when I first contracted a strep infection, then went through two courses of antibiotics, and quit a driving job because the damn sinuses just wouldn’t clear up! I cough and sneeze frequently, and produce… never mind you get the picture.

It’s not that it’s horribly painful, it’s that it never goes away. Let me put it this way, if the doc had said, “We’ve got to saw off the front of your skull with a rusty hacksaw and blast out your sinuses with a fire hose,” – I’d have gone for it.

Soooo, I show up for my appointment and the doc turns out to be a Lithuanian hippie.

Now as it happens, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Lithuania with my wife and son. My daughter’s middle name is from out late dear friend Ilona Daukene.

Pleasant chit-chat with the doc, a thorough examination of my head bone cavities, and he writes me a prescription for antibiotics, various expectorants, and nose sprays loaded with steroids. I feel better already, but I won’t be passing any drug tests for the next month or so…

So of course, because I know a few words in Lithuanian, I was able to thank the doc in his native language.

“Thank you” in Lithuanian, is “Atchoo!”

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I commented on the Facebook site of a NATO reserve officer I correspond with sometimes.

“Hooray! Now another bloody-handed Middle Eastern tyrant will fall. The United States will of course be blamed for everything that goes wrong during and afterward, and another bloody-handed tyrant will replace Quadaffi in the fullness of time.”

Now I don’t think it’s wrong to hunt down and imprison/kill mass murdering tyrants. It’s the costs I worry about. How much does it cost us in men and money? What are the costs to the people you are “liberating”? Are they going to thank you afterwards and say it was worth it to be free of the tyrant?

And what are you replacing the tyranny with? Realistically speaking, do you think the Libyan (or Yemen, Bahrain, etc) resistance is full of budding Sam Adamses?

Since imperialism became unfashionable we can’t march in, shoot the bad guys and present the next regime with a bill.

Nor can we stick around for a couple generations building a decent civil service, court structure, and imposing a reasonbaly just code of laws, while collecting taxes to fund the project.

No, no, no, mustn’t do it.

But since I’m in a sour mood anyway, I have to say I have no patience for those libertarians who talk about “invading someone else’s country,” or worse, “a sovereign state.”

In what way is a state wherein you can be arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, tortured and killed – or in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, have your pretty wife or daughter snatched for the Top Guy’s sons’ pleasure, “your country” in any meaningful sense?

As for the issues of “sovereignty,” in my brand of libertarianism (the sane one) the sovereignty of the individual has to be recognized for me to take the sovereignty of the state seriously.

And of course there is the question of how the Obamandroids are going to react to their “peace candidate” waging war? They going to twist themselves into pretzels explaining how Iraq was George Bush’s unjust and unconstitutional war, but Libya is Obama’s Noble War of Liberation?

(Hat tip Maureen Dowd: “Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.””)

Just asking.

As to the constitutionality of Obama committing to military operations without an OK from Congress, opinions differ.

I did however come across this very perceptive observation by Andrew McCarthy, who falls on the unconstitutional side but notes:

“Agree or disagree with my reasoning, how can it be, given the Constitution’s manifest vesting in Congress of powers over the decision to go to war and the compulsion of means for fighting war, that a president can think he needs approval from the U.N. or the Arab League but not from the representatives of the American people?”

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“There were young knights among them who had never been present at a stricken field. Some could not look upon it and some could not speak and they held themselves apart from the others who were cutting down the prisoners at My Lord’s orders, for the prisoners were a body too numerous to be guarded by those of us who were left. Then Jean de Rye, an aged knight of Burgundy who had been sore wounded in the battle, rode up to the group of young knights and said: ‘Are ye maidens with your downcast eyes? Look well upon it. See all of it. Close your eyes to nothing. For a battle is fought to be won. And it is this that happens if you lose.”
- Froissart’s Chronicles, 14th century

I have deliberately waited to comment on the Itamar Massacre until I had gained enough control over myself to do so with a certain degree of objective detachment.

I may be alone in this, and it’s not likely to win me any popularity contests. But as I’ve said, you know you’re being objective when everybody likes you – or everybody hates you.

The facts as they have emerged so far are these: in the West Bank Israeli village of Itamar last week, two men broke into the house of the Fogel family and murdered Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, their sons Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and their four-month-old baby girl Hadas.

The victims were stabbed in the heart and had their throats cut. It subsequently emerged the baby had been beheaded.

Two boys, Roi, 8, and Yishai, 2, were somehow overlooked. The couple’s daughter Tamar, 12, returned home from spending Shabbat with friends, found something suspicious outside the house and roused a neighbor. The neighbor got his gun and accompanied her into the house to find Yishai shaking the bodies of his parents, begging them to get up.

Reportedly, bloody footprints were found leading to the nearby Palestinian village of Rafah.

Palestinian response has been contradictory. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas officially condemned the murders as, “immoral and inhuman” according to the BBC news. We also know Palestinian leaders have a history of issuing statements for the Western media contradicted by statements issued for home consumption in the Arabic-language press.

Other Palestinian sources claimed it was an Israeli set-up. This seems a frail reed in light of reports of people celebrating and handing out sweets in Rafah.

(Photo credit Free Republic.)

Reaction in the West has ranged from outraged among supporters of Israel, to muted among supporters of the Palestinians.

Supporters of Israel found fault in much of the media coverage. Examples include treatment of the story in the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.

After looking over the offending sites, in my judgement their coverage does seem to lean a certain way, but you can also find things that don’t seem to get mentioned in conservative Israeli-supporting media.

The BBC reported, “On Sunday some settlers set fire to Palestinian cars and attacked Palestinian homes in revenge. There are fears there could be more violence.”

The violence feared does not include beheading four-month-old babies though.

President Obama released a statement, “There is no possible justification for the killing of parents and children in their home,” which seems eerily detached.

It is also not true.

Plenty of parents and children have been killed in their homes over the past century, by bombs dropped from aircraft, artillery fire, or Predator drone attacks. Some of them on President Obama’s orders, some of them by Israeli firepower.

(However, the president has generally been getting a pass in the media Israel doesn’t get.)

The allied bomber pilots and crews who smashed the Third Reich and imperial Japan are rightly regarded as heroes. We don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the women and children who died when they rained hell on them from the air. We can’t, or we’d be paralyzed by conscience.

What is horrifying to us in the west, is the up-close and personal nature of the murders, and the deliberate targeting of helpless civilians. Not as “collateral damage,” in that detestable military euphemism, but calculatedly, deliberately, and gleefully.

But there is something perhaps even more horrifying. From time to time we see news stories in the west about crimes committed by murderous psychopaths with similar results. We don’t see masses of people dancing in the streets, celebrating the murders with gifts and sweets, and naming public facilities, events, and streets in honor of the murderers.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth on the issue, almost all of which misses the point.

Some point out that Palestinian casualties have always been higher than Israeli casualties. They’re quite right.

The best comment I ever saw on this was from an Israeli girl a few years ago. She pointed out in her village they get fire through their living room windows from a nearby Palestinian village. They sometimes respond with fire from helicopter gunships.

“Excuse me for our superior firepower,” was how she put it.

Others point out the Palestinians are resisting colonizers of their land. I agree, and I’ll point out that I was saying this way back when it was still dangerous to do so, before the rise of anti-Semitism on the Left.

Claims by Zionists of a prior right to the land based on their descent from the original inhabitants a few thousand years ago are nonsense. By those lights all of us of Goidelic Celtic descent could demand the right to settle in Spain, the jumping off point for the colonization of Ireland and Scotland. Hell, we could make a case for the reconquista of most of Western Europe.

The counter-point is that Palestinians living in Israel are both freer and richer on average than any Arab population elsewhere in the region under governments of their own, and that most of the misery they suffer within the boundaries of Israel is self-inflicted.

This is also quite true.

We could go round and round with these points and not get anywhere. What is preventing a resolution here is I think, certain cultural illusions held by the west. Illusions seen and understood, but not shared by non-westerners.

We need not be ashamed of holding these illusions, all cultures have them and it takes an extraordinary effort of courage and clear thinking to see past them. And we must, because our survival as a civilization depends on it.

I expect a lot of disagreement on this, but firstly can we agree on one point?

This has been stated many times before: If the Palestinians, and all Arab countries hostile to Israel, laid down their arms, stopped attacking Israel, and renounced force as a means of getting what they want, there would be peace. If Israel disarmed and renounced force, there would be no Jews left there within a very short period of time.

At this point in time, I think it perverse to deny this elementary fact. The way opponents of Israel deal with it, is to ignore it. They can’t deny it with a straight face.

Would Israel’s enemies allow the Jews to evacuate the country (assuming they could find a place to go) without attacking them as they left?

Who knows? My guess is not, but it’s just that, a guess.

The primary illusion we are hampered by is about how peace is made, and it’s a relatively recent one. Few members of western civilization would have held it in the early-to-mid 19th century for example.

There are three ways peace can be made between contending parties: through reason, exhaustion, and victory.

Today we assume peace can always be made through reason. Warring parties will make peace if they are shown the costs of war outweigh any benefits of victory.

Peace arrived at by clear reasoning is historically rare, and the most likely to fail in the short run. Clear-eyed statesmen may prevent war by reasoning among themselves, but when the situation changes enough to make only one side believe it has a chance of getting what it wants through war, the peace can collapse overnight.

Recently we’ve seen an example of the peace of exhaustion, where one or both parties are just too sick of the conflict to go on.

Northern Ireland, Ulster, looks like it’s finally at peace. There were certain concessions made, and certain injustices redressed, but the goal of the Catholic faction, unification of Ulster with the Republic of Ireland, was not achieved. Mostly it seems, the “hard men” got old and didn’t want to kill each other anymore. For some reason, young men were no longer interested in continuing the war.

(And by the way, a nodding acquaintance with the long history of Ireland would show that if Ireland is ever unified, it won’t be “again” but for the first time ever.)

With Ireland at peace (knock wood) the last prolonged conflict in the world that did not involve Muslims ended.

The most common reliable and lasting peace is achieved by overwhelming victory.

Why is there no serious Confederate irredentist movement? In most other countries a civil war of that magnitude would be simmering for centuries afterwards.

Could it be because the South was so thoroughly beaten there was never the least doubt they lost because of overwhelming force? That there was no credible “stabbed in the back” consolation?

Furthermore, what would be the point of reopening the issue? Slavery is gone and not likely to return. (Or rather if it does, it will be an equal-opportunity non-racial slavery.)

Why are Germany and Japan, in spite of some friction and honest disagreements appropriate to free men, now our friends and allies?

Because both of them learned in the clearest possible way that it is a terrible thing to be our enemies. Because they learned it is dangerous to be our enemy, it is dangerous to be friends with our enemy, it is dangerous to be in the same neighborhood as our enemy.

Next: Reflections on Itamar, part 2: Things we don’t want to think about and are too polite to mention.

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