Not in Kansas any more

Well, I’m not in Kansas any more! (I’ve just been waiting till
I could write that. It’s not that I don’t like Kansas– actually,
my two-day visit there has been really wonderful. But still, I couldn’t
resist using a version of that iconic line from “The Wizard of Oz”. Phil
Schrodt, my co-host last night and a 16-year resident of Lawrence, Kansas, told
me that most Kansans actually have a very ambivalent relationship with that
work. “It’s such a tired cliché,” he said. “On the other
hand, often it’s the only thing outsiders even know about Kansas.” Ooops,
sorry Phil!)

Yeah, so anyway, I’m now in a plane flying somewhere over the heartland,
to Pittsburgh, on my way home for Mother’s Day. Will my son Tarek, who
arrived back at our place in Charlottesville from his home in Boston, have
the customary Mother’s Day burned-toast breakfast ready for me as I enter
the house? Let’s hope not. It’ll be about 2:45 p.m. by then…
Ways too late for the burned-toast breakfast.

So the rest of the University of Kansas conference that I was at was as
engaging as the earlier parts that I wrote about yesterday.

I guess in yesterday’s post I had reported on about the first two-thirds
of Saturday-morning sessions on “The Iraq war and the presidential election”
. Notable utterances in the rest of that session included the following:

• From Allen Ciglar of KU: That the recent changes in the
  campaign finance laws, which prohibit much broadcast advertising in the last
  60 days before the vote, will mean that the grassroots efforts in that period
  directed toward getting out the vote will become much more important
  than what used to be a last-minute blitzkreig of broadcast advertising. Or,
  as he put it, “the ground war will become much more important than the air
  war at that point.”
• Also from him, an assessment of voters’ general attitudes towards
  W: “People like someone who’s resolute. They like that
  about George Bush, and often don’t seem to find it in Kerry. But they
  also like someone who’s successful….
• From Steve Winn, an editorial writer from the “Kansas
  City Star”: That George W. Bush” is certainly not where he’d planned
  to be right now, at this stage in the electoral cycle” (!) That
  he sees lots of continuing trouble ahead for W, including probable complications
  around the June 30 handover, Afghanistan coming apart, the 9/11 commission
  producing what’s expected to be a very critical report, concerns about the
  “crony capitalism” (read “Halliburton”) aspects of the Iraq story, etc etc.
• Jim Pfiffner also participated again. He noted that
  Ralph Nader might actually become a growing factor in the electoral scene
  if the Iraq situation becomes much worse, given that he’s positioned himself
  as the “peace and withdrawal candidate” (while Kerry has actually been calling
  for an increase in U.S. troop levels.)
• Pfiffner also said that the “Madrid factor” is a new and interesting
  one. “What happened to Aznar in Madrid after the bombings tyhere has
  been spun by the administration as the wimpy Spaniards bending to appeasment
  after the Al-Qaeda attacks… But I think that if there’s an attack here in
  the lead-up to the election, people are more likely to rally round the
  President.
• Ciglar also, in the Q&A session, commented as follows on
  the domestic political fallout from the Abu Ghraib prison revelations: “The
  political problem for Bush was the admission that he learned about about the
  extent of the abuses only from the news media. That made him seem out
  of the loop. But firing Rumsfeld at this point would make Bush look
  weak.”

After that panel we had another one on war-related threats to domestic
civil liberties under the USA Patriot Act, etc. That was a pretty spirited
discussion. The first speaker was Dick Kurtenbach The regional
director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I thought he
did a great job, articulately laying out all the concerns the ACLU has expressed
about the damage that the Patriot Act has inflicted on the civil liberties
of citizens and non-citizens here in the US.

Kurtenback was followed by Kris Kobach, a preofessor at the law school
at the Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) who has also worked for many
months forJohn Ashcroft in the Justice Department. Indeed, Kobach said
he had drafted some significant portion of the Patriot Act. He sure
was a feisty and very articulate defender of the Patriot Act, and of the actions
of local Missouri boy Ashcroft’s actions in the Justice Department, in general!

The third speaker there was Rick Levy of KU law school, who lowered
the rhetorical heat a little with an engaging, moderate, and clearly presented
contribution that (in essence) warned that the Patriot Act might indeed represent
a case of administration over-reach.

[Okay, you may ask, why is Helena not terribly specific in reporting on
what each of these people actually said? At which point I’d
have to confess that during that portion of the session I was actually sitting
there in the audience keying into my laptop my notes from the previous day,
preparatory to getting them up on JWN as soon as possible…. ]

In the course of Levy’s presentation, he noted the sheer, enormous size
of the text of the Patriot Act: “Some 160 pages of single-spaced printout
from my computer,” he said, holding the wad of printout up to demonstrate.
He also noted that the House and Senate had passed the legislation
in a single day, and raised the quite legitimate question as to how many
of those who had voted for the legislation had even actually read
the whole text. “They were also voting on it during the anthrax scare
there in Washington,” he said. “Most of them couldn’t even get in to
their offices in those days.”

Personally, I’d say the effects of the anthrax scare in DC in late 2001
went far further than just imposing logistical difficulties on legislators
who should have needed to be giving careful attention to the content of such
legislation. It certainly also created a general climate of “security
hysteria” in and around the national capital, which I’m sure must have increased
the propensity of many legislators to give the FBI and other federal agencies
sweeping powers to act against alleged suspects.

Anyway, after the presentations, there was an equally spirited Q&A session.
At one point Kobach made some reference to Guantanamo and then made
the claim that “the U.S. military is not committing any human rights abuses.”
I shot my hand into the air, and challenged that claim, referring both
to Gitmo and to Abu Ghraib, etc etc. He immediately conceded the case
on Abu Ghraib but continued to claim there were no abuses at Gitmo. I
countered by noting the “Kafka-esque” limbo into which the Gitmo detainees
had been plunged by virtue of the Bush administration’s ruling that they were
neither “enemy combatants” entitled to the status of POWs nor, since they
were outside US sovereign territory, entitled to the protections aforded all
defendants under US domestic law, but that they fell instead into the category
of “illegal combatants”. I pointed out that if they were POWs, they
would have all the protections of the 3rd Geneva Convention; they would be
required to provide only name, rank, and serial number; they could not be
subjected to interrogation; the condition of their detention would have to
comply with Geneva Convention regulations; etc etc… I also said this
category of “illegal combatants” that the Bushies were using was quite unprecedented.

He came back and said that it was not unprecedented, but that
it had been used in the US civil war. (Of course, later I had a strong
ésprit de l’éscalier and wished I’d countered to him
that there was no reason whatsoever to believe that a category that may have
been used long ago within US domestic law would have any recognition or validity
in international law; and that since all of the Gitmo detainees had been captured
far outside US borders it would have to be international law that applied…
)

Anyway, that exchange was followed by an equally spirited interaction between
Kobach and Marcella David, a human rights specialist from the University
of Iowa law school who had spoken the previous day. David stuck her
ground in her criticisms very effectively, and seemed like an impressive and
well-organized person.

Over lunch, the conference organizers gave us a sort of last wrap-up session
with Jim Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations doing an Oprah-style
roving mike job, reflecting on the previous 25 hours of conferencing. He
talked quite convincingly on the theme that though the ever-worsening imbroglio
in Iraq seemed to be causing political problems for W, those problems did
not translate immediately into an opportunity for John Kerry. He
described several dimensions of the political dilemmas that Kerry would face
if and when he chooses to attack the Prez directly on the Iraq question: Kerry
could be accused of undermining the position of “our boys [and women] overseas”;
he’d have to deal with his record of having supported the war-enabling legislation;
actually he is on record as urging an increase in US troops levels,
so if he switched to urging a disengagement he could fall into the trap of
appearing “yet again” to be flip-flopping. And meanwhile, Nader will
be continuing to organize as the peace candidate, and threatening
to erode Kerry’s base if he should fail to confront Bush effectively on the
war issue…

Lindsay pointed out that, as President, Bush had many cards in his
hand that he could continue to play. And he made an argument akin to
the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” when he
pointed out that one effect of all the focus of media organizations on the
Iraq war was effectively to drown out Kerry’s voice in the public discourse
almost completely. He noted that since April 1, the number of times
the “New York Times” had run a story about Kerry on the front page above the
fold was precisely two; most often, the various “important” pronouncement
the challenger was making would get covered deep inside the newspaper, if
at all.

Lindsay also spoke to the policy prescription I had been describing the
day before as “the least bad of many bad options”: namely, that the Bushies
had to be prepared to bite the bullet of handing over just about all the
decisionmaking power regarding Iraq to the U.N. “But the Europeans
and others are probably asking themselves, ‘Why buy a seat on the Titanic
once you can already see the iceberg approaching?” he asked.

That’s a good point, and one I’ve encountered before. I guess my answer
to it is that yes, the perils of getting involved (through the UN) in trying
to govern the unruly and dangerous situation in Iraq are surely evident to
the governments of France, Russia, China and the other governments whose
agreement will be necessary of the Security Council is to pass the relevant
resolution– but in addition, the perils of allowing this country of 26 million
well educated people, located in such a sensitive region of the world, to
fall even deeper into the morass of failed statedom and chaos must also be
quite evident to all those world powers as well as to all of Iraq’s neighbors…

Face it, no government in the world has an interest in allowing that to happen.
Though I have mentioned Namibia and East Timor–here as elsewhere–
as countries/situations that provide a helpful model of how the UN acted
as midwife in the transition from rule by a foreign military organization
of highly contested legitimacy, still Iraq is notably not Namibia
or East Timor. Instead, it is a power-keg of truly global proportions.

[Well, I need to finish now. Happy Mother’s Day to you all!]