Shirin Ebadi’s Grand Illusion

One more diversion before returning to my series on Carl Schmitt. With all due respect to her courageous, decades-long efforts as an attorney and public intellectual to improve the human rights situation in Iran - Shirin Ebadi’s recommendations for the path to democratization in Iran betray her naive attachment to the failed reformist framework. In a recent interview with The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, Ebadi urges the U.S. and its partners to:

• discontinue funding for pro-democracy activists inside the country,
• directly engage Iran’s leadership at the highest level via open and public diplomacy, 
• offer the IRI tons of carrots and no sticks in the security arena,
• and drop economic sanctions against the regime.

Her case for such a lenient approach towards this monstrous regime is essentially twofold. On the one hand, Ebadi frames any efforts to hold the IRI accountable for its pursuit of WMDs, its trampling of human rights at home, its expansionist aims in the region, or its support of international terrorism as ultimately hurting the Iranian people and undermining the cause of democracy in Iran. While Ebadi clearly distinguishes between the government and people of Iran, she nevertheless equates the international community’s efforts to provide disincentives for IRI’s misbehavior vis-a-vis human rights and non-proliferation with punishing the Iranian population at large. “Sanctions damage the interests of the people, and they’re not going to topple the government of Iran, because the government has a lot of income from the price of oil because the price is so high,” Ebadi says. The problem with such lines of reasoning is that they ignore historical precedent. By historical precedent, I refer two recent cases of similar states disarming peacefully precisely as a result of sanctions and international isolation (North Korea and Libya). Granted both NK and Libya are “lighter weight” rogues states in comparison to Iran, but this is not to say that the right sanctions, given a united front on the part of the international community, couldn’t contribute to the process.

 

Her case against the Bush administration’s $70 million fund for democratization in Iran is constructed along similar lines. Ebadi views such efforts as ultimately undermining the work of pro-democracy activists in Iran: “When the United States says that it has allocated $70 million for democracy in Iran, whoever speaks about democracy in Iran will be accused of having accepted part of that money, and of being on the US side. It gives Iran an excuse for what it does.” In making such assertions, Ebadi fails to account for the fact that as long as there have been dissidents in Iran, the regime has accused and persecuted them for being “imperialist stooges,” “westoxicated lapdogs,” “Zionist spies,” etc. etc. ad infinitum any way! Given this reality, the way forward is to allow the activists to embrace the U.S. as a natural and committed ally in their quest for freedom and HR in Iran.

 

The other major component of Ebadi’s thesis is a blind attachment to the reformist spirit that dominated Iranian politics during the 1990s. It’s based on her assumption that “the time for revolution has passed” and that the only viable option on the table is gradualism. Of course, Ebadi’s mode of gradualism does not resonate with the vast majority of Iranians, not only because of Khatami’s monumental failure (some would say refusal) to bring about real change during the 1990s, but also because the people of Iran, who possess a great deal of political intelligence, have come to understand that the promise of reform serves the regime as a key pressure valve. They understand that the apparent disagreements between the so-called hardline, pragmatic, and reformist wings of the IRI elite serve to mask the regime’s fundamental commitment to retaining structural control of the country.

In light of these flaws, Ebadi’s cautious, reformist attitude and her calls for the international community to take it easy on the IRI form a grand illusion that is out of touch with both history and political reality.

Before and After: or, How Israel Takes Care of WMD Threats…

I will return to the Schmitt series shortly, but for now here’s a visual testament to the I.A.F.’s operational effectiveness. One minute you are developing weapons-grade plutonium with North Korean help - the next, you aren’t:

Reaction, Revolution, and Liberalism in Carl Schmitt’s Conception of Politics - Part II

Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism originates in his “anthropological” assumptions about human nature and human societies. As I described in Part I, Schmitt is indebted to not only the realist strand in political philosophy (he names Machiavelli, Hobbes, and, interestingly, Hegel and Marx as major proponents of realism), but also to the reactionary Catholic theorists like Donoso Cortes, for whom humanity is inherently evil, ignorant, destructive, and - above all - sinful in nature. Both the realists and the Catholic reactionaries describe the human world as a site of conflict between classes and peoples and as divided against itself and hence contradictory.

For Schmitt, the law is consequently always-already political - that is, it must contend with the possibility that these “internal contradictions” (to use a Marxian term) may become so heightened as to reach the point whereby “sociology” overpowers jurisprudence (PT) and thus threatens the state itself. Nations (and their sovereigns) must operate on a political basis as well - that is, they must remain aware of the presence of the enemy: “Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy,” he writes. “The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy” (CP).

Schmitt characterizes liberalism as a political doctrine and movement based on a fundamental denial of these realities. Liberalism seeks to either depoliticize essentially political oppositions between classes and peoples, or else to neutralize political oppositions by referring to apolitical categories such as economics, morality, culture, and especially the law in order to make political gains on its own behalf:

The worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimize one’s own political ambitious and to disqualify or demoralize the enemy. In the shadow of an embracing political decision and in the security of a stable political state organization, law, whether private or public, has its own relatively independent domain. As with every other domain of human endeavor and thought, it can be utilize to support or refute other domains. But it is necessary to pay attention to the political meaning of such utilizations of law and morality, and above all the word rule or sovereignty of law… There always are concrete human groupings which fight other concrete human groupings in the name justice, humanity, order, or peace. When being reproached for cynicism, the spectator of political phenomena can always recognize in such reproaches a political weapon used in actual combat (CP).

As a political discourse liberalism negates politics, and fails to advance a systematic vision of state or governance: according to Schmitt, liberalism (like other individualistic ideologies), is singularly devoted to mediating the relationship between the individual and the state (or other institutions that can potentially restrict civil liberties). The sole role of the liberal state is to ensure the individual freedoms and social wellbeing of its citizenry.

Schmitt’s affinity for revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin - in spite of his political opposition to the Marxist project - is to be understood in light of their shared distrust of liberalism’s distortion and negation of politics, as well as its inability to propose “a political principle or an intellectually consistent idea.”

(To be continued…)

Reaction, Revolution, and Liberalism in Carl Schmitt’s Conception of Politics - Part I

Engaging Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre is an extremely challenging process. A legal theorist and constitutional lawyer, Schmitt was considered the “crown jurist” of Nazi Germany. After the fall of the Third Reich, Schmitt was held for some time by the Allies, but no charges were ultimately brought against him for his major role in Hitler’s twisted judicial system. During the post-war period, the man was alternatively unapologetic or in denial about his involvement with the 20th century’s most despicable and dangerous ideology.

In Political Theology (henceforth PT), Schmitt provocatively and famously argues that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception [Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet].” In other words, it is a true emergency or exception to the status quo of a state which really designates the sovereign, and it is the sovereign who decides whether the emergency is a true exception - and, if so, what steps need to be taken to restore order. Moreover, Schmitt asserts that the sovereign—despite having the power to transcend the constitution’s abstract “limits”—is nevertheless an integral part of the legal order precisely because s/he has the power to suspend the law to secure the state.

Based on these premises, Schmitt goes on to put forth a powerful critique of constitutional liberalism. The liberal constitution’s fundamental drive, Schmitt argues, is to unveil a law so complete that it may provide norms for responding to every possible situation. Schmitt believes that despite this effort, contingencies and contradictions always arise that ultimately undermine this drive and that the exception shows that the state precedes the law because it allows the sovereign to roll back constitutional rights to protect the state against existential threats.

In contradistinction, liberal theory asserts that all is law or, alternatively, that the state and its sovereign merely exist to serve as guardians of the legal process, not to decide on legal questions. (Thomas Paine: “In America, the LAW is king!”) Schmitt refutes this position by referring to the concept of legal form. He argues that the legal form is incapable of translating itself into social reality or consensus without the state and its sovereign: “A point of ascription is not achieved with the aid of the norm; it happens the other way around. A point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what normative rightness is.” It is the very person of the sovereign that transforms an abstract law into a norm by making a decision in the true sense of the term. Schmitt’s vision of “decisionism” and his intellectual affinity with Hobbes is based on this fundamental process.

In The Concept of the Political (henceforth CP), Schmitt offers another one of his (in)famous definitions: all politics is based on a simple distinction between friend and enemy, on a peoples affinity for or enmity against another people. Furthermore, Schmitt characterizes the friend-enemy division to be driven by existential threats to a people’s security, that is, by matters that involve the “life or death” of a nation. For Schmitt, every other category or association (religion, economics, culture, etc.) is social in nature. In order for the category of the political to operate, affinity for the friend and hatred for the enemy must be in play.

Underlying Schmitt’s discourse are the influence of two major sources of inspiration: (1) the realist tradition in political philosophy that reaches all the way back to Machiavelli, includes Hegel-Marx-Lenin, but finds its most systematic expression in the work of Hobbes and (2) conservative Catholic philosophers like Donoso Cortes and de Maistre who viewed dictatorship as the only form of government capable of protecting society against the “sinfulness” of human nature. Schmitt’s intellectual influences may initially seem politically contradictory, but they share a common vision of society as a site of permanent conflict between competing human classes and forces. What Schmitt admires in both sources is their willingness to come terms with the problematic cores of human societies.

In fact, Schmitt, whose own personal politics were deeply reactionary, had a profound respect for the revolutionary left. After all, Marxists and other revolutionaries fully acknowledge their enmity towards the ruling class (”the class enemy”). There is clarity in the opposition between revolution and reaction. There is something compelling about Schmitt’s analysis here that has attracted many thinkers from the new left willing to separate the reactionary content of Schmitt’s thought from its formal structure, which they turn to renew their own lost project.

Liberal thinkers, on the other hand, detest Schmitt - and, as you can imagine, Schmitt is far less generous when approaching liberal politics.

(To be continued…)

Disgracing the Memory of Cyrus

The first statement of human rights is attributed to Persia’s Achaemenid Emperor Cyrus the Great (Kurosh-e-Bozorg) . Most Iranians take deep pride in the values of tolerance and solidarity encapsulated in Cyrus’s declaration upon his conquest of Babylon:

“When I entered Babylon as a friend and established the seat of government in the place of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk, the great lord (induced) the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon (Din Tir) (to love me) and I daily endeavored to praise him. My numerous troops walked around in Babylon in peace, I did not allow anybody to terrorize (any of the people) of the country of Sumer and Akkad. I strove for peace in Babylon (Ka Dingir ra) and in all his (other) sacred cities. As to the inhabitants of Babylon (who) against the will of the gods (had/were … I abolished) the corvee (yoke) which was against their (social standing). I brought relief to their dilapidated housing, putting an end to their main complaints. Marduk, the great lord, was well pleased with my deeds and sent friendly blessing to myself, Cyrus, the King, who reveres him, to Cambyses, my son, as well as to all my troops, and we all (praised) his great (name) joyously, standing before him in peace … I returned to (these) sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which (used) to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I (also) gathered all their (former) inhabitants and returned (to them) their habitations. Furthermore, I resettled upon the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Sumer and Akkad who Nabonidus has brought to Babylon (su sa na) to the anger of the lord of the gods unharmed in their chapels, the places which make them happy.

Iranian dissidents are correct then when they point out that the disrespect towards and discriminatory policies enacted against Iran’s ethno-religious minorities by today’s Islamic Republic undermines Persia’s heritage of cross-cultural tolerance. Here’s a recent example of one such act of desecration:

The Iranian cultural heritage website chn.ir reported that in the framework of Tehran urban development, the Tehran municipality razed seven ancient synagogues in the Jewish neighborhood of Oudlajan in the south of the city – even though the sites had been nominated as national Iranian historic sites.

Actions like the one undertaken by the municipal government in Tehran highlight the critical importance of vigilantly renewing - in the collective conscience of the Iranian nation, at home and across the diaspora - the moral imagination of our Persian ancestors. At the same time, it may be time for those opposed to this barbaric regime to propose a new, values-driven framework to combat the IRI’s immoral misrule.

What values should stand as non-negotiable cornerstones of this new ethico-political framework?

“Well Execute Him!”

Amnesty International recently released its 2007 death penalty report. Iran earned the silver medal for the highest rate of executions per capita, with Saudi Arabia claiming the gold. The report highlights one particular execution from Iran as symptomatic of a disturbing trend of death sentences being imposed for non-capital crimes: “Ja’Far Kiani, father of two, was stoned to death for adultery in Iran in July.”

Of course, it makes me cringe to find the United States listed in the same company as Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, China, and Libya. I believe that racial disparities in the US justice system, recent cases of death sentences overturned on the basis of new DNA evidence, as well as executions of mentally ill criminals should compel us to at least consider a national moratorium.

Profile in Courage

I’ve been home sick all day long, and I had a chance to watch the Medal of Honor ceremony celebrating the heroism of Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor. Learning about the act of “conspicuous gallantry” for which Monsoor was awarded the Medal of Honor left me in tears:

That September morning, Monsoor and a group of SEAL snipers took up position on a residential rooftop as part of an operation to push into a dangerous section of southern Ramadi. Four insurgents armed with AK-47 rifles came into view, and the SEAL snipers opened fire, killing one and wounding another. Loudspeakers from a mosque broadcast calls for insurgents to rally, and residents blocked off nearby roads with rocks.

Insurgents shot back at the SEAL position with automatic weapons from a moving vehicle and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the building. The SEALs knew that more attacks were inevitable but continued their mission of protecting the troops clearing the area below, according to an official account.

Monsoor’s commander repositioned him in a small hidden location between two SEAL snipers on an outcropping of the roof, facing the most likely route of another insurgent attack. As Monsoor manned his gun, an insurgent lobbed up a hand grenade, which hit Monsoor in the chest and bounced onto the roof.

“Grenade!” Monsoor shouted. But the two snipers and another SEAL on the roof had no time to escape, as Monsoor was closest to the only exit. Monsoor dropped onto the grenade, smothering it with his body. It detonated, and Monsoor died about 30 minutes later from his wounds.

“He made an instantaneous decision to save our teammates. I immediately understood what happened, and tragically it made sense to me in keeping with the man I know, Mike Monsoor,” said Lt. Cmdr. Seth Stone, Monsoor’s platoon leader in Ramadi.

How do men like this come about? What values, aspirations, or experiences forge their courage? How many of us would take the easy exit rather than jump on the grenade, as Monsoor did, to mitigate the impact on our comrades?

Here’s to Hoping the “Communist Hypothesis” Is Never Proposed Again…

 

The BBC is reporting the loss of Dith Pran, the journalist whose personal account of the Cambodian genocide helped to expose the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime (and served as the inspiration for the movie The Killing Fields). During the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia (from 1975 - 78), an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians perished:

Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside. But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork. 

 The Cambodian genocide, of course, is merely one episode in Communism’s dark history. And yet almost two decades since the fall of the USSR, Marxian ideologies and regimes are in resurgent mode. The Communist philosopher Alain Badiou is certainly convinced that the “Communist hypothesis” will have its day yet:

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.      

Far from inspiring, Badiou’s assertions here stand as an insult to the millions of victims of Communist misrule. They also highlight one of the most disgusting aspects of Communism: for Communist politics to truly bear fruit, Communists must actively work to intensify the “internal contradictions” of the societies they are engaged in. For Communists, the misery of workers (who form their nominal constituency) is even more valuable than, say, a successful industrial action that may lead to better standards of living for the workers. According to the Marxist logic, defeat within the status quo can help enhance workers’ “consciousness” by allowing them to realize that the social order itself is “rigged” against them and that only a revolution can help them achieve their true goals, while any attempt to address social problems within established frameworks is to be seen as meant to hoodwink the oppressed. 

In other words, the “Communist hypothesis” is predicated on bad faith. And if democratic societies don’t take proactive steps to address the dramatic challenges of the 21st century, then opportunistic Communists will rely on this very form of bad faith to draw another generation towards this failed hypothesis.

Terrorism Has No Religion

In the aftermath of the Fitna affair, I want to share a new site I learned about (thanks to Letter of Intent!). Primarily aimed at Muslim, and especially Iraqi, audiences, it’s designed to question the ideology of radical Islam on Qur’anic grounds. It’s very well-designed project–enjoy!

The image shows soccer score board. On the left, al-Irhab (terror) has a score of “0,” while al-Iraqh (Iraq) has a scored “1.”

On “Fitna”

Conservative Dutch MP Geert Wilders has released a short documentary titled Fitna (Arabic for “Strife”). The film juxtaposes quotations from some of the more severe suras of the Qur’an with images of Islamist violence, including the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, hangings of gays in Iran, stonings, etc. It’s needless to say that Wilders intention has been to make a direct connection between the text of the Qur’an with the terror committed in its name.The film raises an interesting question, one which cannot be easily answered (though many attempts have been made): if the violence and intolerance are endemic to Islam and its sacred texts, then why is it that this violence appears to be so heightened at this particular conjuncture? In other words, what is behind the current, extreme levels of Islamist politicization?One answer to this question, often offered by the traditional Left, is that today’s hyperpoliticized, extremist Islam is a result of the marginalization of secular, progressive political outlets for the Arab masses at the hands of Arab “client states” propped up by the West. I’m not so convinced. What are your thoughts?

UPDATE (3/29): Due to death threats to the LiveLeak staff, the site has decided to take down the video. Another reminder of why it is so difficult to confront Islamists along rational lines. They short-circuit and close the debate with threats or actual acts of violence. A panoply of other groups and constituencies are questioned/insulted on the airways and on the net on a daily basis. In response, most either join the debate, boycott the particular media outlet altogether, or else create their own counter-media to voice their views. Islamists, on the other hand, immediately reach for the sword.

This is why, despite my strong political differences with them on a number of issues, I agree with John McCain and other defense conservatives when they describe radical Islam as the transcendent ideological and strategic challenge to democracies in the 21st century.