US Elections

The Democrats have won control of the House, and have at least half of the Senate at this point. I cheered them on, but they must not forget that they came to power in large part due to the voters' repudiation of the Bush-Republican Congress's policies. We can argue whether it was Iraq, corruption, Social Security, medical care, or (in my dreams) human rights violations, within and without the country. However, the fact remains that the American voters want something to change, and it's not the economy, stupid!

Democrats will do well not to forget this "mandate". Some of their election time antics were down-right stupid. They took polarizing positions just for their own sake. I don't need to tell them that good governance is still appreciated, whereas a juvenile attitude of "since you did that, I'll do this" will not be appreciated by anyone but the very extreme left wing. That's not who voted them in. America's middle did. Think about the huge problems facing us, both as Americans and citizens of Earth, instead of just "reacting".

The Identity Crisis

I just heard a piece on NPR Morning Edition examining the lives of two Muslim American girls who have Algerian parents and wear the hijab. Two snippets that struck me:

* Who am I? When asked in the US, the girls would say America. When asked in Lebanon, they'd proudly say "American". The response to "where are you from" , that eternal questions all immigrants face day in and day out, depends on what makes you different from the environment you're in. Not simply a red, white, and blue issue.

* One of the girls' moments of reflection: she went to a Muslim school in Paris, with 120 Muslim girls. They told our subject, in tears, how the most difficult decision of their lives was to decide to either give up the scarf or give up schooling. Our subject kept thinking how lucky she was that she was an American...

Rule of law

Some Supreme Court judge once said that the Constitution wasn't meant to be a suicide pact. Ok. I can live with that. But I also believe in "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". And there can be few more extraordinary claims than that the Constitution, heck, the whole American system of governance and jurispudence, is incapable of handling the so-called War on Terror.

CIA today admitted to having run jails abroad, even if they held terror masterminds such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Gitmo has been making a mockery of the US's respect for law, both internal and the external one it is party to, for almost 5 years now.

America may be able win its battles against the armed misfits who are gunning for it and everything else that doesn't fit their very, very narrow world view. Money, guns, politics, technology, all of which USA has quite a bit of, can be brought to bear on this. But will it, in the process, lose the bit of respect it had in the moderates and intelligent people of the Muslim world? I was on the other side. We all despised the US for its clout, much as we would despise a rich neighbor. But we respected American society, because, unlike our own, we believed that it stood for principles, at least internally. We were awed by concepts like Miranda rights, that even presidents could get thrown out if they broke the law, and so on. The American dream was not just about rags to riches. It was about respect for the fellow man, by and large. Or at least the fellow citizen. Even then we could never understand why America supported Israel so blindly. But we thought it was not only the land of the free, it was land of the fair.

I doubt many think of it that way. We could have looked away from profiling of Muslims in the days after 9/11. We could understand the lashout at the Taliban, who were stupid enough to not turn tails and give up their links to Al Qaeda. But what we can not understand is how the US made a mockery of habeus corpus, that one law that we all aspire to in our societies. We couldn't understand why the American president defended a prison on an island using the argument that it was beyond the courts' reach!!! And we watched in horror the tragic comedy of errors as the USA, that great technological and powerful nation, failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that it used as a justification to fight a war. We watched in horror as the evidence that was enough to cost hundreds and then thousands of Iraqi innocents' lives, vanish like a desert mirage. We watched in horror as we were treated to an illusionist's hand-trickery, in blaming the Iraqis for not keeping records of destruction of stockpiles, dammit, or of secret meetings with Al Qaeda in European capitals. We watched in horror as the US government showed how good they were at waging war but botching up peace. And we watched in horror how Iraq slipped into sectarian anarchy, with enough "invaders" to sow division but not enough to bring peace to the streets. We were confused why Saddam, hated as he was, could keep the peace but the world's mightiest military can't. But most of all, we watched in horror how the anarchy in Iraq became a training ground and a recruitment call for militants, just as Afghanistan was in the 198o's. Oh, and we watched in even more horror how the American people voted the same government in again for another four years of the same. Maybe we can't blame them. Even our puny, jailed, beat-up opposition parties do a better job than the American oppostition did.

This has become an anti-Bush policies rant, but the point was much simpler, and let me return to it in the closing. We, who liked to think of ourselves as the moderates, as the critical thinkers of our societies, respected and admired the US for its respect for law. We argued to the fanatics that we must all live within a rule set, and improve the system, not always be tearing it down. But our poster-child abandoned us. We can point to no one and say: hey, look there, a legal system that, for all its imperfections, works! Let's build one with our own laws, one that respects all men equally, one that is derived from our traditions, from our religious beliefs, and live within it, instead of always pointing fingers at others.

Thanks, Mr. Bush. You seem to have bin Laden's playbook all figured out. I wonder who will be deemed by historians to have succeeded in ultra-polarizing the world in the 21st century, bin Laden or you. We may yet hail you as the enabler of "Islamic fascism", yes, you, a man who can lead the world and has the best minds in the world advising him if he wants. A crazed, messed up weirdo hidden in a cave somewhere can not turn the world around. You can.

Gaming the Supreme Court

Supreme Court Rejects Jose Padilla Case

Congrats to the Bush administration. It has succeeded in gaming the US judicial system at the highest level.

I am no neophyte to the appellate process and the Anglo-Saxon judicial principle that prevents hypothetical questions being asked of the court. However, as the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted, following one path for 4 years and then dropping it just as it was about to be reviewed, possibly unfavorably, and yet not conceding that the original course of action was faulty, is just plain wrong. IMHO, the government is gaming the lag in the appellate system of checks and balances to buy itself a 4-yr grace period where it can do what it wants.

The Supreme Court has now ducked the issue of suspension of Bill of Rights twice. They may have at least issued a non-binding opinion that would indicate to the Bush administration, the American people, and the rest of the world where it stood on this issue. This is just very, very disappointing. Not the brightest moment in the history of the American Constitution's system of checks and balances.

When democracy fails the US

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4861320.stm

I belong to a country with a chequered past when it comes to democracy. For many, many years, we heard successive American governments telling us how democracy was an absolute goal. It didn't matter whether elected governments robbed us blind. They were still elected, and hence inherently legal.

Starting with Hamas's clean and fair election to power, the Europeans are learning what the US should have learnt earlier from democracy in Latin America: the democratic process is no guarantee of a government "friendly" to Western interests. The US should have learnt that even earlier, with Chavez's rise to power, and as this BBC article points out, left-liberal, anti-US governments are being elected freely and fairly to power all over Latin America. How will the West deal with this outcome of democracy in action?

Oh, and could Iraq be the next place where an elected government is not overthrown ala Iran 1979 but turns away from its American friends because of perceived ethnic+security policies? Far-fetched? Read some of the reaction of the Shi'ites to American military response to ethnic strife there...