I recently was talking with a Senator who said to me, “Professor, we didn’t ask the terrorists to sign the Geneva Conventions. How can you expect us to abide by commitments that they don’t adhere to?” To which I replied, “Yes, and we didn’t ask the whales to sign the Whaling Convention either. We sign these treaties to protect us from ourselves, not from them.”

See also: Confessions and Hazards.

Quotable Quotes from the Fordham Law Review Symposium

As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East—with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background—FRONTLINE gains unprecedented access to Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy, including parliament leader Hamid Reza Hajibabaei, National Security Council member Mohammad Jafari and state newspaper editor Hossein Shariatmadari.

Frontline continues to be worth the hour. This report paints a damning picture of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory in US/Iranian relations mostly due to incompetence. Watch it online.

FRONTLINE: showdown with iran | PBS

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Idiocy

Read these three paragraphs. Then read them again.

Some suggest today that the US failure in Iraq is due simply to lack of planning; to specific policy errors— debaathification, looting, the abolition of the army, and lack of troops; and to the absence of a trained cadre of Arabists and professional nation-builders. They should consider Gertrude Bell and her colleagues, such as Colonel Leachman or Bertram Thomas, a political officer on the Euphrates. All three were fluent and highly experienced Arabists, won medals from the Royal Geographical Society for their Arabian journeys, and were greatly admired for their political work. Thomas was driven from his office in Shatra by a tribal mob. Colonel Leachman, who was famed for being able to kill a tribesman dead in his own tent without a hand lifted against him, was shot in the back in Fallujah. Bell's defeat was slower but more comprehensive. Of the kingdom she created, with its Sunni monarch and Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish subjects, there is today no king, no Sunni government, and something close to civil war. Perhaps soon there will be no country.

Bell is thus both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for "nation-building." Despite the prejudices of her culture and the contortions of her bureaucratic environment, she was highly intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Her colleagues were talented, creative, well informed, and determined to succeed. They had an imperial confidence. They were not unduly constrained by the press or by their own bureaucracies. They were dealing with a simpler Iraq: a smaller, more rural population at a time when Arab nationalism and political Islam were yet to develop their modern strength and appeal.

But their task was still impossible. Iraqis refused to permit foreign political officers to play at founding their new nation. T.E. Lawrence was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.

Stewart, author of 'The Places In Between', seems to have changed his mind since July.

The Queen of the Quagmire, by Rory Stewart

Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

The US government called it "the largest single drug cash seizure the world has ever seen."

When the law caught up with Ye Gon on Monday night, his weeks on the lam ended in an Asian restaurant on Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton, Maryland -- in P.J. Rice Bistro, in Westfield Wheaton mall, near a Ruby Tuesday and a JCPenney.

Not Your Average Drug Bust

More on Drew Weston.

When we think, we think through networks in which concepts or ideas come with associated emotional resonances and colorings. In short, thinking is feeling -- and vice versa.

So why do Democrats have a hard time grasping this fact? Part of it has to do with the progressive tradition and its commitment to dispassionate social analysis.

The predilection toward objective, fact-based thinking is not in itself a flaw, but it can lead progressives to forget that people are driven by factors that often elude social scientific analysis and that all problems cannot by solved by social programs.

Two conclusions?

1. There are times when you just have to knock some heads.
2. Facts are often overrated.

It's the Emotions, Stupid!

After you've read Why I'm Banned in the USA and watched How Rudy Will Make GWB Look Good, complete the trilogy by listening to this show.

The original version of this episode won a Peabody award in 2006.

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they're the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

From the Peabody web site:

This report, about the denial of habeas corpus to terrorism suspects, focuses on the stories of two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and explains why the right is so fundamental in American law.

You can stream the new episode and download the original one.

Habeas Schmabeas 2007 | This American Life, Episode 331

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Why the Shootings Mean That We Must Support My Politics

The beginning of the end of official, managed campaigns.

The 74-second spot has been viewed more than a million times online, making it far more popular than any of the official videos posted by the presidential contenders.

Vote Different