The question of the daww 3ale

Note: this is the first blogpost in a series of 3 about approaches to practical life, thought of from the perspective I get from what I'm seeing around me. The reading that's inspired this is Raymond Gueuss' 'Outside Ethics.'

It can be surprising to realize that the question that ethics tries to answer is "what should I do?"

Ethics in common understanding or even for some ethicists seems more limited than that, it seems to be concerned with difficult choices, like whether or not it can be the right thing to break the law when it can create some good result.

Most of the time, we are faced with some decisions that are not as difficult as that last one, like what to have for lunch. Here I'm trying to investigate the area in between the decisions and situations we think of when we say ethics and those we don't think of, things we can call "almost-moral-dilemmas."

One of the almost-moral-dilemmas I face on the road in Lebanon is the daww 3ale. That's the high beams. Very often when you're driving at night on a mountain road, the lights on the side of the road are not on. People use their high beams so they can actually see something, except (sometimes) if there's someone in front of them or someone coming the other way. I'm going to describe the second case. This post is mainly about my own perception of it but it seems like everyone in Lebanon who drives on mountain roads at night deals with the question.

When you're driving with your high beams on and someone comes the other way, the "polite" behaviour is to turn your high beams off and stay with the normal light setting until the other car passes you by. The same behavior is expected of them.

Unfortunately, very often, the other person has the daww 3ale for a few seconds before they turn them off, and sometimes they just leave them on. That introduces some uncertainty about their moral character and problems for you as a driverf.

I was polite for a while but then I started getting frustrated by people who just left it on. I felt like an idiot. So I started flashing the lights when I came opposite someone who leaves the high beams on, sometimes doing it to people who didn't deserve it. Then some days I started leaving them on anyway when I was in a bad mood and I didn't feel like making the effort.

I haven't found a consistent approach to deal with it that makes sense. It seems like, as a driver, you're either an idiot who is nice to everyone - even assholes -, or the moral police who calls bad people out in a pretty blindly self-righteous way, or the asshole themselves. I choose from each depending on how I feel but I still think about this question afterward.

The next post is going to be about a more moral almost-moral-dilemma, which 3aksesser (driving against the traffic) and how it's inaccurate and limiting to think about it in terms of civilized vs. backwards (a language used not by foreigners this time but by Lebanese people from different social and economic classes).

"Anti-war" argument #4: Public opinion is against a strike

Note: for a list of arguments and responses (one per post) and more background on why I'm doing this, see this index page.

Note 2: I'll focus this on the U.S. but analogous arguments and counterarguments can be made for the U.K. or other countries.

There is no denying that public opinion in the West and in particular in the U.S. is not in favor of a strike on the Syrian regime, with approval rates in the U.S. ranging between 25% and 29%. Non-Baathist opponents of U.S. military intervention in Syria, a.k.a the "anti-war" crowd, have made the argument implicitly and explicitly that a strike would be anti-democratic and therefore immoral.

For instance, The Telegraph's Peter Foster reports on "one anti-intervention congressman (Justin Amash of Michigan) tweeting that calls to his office were 200 against action, and only four in favour [sic sic ew British English]."

One one hand, this is a good point for a Congressman to make, since his job is to listen to his constituents and vote on their behalf. On the other hand, I think that, in certain cases, and I'll argue that this is one of them, national or humanitarian interests and values can and should trump popular opinion. I am trying to make a more limited argument than it looks: I am saying that the decision of whether or not to strike Syria is the type of decision that needs to be more insulated from popular opinion. I'll justify my claim by taking you back to the Iraq war.

If you're opposed to the war in Syria, you are probably also of the opinion - which I share - that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy; it was a terrible moral and strategic mistake. I found this really cool Wikipedia page on "Popular opinion in the United States on the invasion of Iraq," it seems well cited and it gives us the following regarding U.S. public opinion:

• Opposition to military action against Iraq was 27% a month before the invasion (02/03).
• Popular support for going to Iraq without going through the UN Security Council was at 47% days before the invasion (03/03).
• It was 62% after the beginning of the war (03/03).
• It was 79% two months into the war (05/03).

The point I'm making is that the moral case for or against a war should be separated from what is unfortunately a deeply uninformed and ignorant public when it comes to anything beyond U.S. borders (for instance, according to this CBS poll, in April 2003, 53% of Americans thought that "Saddam was personally involved in the September 11th attacks."). I think the Iraq war was unjust, criminal, stupid, and wrong regardless of what the U.S. public thought and I demand intellectual honesty on Syria from those who share my opinion on Iraq.

The U.S. public is against a strike on Syria because of fatigue and because of realizing how blind it was when it came to Iraq. Their response to any other kind of intervention would be the same even if the moral or strategic case for that intervention was clearer and more compelling than the case Syria presents. It follows that U.S. public opinion is important in an amoral type of political analysis but it does not really contribute to any compelling moral argument against or in favor of the war.

Another thought I'll share quickly because this post is already long is that austerity measures are never popular, yet we go against popular opinion and implement them in certain cases of recession because economists know that it's the right policy option and there's no way around it - econ is not my area of expertise but it looks to me like Grece is one of these cases. here's a danger in delegating every decision to experts and their false neutrality, but there's an equal danger in putting the ideal of (direct) democracy above everything else, especially given that the public tends to be too reactionary and short-sighted. I'm more ambivalent about following this line of thought because of the problems it poses when you fall on either side, but it's something everyone who cares about democracy and politics should think about seriously.

"Anti-war" argument #3: Violence breeds violence

Note: for a list of arguments and responses (one per post) and more background on why I'm doing this, see this index page.

Maybe I take my Facebook feed too seriously, but I've been seeing "the Syrians don't need more violence," "more bombs will not help," "violence is not the answer," etc too much to ignore it anymore. This argument is beautiful if you're running for miss Universe - or #missHabalon - but you need more to be convincing.

The only case in which this argument can be consistent with the rest of your beliefs is if you're what I call an absolute pacifist - meaning you think avoiding committing violence is good regardless of the situation - OR if you're what I will call an optimistic pacifist, meaning you think that avoiding violence will always lead to a better situation. Otherwise, you believe that violence is desirable/effective/useful in certain conditions and, in order to be consistent, you need to specify what these conditions are and show that they are not met in Syria today.

I will ignore absolute pacifists because I am assuming that my reader cares about what happens to people in the world and not only about whether or not one is resorting to violence. Therefore, instead of engaging in more abstractions, I'm going to contradict optimistic pacifism by providing a few historical examples where it seems like violence was used to being about a better situation in the world or was good more generally:

• The Allies fighting Nazi Germany in WW2: This example is so overused I don't feel like going into it.
• Operation deliberate force: In August-September 1995, in response to the refusal of Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) to put an end to massacres of Bosnian Muslims, NATO forces conducted an air campaign that saved a lot of lives. Most writings I have seen on the Bosnian side assert that inaction by the UN and NATO earlier in the conflict allowed for terrible things like the Srebrenica genocide.
• Maybe this is more controversial, but there's no doubt in my mind that some - not all - of the violence we see and have seen conducted against perpetrators of oppression by its victims is justified - either because there is something about it that makes it justified in itself or because it can lead to a weakening of oppression. I won't choose a particular case here but there are plenty, from colonialism to apartheid.
• This cool video of an Australian kid standing up to his bully.

Non-violence can work in certain contexts, but its success in this context can't be used to justify inaction or decry violence on the part of people who, like in Syria, don't have access to the luxury of non-violence being effective anymore.

A final point: to those who are against violence because it allegedly prevents a diplomatic solution, this post by Elias Muhanna is the most realistic proposal for a diplomatic solution by people close to the regime, and it is utterly unrealistic. How can a a regime that just massacred - by the most credible estimates so far - 1400+ of its own people be trusted to hold free and fair presidential elections within a year, give a prime minister real powers, etc??

I'm serious, if you have good evidence for the possibility negotiated settlement at this point or reasons to blame the opposition for its impossibility, please send them my way.

Remark: there are good articles pointing out that Syria is not Bosnia or Kosovo and that the case for intervention is more difficult to make in Syria; I don't dispute that. I'm just hoping for people to go into the specifics instead of using this unrealistic, lazy call for avoiding violence.

"Anti-war" argument #2: America's enemies are killing each other, let them be

Note: for a list of arguments and responses (one per post) and more background on why I'm doing this, see this index page.
Note 2: I'd like to focus this series of posts on liberal arguments against intervention, but this argument in particular is very prevalent so I decided to treat it although it's more in the realist tradition.
Note 3: I'd like to thank Ayman Mhanna for the Daniel Pipes reference.

According to popular opinion (and The Economist, sadly) the Syrian civil war pits Iran-backed Hezbollah and the Syrian regime on one side and Syrian rebels who are supposedly mostly al-Qa’ida or al-Qa’ida backed jihadists - response to this last notion coming soon - on the other.

According to that view, Syria is a black whole evil people and evil money are getting sucked into and consumed in. The argument I'm looking at here is that if that's the case, from a U.S. perspective, there's no point in doing anything to make this war shorter - let the bad guys kill each other. For example, Daniel Pipes writes: "Also, as Sunni Islamists fight Shiite Islamists, both sides are weakened and their lethal rivalry lessens their capabilities to trouble the outside world."

This point is reminiscent of an Arabic saying: "بطيخ يكسر بعضه;" "let the watermelons break each other." (thanks Yamli!). Although there are a gazillion moral and factual problems with this argument, I am going to put them aside and attack it from within its own framework and assumptions.

The problem with this argument is the same one with the realist argument in favor of drone strikes (i.e., more drone strikes = more terrorists killed = less terrorists overall = more national security): it's incredibly myopic when it comes to the dynamics of terrorism. As the great Farea al-Muslimi explains in his testimony to Congress, AQAP actually uses drone strikes as a tool to recruit militants!

The violence in Syria today is coupled with - at least before August 21st - a failure of the U.S. and its allies to react to the violence and support the opposition properly. This has contributed greatly to the material and psychological conditions for jihadi factions to be able to fight in Syria and recruit there and elsewhere. Eventually, if left to its own devices, the war in Syria - like the drone strikes if they continue - will end up creating more jihadists and threaten U.S. national security more in the long run.

"Anti-war" argument #1: Evil people want the U.S. to intervene

Note: for a list of arguments and responses (one per post) and more background on why I'm doing this, see this index page.

In a widely shared article (at least as far as my Facebook news feed is concerned), the legendary Robert Fisk remarks that Obama is "fighting on al-Qa’ida’s side." The rest of the article is not really worth commenting on; clearly the point is to use a catchy shocking headline that will lead to lots of sharing. In any case, I'll focus on the argument.

Stripped down to its bare bones, the argument is:

1. al-Qa’ida is against the Syrian regime

2. The U.S. is against the Syrian regime {and about to confront it even more directly than it had before}

3. Therefore the U.S. is on al-Qa’ida's side

4. al-Qa’ida are the bad guys so the U.S. is on the bad guys' side

Alternatively, 4'. al-Qa’ida is an enemy of the U.S. so the U.S. is contradicting itself / being hypocritical

I'll focus on 3 and 4. The problem here is that this approach takes an overly manichean view of the world. It reminds me of 2006, when, during Israel's war on Hezbollah, anyone who called Hassan Nasrallah out for making a decision to go to war without asking the Lebanese state - or anyone for that matter - for their opinion was told: "so you're with Israel?"

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" doesn't work past 4th grade. Especially not in the Arab world, otherwise we would all be friends - or maybe enemies.

One last point: to be a little bit more philosophical about it, a bad person or a person who does not have your best interest at heart wanting you to do something doesn't mean you shouldn't do that thing. It might mean you should be more careful but that can't be the only element entering your calculus.

PS: @MaxBlumenthal makes a similar but implicit point with Israel and AIPAC instead of al-Qa’ida here. He tries to constitute two camps: the pro-war camps with evil people like AIPAC, and the good people in the anti-war camp. I think the same counterarguments apply. Blumenthal also makes other better points that I don't have the time or space to address here.

Responses to "anti-war" arguments

Full disclosure / Note: At the point where I am writing this, I support a U.S. attack on the Syrian regime. This and this (by Frederic Hof and @michaeldweiss respectively) are probably the closest articulations of my position so far. To give you some context, more generally, politically, I'd say I tend to be more or less to the left of the spectrum (real left not U.S. left).

I decided to write responses and thoughts on common, bad, or good arguments I read or hear against U.S. intervention in Syria. Maybe I'll change my mind, convince others, or learn something in the process.

Here are the arguments and responses I have collected so far:

• "Anti-war" argument #1: Evil people want the U.S. to intervene
• "Anti-war" argument #2: America's enemies are killing each other, let them be
• "Anti-war" argument #3: Violence breeds violence
• "Anti-war" argument #4: Public opinion is against a strike

Hope this proves useful/interesting!