What's Iraq Like?

Monday's horrific shootings in Virginia remind us of the preciousness of life and the vulnerability of society. They also give us some glimpse as to what it must be like to live in Iraq.

Remember how you felt when you learned about the Blacksburg shootings -- when you learned that 32 people, people like yourself, living in your own country (if you're American), going about their daily business much like yourself, had been killed in a senseless suicide attack.

Now imagine hearing that the attack had killed five times that many people. Because that's what happened in Baghdad yesterday.

Imagine that additional bombings and shootings across the country brought the day's death toll to almost 230 -- nearly eight times as many as died in the Virginia shootings.

And finally imagine that such attacks, killing scores of people, occurred multiple times per week. Imagine not even having enough time to recover from being stunned by each attack before the next one.

That's what's happening in Iraq, where civilian casualties are actually higher than before the new Baghdad security plan was implemented.

Iraqis are people too, and our security plan doesn't seem to be providing them with much security.

For Heaven's Sake

I'm no fan of Mitt Romney, but could people please stop attacking him for being a Mormon? It's a little cheap. Sure, he belongs to a minority religion that has beliefs that seems strange to outsiders, but every religion has beliefs that, viewed from the standpoint of science, logic, or another religion, seem strange.

A recent On the Media portrait quotes Judy Woodruff asking Romney about the supposed Mormon beliefs that "Jesus Christ will appear again in the state of Missouri or that God has a material body, that he was fathered by another God." Passing over the Missouri part, aren't the latter parts rather similar to some mainstream Christian beliefs? I'm Jewish, so my knowledge of Christian doctrine is imperfect, but I've always understood that Christians believe that Jesus was both God and the son of God and that he had a material body. I'm sure the Mormon views are different in ways that are theologically very important (Jesus wasn't the son of another God, in the mainstream view), but there are lots of theological differences between Christian denominations. Some Christians believe that they actually drink the blood and eat the body of Christ during the Eucharist ceremony (I expect some outsiders regard that as odd); others believe the ceremony is only symbolic.

The previous Dean of my law school was a Mormon, and he was a lovely fellow who made an excellent Dean and got a lot done for the school. I don't recommend that anyone vote for Romney, but let's leave his religion out of it.

Eerie Coda

An eerie coda to the previous post: as I entered the school building this morning, alarms were shrieking and a light was blinking on the main door's control panel. The light was marked "Trouble." Somewhat unsettling after yesterday's awful events.

In The Midst Of Life

Yesterday's horrific shooting in Viriginia reminds us of the preciousness of life and of the inherent vulnerability of a free society. Pretty much anywhere, anytime, a deranged person could open fire and kill whoever happened to be around.

I work in a university setting where security is very much an issue. When I started, our security was basically nonexistent. Since then, things have improved a little -- we now have card-key entry locks on our doors. But the doors are unlocked most of the day, and there is no guard to challenge anyone who enters. At other urban law schools I have visited (U. Penn. and NYU, for example), those entering must click through a turnstile with school ID or be challenged by a security guard.

We could upgrade our security to that level, but it wouldn't prevent shootings by students [update -- as the Virginia shooting is now thought to be], or by faculty or staff. And in the end, it's hard to see how incidents like Virginia's could really be prevented in society at large. We could set things up so that, before going to school, getting on a subway car, buying a cup of coffee, seeing a movie, entering a store, or generally going from anywhere to anywhere else, you would have to show ID, sign in, and walk through a metal detector. But life would become unbearable.

Of course, we could ban guns. Incidents like yesterday's would be much more difficult to pull off without easy access to guns. But this question is not as simple as it seems. I've never studied the question closely, but people whose opinions I respect -- most notably Eugene Volokh -- say that the statistics show that guns save more lives than they cost (not in the particular post linked here, but elsewhere). The NRA had the good taste to offer nothing but its condolences for now, but you can be sure it will be defending the right to own guns in the wake of the tragedy. The right answer on this point is not clear.

General Won't Serve as Czar

Everyone should read this: a retired Marine Corps general's explanation of why he won't serve as the "White House implementation manager," or War Czar, for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Basically, he refused to take the job because he determined that the Administration has no strategy for winning the war.

I assume Marine Corps generals are not a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals eager to bash the administration. So when one of them says that "that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region," that "We cannot 'shorthand' this issue with concepts such as the 'democratization of the region' or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to 'win,' even as 'victory' is not defined or is frequently redefined," and that "We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq," it's important to listen.

I have no idea what the solution is in Iraq. Even if one believes that starting the war was an enormous mistake, we can't wave a wand and make it unhappen. Planning for the future has to start with a recognition of where we are now. We may need to accept some sacrifices to marshal the resources that would be needed to succeed. But we're never going to succeed with a strategy that amounts to tinkering at the margins with what we've been doing unsuccessfully for four years in the hope that we can somehow muddle through. The President says that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror -- the most important fight in the world. If he's serious, then it's up to him to make sure we win. When even the generals basically say that he's just muddling through, we have a right to be angry.

Nothing to Hide

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has "nothing to hide" with regard to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, because "nothing improper occurred" and he knows that he "did not -- and would not -- ask for the resignation of any U.S. attorney for an improper reason. "

I am certainly looking forward to hearing the Attorney General substantiate these statements when he testifies before Congress tomorrow. I like to start with the assumption that, although people often have policy goals I would disagree with, everyone is doing their job in good faith, as best they can, as they see it, until the contrary is proven. So I'll give the Attorney General the benefit of the doubt. But I will need to hear answers to the following questions:

If this whole thing is just an "overblown personnel matter," as the Attorney General wrote in USA Today, then why can't we get a definitive statement of his role in it? On March 13 he said "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on." Now he acknowledges that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson "periodically updated" him on the process, Sampson says he had at least five discussions with Gonzales about it, and Michael Battle (former director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys) says that a memo on the firings was distributed at a meeting that Gonzales attended.

Also, if there are proper reasons why these U.S. Attorneys were fired, why can't we get a clear statement of those reasons? Why does the reason keep changing? The whole scandal stems from the initial insistence that the firings were for "performance-related" reasons and that the White House was not involved. But later it turned out that the White House did approve the firings.

I await the Attorney General's explanations with interest.

Poof

I awoke this morning to the news that at least 56 people were killed by a car bombing at a bus station in Karbala and another 10 by a car bombing on a bridge in Baghdad. If you keep your radio tuned to the news and have it go off on the hour, that's often the first thing you hear -- how many people were killled by bombs in Iraq that day.

Living my comfortable life in the USA, I have, like many Americans, become numb to the daily reports of death and destruction in a far-off land, but every now and then, like this morning, it hits me that these reports we hear on the radio are about actual people. The statement "at least 56 people were killed" flashes by, but each of those 56 people had a mother, a father, a childhood; they grew up, perhaps they went to school, worked at jobs, fell in love, married, had children of their own, had dreams, hopes, heartaches, fears, aspirations, good and bad times, and then -- poof, in a second, someone who didn't even know them blows them up and their whole life is reduced to being part of a number read out at the top of the news. Thousands of miles away, all we hear is the number; we never even learn the names of the dead. And to the left of the article on the Washington Post website, the tantalizing headline beckons, "Prince William Single Again."

President Bush and Senator McCain say that we are making progress in Iraq; Senator McCain complains that American media aren't reporting the good news. But the car bombs explode almost every day.

Thank goodness it's not my job to figure out how to solve the Iraq problem. But it certainly seems like the 15% "surge" solution is unlikely to have much effect. I continue to think that a President who really wanted to achieve victory, and who really beliveved that Iraq was the most important front in the war on terror, would do something more like doubling our commitment in Iraq, and would explain to the American people why this step and the sacrifices it would entail were necessary.

In the meantime, the daily drumbeat of the numbers of the dead continues.