Balance beam

Taken at Taney Playground

T at the Italian Market

Taken at Italian Market

I'm against intervening in Libya

You can take the boy out of the Mennonite Church, but you can't always take the Mennonite Church out of the boy: It's been nearly a decade since I walked away from my faith, but the pacifist foundation I acquired during those days still largely shapes my outlook.

Largely, but not completely. I believe the United States was right to topple the Taliban and go after Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan following 9/11: I think nations have the right to self-defense. But I was against the Iraq invasion—I'm against defense so pre-emptive we don't even know if any threat is actually going to emerge—and I'm against President Obama's decision to instigate a limited war in Libya.

Why?

Well, it's not because I love Col. Qaddafi. I think he's a bad man who does bad things, and I'll be happy when his reign comes to an end. I'm rooting for the Libyans rebelling against him.

I just haven't heard a clear and convincing reason why the United States should get involved.

Now, I'm not a national security expert of any sort. It does seem to me reasonable, though, to ask a series of questions before jumping into a military commitment abroad:

A: Does the party against whom the United States is considering military action threaten U.S. security? If the answer is "no," the conversation should almost always stop here. There is an alternative question that permits progress, in my mind, even if U.S. security isn't directly threatened:

B: Is the party against whom the United States is considering action committing genocidal-levels of violence, such that even by the standards of war or civil war the conscience is shocked? This is probably a little more nebulous and requires more debate, and lots of people are going to draw the lines differently here.

C: If the answer to (A) is "yes," are there non-military means that could effectively mitigate the threat? Also difficult to answer, in part (I think) because it's harder to see cause-and-effect working together with non-military methods. It takes longer, it's more frustrating in some respects.

D: If the answer to (C) is "yes," do that. If the answer to (C) is "no," then: What is the desired end state of U.S. military action? A return to a previous status quo? Regime change? What? (Put another way: What does "victory" look like?If a clear answer to this question isn't forthcoming, it should be.

E: What is the worst-case scenario that could develop from U.S. military intervention? Is the scenario more or less threatening to U.S. security than the current threat? If the answer is "more," then you might want to refrain from military action.

F: Does the United States have the military and financial resources to bear the burdens of that worst-case scenario? See the action recommended in "E."

With regard to Libya, my answers are thus:

A: No. Some advocates talk about the security of the oil markets, but even if one makes a moral defense of deadly force to preserve cheap gasoline—difficult, I think—I'm not certain that Libya is creating that much instability, on its own. (Lots of other stuff going on in the Middle East might be affecting those prices, too.)

B. No. Qaddafi is a bad guy. But there isn't, from what I see, ethnic cleansing. He is trying to defeat the people who are trying to depose him. I think that's deplorable, but I don't see that it's hugely different from many civil wars that the United States doesn't involve itself in.

C. Actually, no. Qaddafi spent a generation living under sanctions and diplomatic isolation. The renewal of those conditions won't force him from power. If you believe that Qaddafi must be removed military action by the U.S. is your best bet.

D. I assume the desired end result is the end of the Qaddafi regime. Roger Cohen lays out why the proposed no-fly zone is unlikely to bring that end state about. Furthermore, I'd assume "victory" includes his replacement by some more democratic form of government unlikely to (say) support terror attacks aganst American and allied targets at some point in the forseeable future.

E. Two worst-case scenarios: Qaddafi remains in power, and the U.S. and its allies will have spent blood, treasure and prestige fruitlessly. Or Qaddafi is toppled, and (reminiscent of Cold War Afghanistan) replaced by a radical group that either supports or gives refuge to Al Qaeda or some similar group. Bad scenarios; not sure if they're so bad (or so likely) as to inhibit military action.

F. Apparently we don't have money for NPR these days. So...no.

You'll notice that some answers seem to offer qualified support for a military intervention. But the answers to the first two questions are the critical, foundational ones. Just because Col. Qaddafi is a bad man doing bad, evil things, does not make it wise for the U.S. to intervene.

Of course, the burden is never on those who support an intervention, really. It's usually on those who would refrain. That's too bad. At least during the Cold War, we believed that our interventions had a place in a larger struggle against totalitarian Communism. These days, we go around intervening ... mostly because we can, it seems. I think that approach invites blowback, and is ultimately unsustainable. Even if Libya ends up being "successful" in some respect, I'm not sure the United States can or should bear the burden of the accumulated Libyas. I haven't seen a compelling reason to intervene. I must oppose this action.

First cookie of spring.

Taken at Almaz Cafe

Time to end nuclear power?

Events are still unfolding in Japan; Ben Boychuk and I discuss the future of the domestic nuclear power industry in this week's Scripps Howard column. My take:

It's not time to put the kibosh on nuclear power in the United States.

It's also not time to make it a lot easier to build a plant.

And understand: Building a nuclear power plant in the United States is very difficult. It costs lots of money and takes many years of moving through an excruciatingly slow permitting process. Advocates of nuclear power have spent recent years urging that the process be streamlined -- and some environmentalists, seeing nuclear power as an alternative to carbon-belching fossil fuels, have even started to support that view.

They're wrong. The bar to building a nuclear plant should be almost prohibitively high. The permitting process should be slow -- giving engineers and government officials a chance to consider and address all the ways disaster could afflict a plant -- and construction itself remain expensive, in large part because of all the safety measures that must be put in place.

Why? The vast majority of the time, nuclear plants run smoothly. But as Josh Freed, a nuclear power advocate, told the Washington Post: "When nuclear goes wrong, it goes wrong big." The area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine, for example, is a virtual no man's land more than 20 years after the disaster there -- and cancer rates for hundreds of miles outside that zone remain precipitously high.

Cheap, mass-produced energy has probably lifted more people out of poverty than any other force. That fact must be acknowledged. But it also comes with a cost -- no matter what form it takes. The health and safety costs that come with nuclear power can be more extreme than most. The disaster in Japan is a warning against the hubristic idea we can ever make it perfectly safe.

Ben's a bit more sanguine about nukes than I am. Read the whole column for his take.

Looking forward to the day Philadelphia residents write for the Philadelphia Daily News*

If there's a trend to Larry Platt's columnist hires at the Philadelphia Daily News—aside from the fact that his "new"voices are familiar faces—it's that many of them seem not to bother being in Philadelphia that much.

Buzz Bissinger lives at least part-time in the Pacific Northwest. Ombudsman Richard Aregood is planted in North Dakota. And Marc Lamont Hill's main professional gig these days is at Columbia University ... in New York. Ed Rendell apparently still lives in Pennsylvania, at least, but he's writing about sports—and despite the former governor's enthusiasm, I actually don't care at all what he thinks about the topic. (I've tried reading his sports columns. They're boring, and would be utterly unremarkable were it not for the fact that Big Ed was writing them.)

Now, these guys all have far deeper roots in Philadelphia than I do, admittedly, so my grounds for criticism are maybe pretty thin. But the great thing about the Daily News has been its relentless focus on the city; filling up the pages with celebrities who have one foot out the door seems like a departure from that mission.

*Part of my ongoing series to ensure I never work for a Philadelphia newspaper, apparently.

About Virgil Peck, Southeast Kansas, and state legislatures

A friend, knowing that I was born in Southeast Kansas and spent a couple of years working there, asks me about Virgil Peck. He's the state legislator who advocated shooting illegal immigrants like feral swine, then semi-apologized for it by saying: “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person."

Is that the way a Southeast Kansas person talks?

Yes. No. Kind of.

Southeast Kansas isn't really what most people think of when they think "Kansas." (I assume most people think flat, full of wheat fields, etc.) It's hilly country, with more trees than the rest of the state, and lots of abandoned mines that flourished a half-century or more ago. It is relatively poor, relatively uneducated, and a fairly depressing place to be. (At least, that's how I saw it during the two years I worked at the Parsons Sun, right after college.) In some ways, it has more in common with Arkansas and the Ozarks—which are relatively nearby—than with any other conception of "Kansas" I've ever held.

There are good people there. There are also a fair number of hillbillies. And there are more than a few people—the ones who remain—who have seen their livelihoods in the mining and railroad industries crumble (almost literally in some cases) from beneath them. And yes, I've heard the occasional suggestion that illegal immigrants be slaughtered by sharpshooters.

I've also heard it outside Southeast Kansas, for that matter. I had one relationship end, in part, because of a similar comment. (It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, but it was one of them.) So Virgil Peck wasn't really speaking "like a southeast Kansas person"—he was speaking like a hick. Hicks are everywhere. In Kansas, a lot of them get elected to the Legislature.



This, I gather, is a problem with state legislatures everywhere. There's a certain type of gregarious backslapping dummy who has no real viable skill except to get himself (it's usually men) elected to a low-level job that most locals don't really pay close attention to. They know they hate the "legislature" but they're pretty sure they like Virgil Peck. And the Pecks of the world, despite their all-pervading mediocrity, are convinced they're the smartest people in the world. It's an ugly mix, made more visible by the fact that there's often a reporter or two on the statehouse beat to publicize the more egregious gaffes.