Sit Back, Relax, and Leave the Foreign Policy to Us

I've been reading Ben Ehrenreich's new book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016).  It's a long, grim slog, but worth it, and every now and then there's a touch of comic relief.  Describing the 2014 collapse of talks between Israel and Palestine, mediated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Ehrenreich writes:

Another month would pass before a frank American narrative of what had occurred in Jerusalem and Ramallah hit the press.  In May, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea published an interview with anonymous senior U.S. officials who, he wrote, had been closely involved in the talks. The story that emerged from what Barnea called "the closest thing to an official American version of what happened" was one of Israeli cynicism and an almost astonishing American naivete.  "We didn't realize," said one of Barnea's sources, that "Netanyahu was using the announcements of tenders for settlement construction as a way to ensure the survival of his own government.  We didn't realize continuing construction allowed ministers in his government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks."  If true, this is a shocking admission: the Americans, with all their vast data-collecting capabilities, did not know what even the least observant reader of Israeli newspapers had for months understood to be self-evident [262].

The theme of American naivete unto gullibility when faced with conniving Oriental slick dealing is well-worn by now, and makes me suspicious.  American elites have always tried to excuse their short-sightedness and (let's not mince words) incompetence and/or collusion with authoritarian regimes by claiming that they were babes in the woods, outclassed by the ancient wiles of their opposite numbers.  It's echoed by the Vatican apologists' claim that, confronted with sexually predatory priests, they were so unprepared to deal with such Evil that they could do nothing but send them to new parishes to prey some more.  In either case the defense is unconvincing, and could only be supported by immediate resignation, confessions of incompetence, and departure from public life, except perhaps as garbage collectors.

On the next page Ehrenreich continues:

In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: "The Palestinians don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state.  We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.  Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale." 

When I first read that line, I nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. "Only now," the unnamed official said [263].

And, of course, six weeks "after the talks collapsed ... Obama sent his secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel," to Israel to pledge eternal U.S. fealty, along with "$3.1 billion per year in foreign military financing, which is not only more than we provide to any other nation, but the most we have provided to any nation in American history" (264).

Which brings me to another bit of comedy.  After the end of the talks, Hagel's opposite number, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, complained to the same newspaper about Kerry's "naive and meddlesome 'messianic fervor' ...'The only thing that can save us ... is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone" (234-5).

Of course, Ya'alon doesn't really want Kerry or the U.S. to leave Israel alone, any more than corporate CEOs want meddlesome big government to leave them alone.  Leave them alone -- but continue to send vast amounts of money, stand by them in the United Nations, and make it illegal for any Americans to organize boycotts against them.

The other examples I gave show that this is not a new problem in American foreign policy or diplomacy.  But once again, combined with Obama's (and his fans') feckless responses to domestic opposition, it makes it impossible for me to believe that he or his advisors know what they're doing.

You Cannot Hope to Bribe or Twist

Avedon Carol's Sideshow continues to be a very useful source of links, but there's less discussion in the comments than there used to be.  I remember having some spirited debates there in 2008, especially.  Her blog is still prominent enough to draw fire from Democratic loyalists, however, and under the latest post is a fine example of the syndrome.  I'm going to quote the whole thing, because comments have a tendency to disappear over time as one commenting platform is replaced by another, and it might be handy to be able to quote this in the future as an example of a well-trained Clintonbot.

Every time the "lesser evil" debate comes up, it bears repeating that we could solve this once and for all with approval voting. And repeating, and repeating. The two-party monopoly is a function of the voting system, and that can be fixed.

Lots of luck fixing that; I can't see Clinton taking any interest in the project, or the party elites on either side.  How would you change the voting system, by the way?  By voting?

In this particular case, I have to say the "lesser evil" question looks pretty easy to me. Clinton has the most progressive Democratic platform ever*, and while she's more hawkish than Obama and that sucks, that would still makes her the second least hawkish president in over 100 years. Her opponent is a narcissist with ADD who's riding a wave of hate and wants to know why we don't just nuke more countries. I voted Nader because I didn't see the difference between Gore and Bush, and I think history has proven that there was one. But there is no doubt at all that, as inadequate to the deeper challenges as Clinton is, she's a damn sight better than Trump.

Nice footwork.  As far as I can tell, there's no need to prove that Clinton is the lesser evil to anyone but a Trump supporter.  If you're addressing a frustrated progressive or liberal who says that everybody must vote for Clinton because otherwise Trump will win, that Clinton is the lesser evil is already given.  The Sanders supporters who don't want to vote for Clinton aren't really interested in the question; they recognize that even if Clinton is the lesser evil, she's still very evil; even if she's not as dangerous as Trump, she's still very dangerous.  So this commenter, whether intentionally or out of standard partisan cluelessness, misses the point completely.

The commenter's defenses are of course debatable.  It's certainly open to question whether Clinton would be "the second least hawkish president in 100 years", especially if (as it appears) the least hawkish president is supposed to be Obama.  I'm not really interested in how progressive the current Democratic platform is, and I see no reason to suppose that this commenter is any better informed on that topic than on Clinton's hawkishness.

On the fabled difference between Gore and Bush, much beloved of Democratic loyalists, no one has any idea what Gore would have done if he'd become president.  I suppose that the commenter has in mind Gore's environmental campaigning after he became a more or less private citizen, but private citizens are much less constrained that elected officials, including American presidents.  (Again, it's funny how partisans oscillate between touting the great power of presidents on one hand, and denying that they can do anything on the other.)   Gore didn't distinguish himself as a progressive while he was vice-president, and I see no reason to suppose that he'd have changed if he'd gained the White House.  It might be pertinent to recall the difference between Jimmy Carter's inspiring behavior and pronouncements since he became a private citizen, and his squalid record while he was in the Oval Office.  For what little it's worth, I voted for Nader not because I thought there was no difference between Gore and Bush, but because the differences were too small to suit me.  Anyone who wants to argue this line should have to address the many continuities between Bush and Obama, in terms of hawkishnness and hostility to civil liberties at home.

"Her opponent is a narcissist with ADD who's riding a wave of hate and wants to know why we don't just nuke more countries."  I've become increasingly intolerant of Democrats who use mental illness as an accusation against Trump and his followers.  As far as I know, no mental health professional is in a position to diagnose Trump with any condition, so neither this commenter nor I know whether Trump has ADD for example.  Even if he did, mental illness (like mental retardation) is not a moral failing, yet it's clear that these Dems assume that it is.  If Clinton or Obama were known to have ADD or some other condition, their fans and their organizations would be spinning it in terms of a heroic individual's struggle with a cripping disease, and they would assure the nation that the illness would not hinder the candidate's performance in office.  It's especially ironic since a favorite anti-Trump talking point is his mockery of a disabled journalist a few months ago.  The wave of hate that has been directed by Democrats at Trump all along means that they're in no position to cast the first stone.

*Some would say "who cares about the platform, it's all lies." But history shows that, whether they truly believe it or not, presidents try to keep the majority of their promises. Go ahead and discount the Democratic platform by 1/3; it's still light years from Trump.

Would "some" say that?  Maybe.  "Some" will probably say anything you like; it's a big world.  Just how far apart Clinton and Trump really are is hard to say, and I don't see that it matters, certainly not enough to spend much time debating it.  For all that Trump has taken many vile positions, his lack of any real political experience means that he has no record to judge what kind of a president he'd make.  Not that I have any wish to find out, and his record as a businessman inspires no optimism anyway.  But "light years"?  I don't think so.  I guess that if you're one of the Good Guys, as the commenter evidently assumes him or herself to be, that kind of childish exaggeration ("thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis big!") is supposed to pass for rational discourse.  Once again, we see that Democratic apologists won't be satisfied if you recognize Clinton as the lesser evil; you must convince yourself that she's a positive good.

Making Honest Men of Us

The Blogger Formerly Known As IOZ linked to a bizarre essay on gay fiction at the Guardian.  Maybe "bizarre" is too strong: the piece exhibits the same highly selective sense of history that so many gay people cling to, but I still cling to the hope that people will learn.  It seems they never do.

The Guardian titled the piece "It's time fiction reflected gay married life," and that's largely what the writer, Matthew Griffin, is calling for.  After reading At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill's fine novel of teen love during the Irish uprising of a century ago, Griffin says,

... I wanted to know what it was like for one man to love another – beyond initial attraction, beyond the passion of youth. At 18, I probably shouldn’t have been so worried about such things, but I’d read a lot of fantasy novels as a kid which ingrained in me a need for love to endure. I’d seen my parents’ marriage do this, but I needed to know if such a thing was possible for me, even if I’d have to call it by another name. And I needed to know what it would cost.

The gay literature I read in the years after that never quite answered my questions. Much of it is rooted not in the drama of long-term relationships but in the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession.

As examples Griffin cites Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and (mystifyingly) Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, which was just published this year and could hardly have disappointed the teenaged Griffin.

Apparently determined not to miss a cliche, Griffin continues:

But the tremendous swell that pushed the marriage equality movement forward is evidence that many gay men want more than a life of sexual freedom and excitement – we want love and commitment and stability, even if we may not all want them in the particular forms our heterosexual friends have created.

He sums up:

Long-term commitment is now a real possibility. This changes the experience of desire, shifting our expectations and the meaning we attach to it. Our literature should account for this.

At least Griffin is clear that by "marriage" he's not referring only to state-recognized liaisons, but to all committed, long-term relations.  But how naive must you be to believe that legalizing same-sex marriage suddenly makes "long-term commitment ... a real possibility"?  On one hand, it was always a real possibility, even in the primitive 1980s; on the other, marriage offers no guarantee that the commitment will last.

One commenter on the article remarked, "You want a book to reflect a particular story, you write it."  Though it's mentioned only as the biographical blurb at the end, Griffin seems to have done just that: his first novel, Hide, will be published next week.  From the description, I'm not sure he's complied with his own requirements and strictures.  That same commenter added, "Literature does not have any kind of responsibility to reflect society, either real or ideal."

I agree with that, but my main criticism is that Griffin's complaint is unfounded.  The key word, I suppose, is "much of it."  True, much gay male fiction has been about "the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession," but much of it has not.  (And it's not as if "much" heterosexual fiction weren't about the single life, or about courtship ending with the wedding, or about marriages cut short by failure -- the novel of adultery is common -- or tragedy.)  Much gay fiction has been about "the drama of long-term relationships," so much that I hardly know where to begin.  Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, for example.  Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World.  Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir.  Christopher Bram's debut Surprising Myself is about a male couple, as are several of his later novels.  Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner.  Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell, even if it gave John Updike the vapors.  Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man is about widowerhood, so it probably wouldn't satisfy Griffin, but the dead partner is still present in his absence, throughout the story, and that too is a lesson about the drama of long-term relationships.  I recently read Paul Russell's Immaculate Blue, which is about a male couple's wedding, but it addresses the matters Griffin says he wants fiction to cover; besides, the couple in question were Living in Sin for years before they tied the knot, so they've already been living the long-term drama.  Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders follows a male couple over several decades together, and it's a reminder that long-term coupledom doesn't necessarily exclude sexual freedom and excitement at the same time.  Hell, if we don't limit the list to prose fiction, there's James Merrill's epic poem of life, death, afterlife, and Ouija boards, The Changing Light at Sandover.  Those are just off the top of my head, and I didn't even include lesbian fiction.  If I went over my bookshelves I could list quite a few more.  None of them are what you, or at least what I would call obscure.

So, my first and major objection is that Griffin misrepresents the current and past state of gay male fiction.  The kind of story he demands is and has always been told in some gay fiction; he has, of course, no right to demand that all gay fiction do it.  (I admit that he didn't quite demand that, but then it's not clear what he really was demanding, aside from the actual state of contemporary gay fiction.  Some of the commenters saw the piece as a ploy to promote his own novel, but I don't think so, partly because he doesn't mention it and mainly because the misrepresentation he makes is a staple of pop criticism.  Some of the commenters noticed the falsity of his complaint (at least one, perhaps out of a desire to sell his own kind of fiction, confused stories about marriage with boy-meets-boy romance), but most of them swallowed it whole, and I don't think they were selling anything.

My second objection starts from Griffin's desire to know more about the reality of long-term relationships.  I share that desire, but you won't learn what it's "like for one man to love another" from fiction.  Readers who believe that prose fiction or any other medium will give them reliable information about life will soon be disappointed.  Fiction uses real life as one of its raw materials, but writers aren't bound to depict real life accurately, and they don't.  It's at least arguable that depicting reality isn't what art of any kind is for.  (What it is for is another question, which has no single answer.)  Even when a novel describes a marriage, the description is not an end but a means to whatever artistic end the author is trying for.

If someone wants insight into the process of living for a lifetime with another person, nonfiction is probably a better resource, though it has its own limitations.  We have numerous autobiographical accounts of same-sex marriages, from Jesse Green's The Velveteen Father to Paul Monette's Borrowed Time to Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast to Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart.  We have the published diaries of coupled writers -- if Griffin wants an account of the process of two men building a life together, he could read Christopher Isherwood's diaries, which cover most of his thirty-odd years with Don Bachardy.  We have reasonably reliable non-homophobic, un-closeted biographies of gay writers, artists, and other notables who lived in long-term partnerships.  There are also research studies of male couples, starting in the Eighties with Charles Silverstein's Man to Man and David P. McWhirter and Andrew Mattison's The Male Couple, and self-help tomes like Eric Marcus's Male Couple's Guide: Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life.  In sum, fiction and non-fiction already reflect married life, so why is Matthew Griffin unaware of it?

The Unbiased View Lies Somewhere in Between

Ted Rall did this better, but it reminded me of something I've been noticing for a while.  Just as both Americans and South Koreans oscillate between seeing North Korea as a weak, pathetic, ineffectual clown show on the one hand and an existential threat poised to rain nuclear missiles on Washington, D.C., so liberals can't quite make up their minds whether Donald Trump's laughable campaign has been doomed to fail from the beginning or is a sleek, streamlined fascist steamroller that will take Hillary down and impose a Nazi dictatorship on America if we don't clench our fists, squint real hard, and mock him on Facebook a dozen times a day.

Now that I think of it, such doublethink characterized the World War II-era propaganda cartoons that were recycled on TV when I was a kid: Hitler was a terrible threat, but mainly a clown, so we all must join hands and unite to destroy him without breaking a sweat.  One must simultaneously convince oneself of the danger, and deny that there's any danger.  But it gets comical when the contrary ideas are put side by side.

This Crazy Little Thing Called Gay Love

I finished reading Queer Wars last night, and I don't want to leave readers with the impression that Altman and Symons accept (let alone approve) the arrogance of Western-trained professional activists.  Their last chapter, "What Is To Be Done?" discusses the problem at length, and quite well.  In general it's a good book, especially for those who want an introduction to international LGBT politics.

There are, however, numerous bits in it that rub me the wrong way, and one of the most annoying was this quotation, on page 62, from another writer about Bangladesh:

Homosexuality is not shunned because of its criminal tag; it simply does not exist in the common mind as a variant of human behavior. This is a highly social culture with large and extended families, friends coming and going, eating and sleeping together at different times—all encased in strong social traditions. So what is this strange thing called gay love? Few have an answer.

The passage comes from a website, so I could go to the source.  It's not much better in its original context, an article called "Gay Life in Bangladesh" by one Richard Ammon.  Ammon has actually spent time in Bangladesh, but the tone of the article is normal Anglo travel writing about colorful natives and their exotic folkways, with a zest of sex-tourist prurience and sentimentality for subtext. 

So why do I object to this passage?  The fantasy of guys so culturally deprived that they have never even heard of Lady Gaga is of course a popular one, especially for those with a missionary temperament; also for urbanites who mistake their boredom with commercial gay culture (usually after spending a few decades immersed in it) for some kind of spiritual fastidiousness, and dream of finding a place untouched by Modern Life -- as long as they can get a good cell-phone signal there, of course.  The promise of untouched, unspoiled destinations is a common sell to tourists generally.  But eventually those other tourists start pouring in, and nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded.

If you identify homosexuality or "gay love" with its twenty-first century urban First-World manifestations (the Foucauldian fallacy), then you can persuade yourself and others that there's no
homosexuality where there are no mod cons -- no discos, no Internet porn, no (gasp!) Grindr.  While there is arguably a valid distinction to be drawn between "homosexuality" as an isolated practice and "homosexuality" as a specific cultural structure with a "scene" and institutions and ideology, most writers who draw that distinction can't sustain it consistently.  But the distinction is never hard and fast.  I can't fathom why Ammon assumes that "a highly social culture with large and extended families, friends coming and going, eating and sleeping together at different times—all encased in strong social traditions" somehow excludes same-sex eroticism and love.  If you put a bunch of males together, eventually some of them will start exploring each other's bodies, and some will realize that they prefer male bodies for this purpose.  (Muslim cultures are certainly aware of this "variant of human behavior.")  Even in cultures so benighted that they have never heard of RuPaul's Drag Race (oh, the humanity!), there are traditions of passionate same-sex friendship and sworn brotherhood.  It doesn't matter if those traditions didn't originally refer to copulation, because they will eventually be interpreted as erotic by people who need a precedent. (The ancient Greek reinterpretation of Achilles and Patroclus as erastes and eromenos is a classical -- pardon the pun -- example of this tendency.)

The capper is that closing rhetorical question.  Who are the happy "few" who "have an answer" to it?  Millions want to know.

You've Been Served: First World Problems, LGBT Activism Dept.

A couple of interesting and symptomatic passages from Dennis Altman's latest book Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights (written with Jonathan Symons; Polity Press, 2016).

AIDS activism has often seemed inseparable from gay activism, and has contributed to the development of an emerging group of professional and skilled 'LGBT' activists, who have played crucial roles as brokers between communities and international institutions.  Moreover, the priorities of HIV activists, often well connected to an international movement such as the Global Future on MSM and HIV, have sometimes clashed with the needs of those for whom immediate survival is the major priority.  This is a not uncommon problem when well-intentioned activists seek to apply models developed elsewhere [46].

It's depressing that this is still a problem, decades after it was first identified.  I've been reading essentially the same diagnosis of cultural incomprehension by foreign activists since at least the 1980s, exemplified by the Mexican-born (but professionalized in the US) activist Hector Carrillo, who after only a few years away returned to Mexico totally clueless about the needs and hangups of the people he'd come to "help."  Outside of specifically gay or AIDS work the syndrome is far older.  In her 1901 novel Work: A Story of Experience, for example, Louisa May Alcott wrote about clueless "ladies" trying to organize "anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop-girls" in a manner that suggests that what she was describing was already a cliche -- and that was within American society, not on foreign shores.  Yet the "professional and skilled" activists are always taken by surprise, which indicates that something is badly wrong with their training.

The consequences can be worse than the embarrassment produced by patronizing ignorance, since as Altman and Symonds point out, there are countries where LGBT activism is highly dangerous for the locals, notably African countries whose governments reject "foreign" influence in the form of the gay movement, but not the equally foreign influence of Islamist and American Evangelical missionaries, let alone the weaponry and training of death squads that the American government has shared so generously around the world.

Writing of Namibia, Robert Lorway argues that the foreign-supported Rainbow Project 'not only inhibited important political possibilities, but sometimes also reinforced social inequalities'.  The emphasis of the project on law reform often seemed irrelevant to young and poor Namibians struggling to survive, while fascinated by a particular identity politics that threatened to alienate them from family and community [ibid.].

Don't these well-intentioned activists ever begin by educating themselves, by asking local workers what they need, and under what cultural and political constraints they must live and work?  For that matter, these American professionals tend to be ignorant of gay people's lives on the ground in their own country.   Professional and skilled they may be, but people skills seem to have been forgotten somewhere along the way, and that's a failure of basic competence.

I'm a bit suspicious about that passage on Namibia, though.  It treats the "young and poor Namibians" as if they were innocent, ignorant savages, just as those foreign activists thought they were: blank slates who need to be carefully taught.  It reminded me of the account of a South African workshop on "real gay" identity, described in the anthropologist Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay, led by a local organizer (tainted, alas, by contact with activists in Johannesburg).  Reid was distressed that this workshop tried "to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constituted gay life in the area of my fieldwork?" (Reid, page 154), but on his own account the participants, though not uncritical of the presentation, were fascinated by it.  A second workshop, on gays and the law in South Africa, was run not by a local but by professionals from Johannesburg, bored the queens and drove most of them outside.  That didn't mean they weren't interested in their legal status -- according to Reid, they brought questions with them -- only that the workshop was badly designed by people who didn't bother to learn how to communicate with non-professionals.  The conflict appears to me to be less about "East vs. West" culture clash and more about class, and to repeat, the problem lies in a basic failure of professional competence.

Still, in the West we've come to expect professionals to meet their clients at least halfway: to ask them what they need, and to listen to the answers; to try to explain without condescension what the professional has to offer.  This expectation too is a product of American activism in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the Women's Health movement, and it's rooted not in professionals (though some professionals participated early on) but in grass-roots organizing by people who were tired of being pushed around and talked down to.  It's also a product of AIDS activism before the movement became professionalized.  That's a model that should be exported to the Third World, though it's probably already there; the Western-trained activists should respect and cooperate with it.

One more bit:

As one activist remarked of South Korea: 'Oppression is real and ubiquitous, yet invisible enough to make calls for advocating homosexuals' rights look "excessive" or "privileging"' [47].

I hope I don't need to point out that resisting oppression is always considered excessive by the oppressors, who regard any diminution or rearrangement of their status and power as an attempt to hang them all up from the lampposts, or at least to shoot a third of them.  Leaving aside the possible merits of such an approach, I've pointed out before that there's no reason South Korean or other Asian LGBT activists must model their movements on American precedents: they should take what they find useful, and leave the rest.  If a rights-based ideology and discourse aren't appropriate in a given country, that doesn't mean that gay people there have no recourse.  Every culture has its own traditions of justice and, yes, activism.  We in the West have often learned from them.  Yet even learned and experienced observers like Altman seem to have trouble recognizing that the influence has always gone both ways.

Human Sacrifice and Political Capital

The last national political convention I watched on TV was the Democratic one in 1968.  By 1972 I wasn't living with my parents any more and didn't have a television on all the time, and that's still true.  This time around I watched stray Stephen Colbert clips on Youtube, and listened to Democracy Now's coverage in the mornings.  I don't think I missed anything important.

The big story out of Philadelphia last week was evidently the brief speech by Khizn Khan, a Pakistani immigrant whose son Humayun was killed in action in Iraq in 2004. Khan Senior assailed Donald Trump for wanting to keep Muslim immigrants out of the US, waved around a copy of the Constitution, and said "You have sacrificed nothing and no one."

The Democrats could hardly have hoped for better political theater. Khan's speech went viral, as they say.  The American Civil Liberties Union offered free copies of the Constitution until election day.  Families of American soldiers killed in action stood with the Khans.  Trump flailed around, trying to divert attention to Khan's wife Ghazala, who stood in silence while her husband delivered his speech (but spoke up in reponse to Trump), and finally whined that "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention.  Am I not allowed to respond?  Hillary voted for the Iraq War, not me!"  (Of course Trump is "allowed to respond," but it's proper to judge him on the quality of his response, which was even poorer than I'd have expected; but his normal style of attack would backfire if he used it on a Gold Star family.)  Trump's running mate Mike Pence issued a statement praising the Khans and trying to blame Obama and Clinton for Humayan's death, evidently because they'd traveled back in time and made George W. Bush start the War on Terror.

It wasn't until this morning, preparatory to writing this post, that I read the transcript of Khizr Khan's remarks at the DNC.  Khan spoke briefly, without a prepared text or a teleprompter.  As he told the New York Times, "It all flowed pretty easily, because he had been thinking about these things for quite a while, he said."  It's not a criticism of Khan to say that it shows; he wasn't there to make an argument but to make an emotional appeal, and grieving Gold Star families and fallen heroes are very effective emotional appeals.

I don't like it when any party exploits veterans or their families for political capital, and the cognitive dissonance in Khan's speech and the reaction to it is stronger than usual.  It's true that if Muslim immigration had been blocked in the past, the Khans would not be in the US and Humayan would not have gone to Iraq for our military; but in that case he would probably still be alive.  I almost feel sympathy for Trump when he pointed out correctly that Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq (though incorrectly that he didn't).  True, Trump made no sacrifices -- but neither did Bush, Obama, or Clinton.  And though it makes no difference to the pain and suffering caused the Khans by the loss of their son, I must stress again that Humayan Khan was not defending America or its freedoms.  He was a willing participant in a war of aggression that undermined America and its freedoms.
I think the main reason Trump is taking so much heat for his (unusually mild by his standards) response to the Khans is that they don't question the war.  Perhaps Khizr Khan should reread his copy of the Constitution, attending this time to the grounds it prescribes for the waging of war.

It's hard for me to make sense of a political faction that now claims Bush's war in Iraq was a bad decision (though its president not only supported it once it got going but tried to continue it after it was supposed to end), yet makes political hay out of the deaths of the soldiers who died uselessly in it.  Notice that I say "sense," because the partisan emotional appeal of Khizr Khan's speech has nothing to do with reason.  From a propaganda viewpoint, using the grieving parents of a fallen soldier to attack the enemy candidate makes perfect sense.  I don't blame the DNC for using the Khans, I only insist on my reservations about what that use means.

I'm also struck by the oddity of the Khans supporting Hillary Clinton, who did support the invasion of Iraq and every war since -- including some, like an attack on Syria, that didn't pan out -- as if she offered a real alternative to Trump.  The only sense in which she is an alternative is that she'll allow American Muslims to kill and die in her service.  That's equality!

Neither party is interested in the deaths of the Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, and others killed by our weapons in our unjustifiable wars.  The sacrifices they made, or had made for them by US fiat, don't count.  Defeating Trump in November isn't likely to end the sacrifices, either of US families or of the victims of US foreign policy abroad.