I think there's more than that, though you're certainly correct in part.

Darfur doesn't provide us anything. This is the same thing people said about Rwanda vis-a-vis Bosnia, but it's true. The Middle East is the face of world oil production. Africa is the face of starvation. The death of an African, even as part of a larger struggle with regional implications, doesn't have any obvious effect on the life of an American. The death of an Iraqi, insofar as it may be symbolic of a civil war or terrorists run amok in a nation occupied by thousands of Americans, has very real implications for those of us in the States. But let's be pretty clear: Iraqis killed by other Iraqis don't get all that much attention here, either.

The Baltimore vs. Iraq question is very different. The murder in Baltimore matters to the people in Baltimore, but not to the nation at large because there's no greater significance attached to it. A person died, and that is tragic. But it doesn't represent part of an ongoing struggle with winners and losers that has implications for policy and prestige and all that good stuff. Americans dying in Iraq do.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Andre Glucksman wonders why Lebanese civilians killed by Israelis provoke so much more outrage than Iraqi civilians killed by Iraqis

Many Lebanese are Christians and the country is more westernized than the rest of the ME. Beirut is considered the 'Paris of the ME, no? Is there even a more subtle subtext that Christians are being killed by Jews?

After all, an American soldiers killed in Iraq by an insurgent is considered a bigger deal than a murder in Baltimore

In America we do not place a lot of value on skinheads or blacks killing each other either. OJ accused of killing Nicole provokes much more outrage than a white doctor killing his wife.

In general killing within an ethnic group of people is far more tolerated than killing between groups of people.

This is one of those weird things. Hate crime legislation has always struck me as rather insane because you aren't being punished for your actions, but your thoughts. Or, looking at it as we do here, you're being punished for straying from the more acceptable targets available to you.

Philosophically it's completely insane, but that doesn't mean we ought to go to great lengths to fix it. People have different reactions to different murders. As long as we can agree that they're all pretty bad, I'm not especially terrified by a little prejudice getting into the mix.

mike

There's three kinds of criticism. They each have different motivations, and measure deaths differently.

There's the cynical kind in which you criticize people you resent, perhaps to deflect criticism of yourself. That kind of criticism exists on all sides. Indeed, sometimes in criticizing critics for engaging in this we are engaging in it ourselves.

There's purely philosophical criticism, in which the only purpose is truth for its own sake. In that criticism all deaths are equal.

And finally, there's constructive criticism--criticism that you make in the hopes that you will change people's behavior by showing them a morally or pragmatically superior path.

In both the first and third kind, deaths will seem to have different weights. It's exactly like you said, Matt: "I'm not sure what point there is in outsiders complaining about it." The first kind tends to have you criticizing your enemies, the third kind tends to have you criticizing your friends, your allies, and people you have influence over.

The American right claims the second, the American left claims the third, while both are tempted by the first.

The funny thing is, though, that whenever I see either the first or second motivation appear within myself I am ashamed of it--I don't regard either of these as admirable motives. Who cares if you're right unless you can prevent injustice? That's not to say that I don't frequently succumb to the first and second, but it seems to me that there are many voices on the American right--especially with regards to criticism of Muslims--who simply and completely fail to recognize the third at all--who never ask how their criticism is supposed to achieve any ends whatsoever?

Interesting point. But I'm not sure that's a question of the person's thoughts so much as how much thought we can reasonably expect of a person in a given circumstance.

Or, to say it another way, we're not actually quantifying the person's state of mind and sentencing accordingly, we're quantifying what it's reasonable to expect.

So if Dan finds Victor in bed with his wife, he hasn't had a lot of time to think things through and we'll forgive him slightly for the subsequent killing.

If he hears about it in his office, waits a while, and then kills Victor, we understand that he had time to think more on the issue and still committed murder -- so we're less leniant.

Yes, the definition depends on "a reasonable person's" hypothetical response to the situation, but it does not depend on *Dan's* specific response. In fact, it specifically excludes him -- because being outraged by something unreasonable (such as, say, finding out a stranger is gay) doesn't predispose our community to go easy on you.

You could argue pretty easily (and convincingly) that I'm just coming up with a different rationale for essentially the same decision, but I'd be curious to see you come up with a parallel rationale in the case of a hate crime. I suspect we're talking about fundamentally different issues here.

Not that this is either here or there.

mike

I don't read Sullivan too much, and what little I have read of him doesn't really leave me willing to delve into his blog to see if he fits the general pattern, but I've noticed that war supporters in general tend to:

1. Present the Iraqis murdered by Saddam Hussein as being more important that Iraqis killed by a) US actions or b) insurgent actions.

2. Be very unconcerned about the total number of Iraqi civilians killed so far. Bush estimated 30,000, the army says it doesn't keep count, and the Lancet published a study that found that 150,000 more people died in the 15 months following the war than did in the 15 months preceeding it. (The Lancet study is the only way that you could actually measure the effects in civilian deaths resulting from the war, and while people denounced it when it came out I've yet to find anyone proving it to be methodologically unsound).

3. Hold Saddam Hussein responsible for things going on in areas of Iraq that were outside of his administrative control (Ansar al Islam in Kurdistan) but absolve the US for responsibility for things going on in areas of Iraq under thier control (civil war, lack of basic services, etc.)

So, I guess there are plenty of rhetorical questions to go around.

 The study published in the Lancet didn't report anecdotal deaths per se - they did a study of household composition in cluster of houses in randomly selected points throughout Iraq.  Doing that they came up with an increase in total deaths in the 14 months immediately following the start of the War of 98,000 (including combatant deaths).  So, that wasn't "Who do you know of who has died", which would be fairly incaccurate (houses next to eachoter would have double reporting, and you could only compare it with "how many people do you know in total" which would be impossible to answer), but "How many people live with you, how many have been born or died in the past 3 years..."

There is a lot that can be said against this type of random sample study - most significantly that it suffers from the fallacy that a given sample will be representitive of the whole.  I live in a predominantly Hassidic neighborhood, and if a researcher were to knock on my door and draw generalizations of the neighborhood religious beliefs based on interviewing me, his results would be fairly hard to reconcile with the actual neighborhood.

 However, all sampling analysis suffers from this fault - the estimates of Tsunami deaths, people killed by Saddam Hussein, poll numbers, our entire reconstruction of human and homonid development before written history (and somewhat after it as well), etc.  So, to the extent that the researchers held true to the accepted methodology their conclusions can be taken to be just as valid (or invalid) as what everyone else does with it.

Iraq Body Count is based on reports of deaths in the English language media.  It can't really be compared to the Lancet study because it isn't a statistical sampling study - it represents a total count of reported deaths, not a projection based on a sample.  One can expect IBC to underreport, simply because not all Iraqi deaths make it into the English language media.  That doesn't mean that the work that they do is not increadibly valuable - but they are doing something else entirely.  I think of IBC as a baseline estimate.

I don't know if the total numbers of civilians who were killed as a result of this invasion (including from Coalition fire, insurgent violence, break downs in medical, water and sanitation systems, etc.) will ever be known.  It is certainly difficult to assess that now (do you want to go knocking on doors with a clipboard in Sadr City?) What strikes me as disturbing is how little people who continue to cheerlead for this war seem to care.

Yours is the best description I've seen of the rationale. Still, I would hope that prosecutors have to make the case that the crime was specifically intended against the protected class. If an individual just happened to be a minority, it's not even thoughtcrime.

Still, I am extremely hesitatnt to go with thoughtcrime of any sort. Offhand, I can think of several classes to which I belong that someone might want to terrorize. It doesn't bother me.

Indeed, this reminds me that a viable society can't be in terror of something generically called terror. Few things were more terrifying that WWII population bonbing, but it didn't break the morale of the British, Germans, or Japanese. Let's not let terror become a tool of demagogues.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Perhaps because an international force can rush into Lebanon, over the beach, from neighboring countries, or by air when the runways are repaired? In contrast, Darfur has few or no paved roads, a single insecure railroad covering hundreds of miles, two minimal airports without refueling capability, and no pipelines?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Idly observes that landlocked Bolivia has a Navy, which has even participated in military coups.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*