Quotes from Rosa Brooks

It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world

While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war—and when everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission.

Most fundamentally, the U.S. military is—and will continue to be—a product of our culture and our collective decisions. Whatever it is, it's what we have made it.

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

Don't imagine that our world can't collapse: there is nothing inevitable about progress or peace, and the global and national social and political order we inhabit today is no more immune from catastrophe than the pre–World War II order.

For the most part, America's criminal justice system isn't deliberately cruel. It's just indifferent to the ways in which it breaks human beings. Few police officers want to contribute to mass incarceration or aid in the destruction of poor minority communities. But the absurdities and injustices are inherent in the system. Often, by the time the police get involved, the only available choices are bad ones.

What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it's better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?

It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.

What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)

My point here is not that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place (though it certainly was). My point is that this cynical, foolish, arguably illegal war might still have come right in the end—if only we had tried a little less hard to fix everything that struck us as broken.

the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all—and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.

Building relationships on a global scale requires putting human beings on the ground in regions all over the world—and only the Army has the manpower to do this.

Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers.

As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform ad they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack. . . . This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.

anthropology

And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble. US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...

American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it's very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it's almost impossible to be good at them all.

High Visibility Patrol. Other item of note: Units observed a female having a panic attack in the middle of Bladensburg Road NE due to a spider on the inside of her windshield. Officers removed a spider from woman's car in traffic and she was very relieved. —MPD Reserve Corps Newsletter

Bluntly: the United States will need to accept some further loss of sovereignty in exchange for more just and effective mechanisms for solving collective global problems. No state can combat disease, climate change, or international terrorist organizations on its own--but any state can play a destructive and destabilizing role on its own.

total spent on Defense-related activities is close to $1 trillion a year.19 Even in this era of fiscal austerity, proposing significant cuts to military compensation and benefits is still considered political suicide for national politicians.

We're trapped in a vicious circle: asking the military to take on more and more nontraditional tasks requires exhausting our all-volunteer military force and necessitates higher military budgets. Higher

The distinction between war and nonwar may be arbitrary, but we want it to be sharp and clear, because many actions that are considered both immoral and illegal in peacetime are permissible—even praiseworthy—in wartime. Recall

As "war rules" trickle down into ordinary life, they are beginning to change everything from policing and immigration policy to courtroom evidentiary rules and governmental commitments to transparency, gradually eroding the foundations of democracy and individual rights. In