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September 3, 2006 - September 9, 2006 Archives
Resignation Theater
Tom Keane says Don Rumsfeld should resign. And, of course, Rumsfeld has been a poor Secretary of Defense. Overwhelmingly, however, this poorness has tended to manifest itself in Rumsfeld advocating horribly misguided policies that the President of the United States also advocates. Now, there's a question as to what extent Rumsfeld is actually influencing Bush to adopt the same horribly misguided policies as Rumsfeld, or to what extent Rumsfeld and Bush just happen to be in agreement on all this stuff. Probably the question isn't answerable. The issue, however, is Bush, not Rumsfeld. It's not as if Rumsfeld just did some one dumb thing two weeks ago and Bush has the chance to wash his hands of it. The problem with Rumsfeld just is the problem with the Bush administration's national security policy. Pretending that there's some "Rumsfeld issue" that could be resolved with a resignation at which point everything will be back on track is absurd.
World Championship Retrospective
First off, congratulations to Spain on their gold medal win over Greece. Second, I got a chance to watch the USA-Greece game last evening before heading out and having seen it, the precise manner of Team USA's loss makes it rather than surprising than one might have thought. In essence, as some people told me in comments, the Americans did a poor job of defending the pick and roll while the Greek team was clearly having an "on" night and executed brilliantly in terms of making sure to hit their open shots.
Continue reading "World Championship Retrospective" »
The Cult Spreads
Scroll down and you'll find Bill Simmons' thoughts on The Wire -- long story short, he, like everyone else, thinks it's great. If you haven't seen it yet, you really must. Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed (education policy blog) promises that he'll be doing Wire-blogging throughout Season 4 to comment on the show's presentation of inner-city school stuff. I think what the world really needs is for Mark Kleiman to start watching and blogging.
Sistani Bows Out
There have been a lot of ins-and-outs to the Iraq debate and a lot of silly things said. The silliest period, though, by my money was the "Arab Spring" craze in early 2005 after the elections in Iraq. It was quite clear by that point that, elections or no, the situation in Iraq was actually really, really bad. Nevertheless, people got it into their heads that this was actually a giant victory and that, in particular, Grand Ayatollah Sistani was going to turn into a silver bullet, capable of not only saving Iraq but somehow bringing about regime change in Teheran as well. You guys all remember that, right? Well, now comes this:
The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.
Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani "I will not be a political leader any more," he told aides. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."
This via Jonah Goldberg who remarks that it "will take some time to digest, but . . . sure doesn't sound good." I guess my ex ante outlook was sufficiently bleak that hearing this doesn't make things look notably bleaker.
Negotiations, If You Want Them
Kofi Annan says Iran is happy to negotiate about its nuclear program but, rather sensibly, isn't willing to concede everything in advance by suspending uranium enrichment as a condition for having the talks. Meanwhile, one two three silly UN-bashing posts from Marty Peretz at the Plank. I'm told he'll be getting a blog of his own soon, to help replace the dearly departed Lee Siegel.
My fellow liberals in town keep assuring me that there's not going to be a war with Iran. It's just not possible, it's too crazy, etc. I don't know. They could be right. Their argument makes sense. But I'm not so sure. Certainly, most of the relevant people are acting like they'd like to start a war with Iran. And the relevant people inside the government haven't exactly been known to let "X would be a really bad idea" stop them from doing X. I'd be worried. I'm especially worried that our progressive leaders don't seem to be worried. Clearly, there are people out there agitating for war. If the people who don't want a war don't take them and the threat they pose seriously, that only makes it more likely that they'll get their war.
On Inequality
I don't think the case Sebastian Mallaby makes here against public policy measures aimed at increasing unionization makes very much sense, especially since he himself concedes that "the case for unionization appears better than it has in a generation." Nevertheless, he's still quite right about what he says about taxes -- lurking beneath the mildly progressive structure of the income tax code is a series of shockingly regressive tax deductions. Eliminating or reforming them would be a good idea.
On inequality more broadly, I have a take vaguely along the lines of what Max Sawicky says here. The challenge isn't to try and devise some one specific good anti-inequality policy initiative. Probably there is no such initiative. Probably if you pushed hard enough on any one lever to singlehandedly reverse the trend, you'd break the machine. The decisive issue is one of political will. Were it the case that there was mass concern with inequality -- the fact that someone as rightwing as Mallaby is writing about the topic is a good sign -- then the dynamic would be different. How?
Continue reading "On Inequality" »
The Annals of Headline-Writing
"Some ID Theft Is Not for Profit, but to Get a Job" -- but why do they want these jobs? For profit, no?
Last Word On Siegel
To just make a brief point The New York Times seems to have overlooked, while sockpuppetry is bad, being an ass to Ezra Klein not to be approved of, and the "blogofascism" episode absurd, the genuinely problematic thing Lee Siegel did as a blogger was repeatedly smear someone as a pedophile utterly without evidence. I'm not sure whether or not what he was doing amounted to libel, but it certainly seemed close to me.
What's The Matter With Rhode Island?
It's an apparent sea of prosperity amidst New England's economic gloom. What's the deal?
Confidence Game
It's certainly true, as Kevin Drum says, that the GOP has a nasty taste for playing politics with national security. Nevertheless, I don't think whining about it is the best strategy. I think this talk of how the GOP wants a focus on security in November is all about psyching the Democrats out. After all, national security should be a great opposition issue. The war in Iraq is a shambles, the Bush administration's legal theories are in tatters, almost no terrorism experts think we're in good shape, etc.
The GOP hope is that if they can say "we're hoping to debate security" and the opposition reacts with defensiveness and whining then they can recreate the illusion that they're in command of these issues.
Realistically, the whole thing's a fraud. Going back months the GOP strategy has been a focus on immigration and efforts to "localize" the election in order to save House Republicans from the backlash against Bush and against Iraq. Democrats should welcome a national debate on the Republican wreckage of national security policy and just say, confidently, that they're sure they can win such a debate and then go out and win it. Joining the debate with pep, vim, and confidence is a big part of making sure you win it. Do Republicans really think people are going to hear about this tale of dead American soldiers and blindfolded Iraqi corpses and rush into the tender arms of the GOP? Or maybe it's the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan they're so eager to engage with?
The Case for Kirk Hinrich
Chris Sheridan writes about his prospects of making Team USA in future tournaments:
Supplanted Chris Paul as the starting point guard, but does anyone honestly believe he's the best point guard in America? If Billups plays next summer, he could get squeezed off the active roster -- especially if the team hierarchy believes it'll pay more long-term dividends to keep Paul on the active roster.
This strikes me as the wrong mentality. It doesn't especially matter whether or not Hinrich is "the best point guard in America?" Hinrich doesn't need to be a superstar on Team USA -- LeBron, Wade, and Anthony are there to do that job. Hinrich is certainly good enough in terms of his talent, doesn't make a ton of errors, plays in the NBA on a squad with good team defense, and most everyone feels he's an important part of that sound team defense. Chauncey Billups also fits that description, and he's a better player, so it makes a ton of sense to add him to the team. Chris Paul, though he's going to have a fantastic NBA career, doesn't really suit Team USA's needs. The team has relatively little need for additional levels of dynamic playmaking at the cost of experience and defense.
What's more, in a less serious vein, every Team USA needs to have at least one white dude and I'd much rather have that guy be Hinrich than Brad Miller. The other thing I note from Sheridan's article is that talk of recruiting Paul Pierce and/or Adam Morrison for the team really ought to consider that LBJ and 'Melo playing the same position is already a bit of a problem and the last thing USA needs is more small forwards (though I'd be happy to see the underrated Pierce get some love).
Dulce et Decorum Est
Jon Chait had a funny column over the weekend comparing the '06 midterms to World War One. At the very end, though, it offers up some fairly odd commentary on the war itself: "Woodrow Wilson didn't make the world safe for democracy, but he did manage to keep a pretty noxious regime from dominating a continent."
Wilhelmine Germany wasn't especially noxious. It was quasi-democratic and evolving in the direction of greater democracy. Among its opponents was Tsarist Russia, the most noxious regime on the European continent at the time. And, of course, the allied victory didn't exactly prevent noxious Germany from dominating Europe . . . the Germans came back, in much more noxious form, and tried again. Even though Nazism only lasted 1933-1945 it inflicted sufficient suffering that I think it's extremely plausible that the world would have been better off with a German victory. The real twist, however, is what would have been the fate of the Bolshevism in case of a German win. It would depend, I suppose, on how and why the German victory was achieved.
On top of that, reliable sources have contended to me that American intervention in the war wasn't especially decisive, though I'm not sure about that one way or the other.
Zakaria on Iran
Good stuff. He's not really as shrill as he ought to be in terms of pointing out the evils of the hysteria-mongerers, but he does an excellent job in debunking their hysteria.
Double Standards
What can you say about a guy like the Bull Moose. "The question is why Democratic leaders continue to collude with the anti-Semitic appeasing left? This should be a time for introspection for a party that relies heavily on Jewish support." Now, in this context, "collude" means that Democratic leaders work with people who run a website on which some other people have posted some allegedly anti-semitic material. Wittman, by contrast, used to work for lunatic anti-semite Pat Robertson. Before that, my understanding is that he was an actual practicing Communist, a dedicated member of a political party committed to the violent overthrow of the United States government and its replacement by a brutal, ruthless dictatorship.
Currently, though, he's a friend to Jews everywhere, which is nice of him. This is the question, though. Does Wittman ever worry, do any liberal hawks ever worry, does anyone on the "decent left" ever worry, that their foreign policy preferences derive large amounts of their electoral support from racist hatred of Arabs and bigoted prejudice against Muslims? Or do they deny that that's the case? Do they think the precious comment threads of warmongering blogs, the call lists at rightwing talk radio, are blissfully free of such sentiments? Call me crazy, but I believe it was David Brooks who published a column over the weekend arguing that the Iraq War failed, in essence, because Arabs are sub-humans incapable of living together peacefully. Or maybe he was trying to say Muslims are like that. And, of course, he didn't say it in so many words but he's David Brooks, conservative punditry's friendly ambassador to the left. Just imagine what they're saying in the fever swamps.
Does this bother anyone?
"Don't Look Back"
My latest column takes on the burgeoning debate about whether living standards are going up or down and says it's the wrong debate -- centrist policy prescriptions are largely wrong even if you agree with their take on the history.
Our Long National Nightmare is Over
The nation will no longer be without a Secretary of Transportation. In a shocking development, Bush's pick is an advocate of privatizing government services, in this case highway construction. My understanding of the matter is that privatization of government services has been a fiasco.
There really are certain pathologies associated with government work. When money is allocated by a political process rather than a market process it tends to be allocated less efficiently. The trouble with privatization as a remedy to this problem is that it . . . doesn't remedy the problem, the money is still being allocated by a political process. The only change is to generate profits for a series of well-connected contracting firms that, in turn, give money to the GOP. The only real alternative to having some inefficiency would be to just not have the government finance road construction, which is a nonstarter.
Equivalence And Fairness
Joseph Cirincione, who you should listen to on all things nuclear proliferation, worries about the Bush administration's civilian nuclear energy programs:
"It gives countries, under the guise of civilian nuclear programs, the ability to make one of the key ingredients for a nuclear bomb - plutonium," said Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank. "And they can stockpile it in large quantities. How are you going to tell Iran that they can't do this if you're promoting it yourself?"
National Review John Hood takes offense at the "moral-equivalence mentality" this involves and says that "because Iran is run by a disgusting cabal of terrorism sponsors and Holocaust deniers, telling its dictators that their nuclear program won’t be tolerated is not all that difficult." This gets perhaps to the very core of the problems with conservative foreign policy. To be sure, any of us when we're sitting around the living room shooting the shit can draw distinctions between an Iranian nuclear program and, say, a Norwegian one. The Norwegians get the benefit of the doubt for a variety of reasons, and a Norwegian military nuclear arsenal would be less worrisome than an Iranian one. Nevertheless, if you expect to have an international system that countries are going to cooperate with it has to be governed by neutral rules and not John Hood's gut sense of what's right or wrong.
Continue reading "Equivalence And Fairness" »
NCAA As Cartel
Last weekend, I watched the Longhorns' opening game of the football season (roommate and many friends went to Texas) and they were playing . . . the University of Northern Texas. Now, yes, as amateur sports apologists have been pointing out to be all week, Texas is matching up against some legitimate opposition this week. Nevertheless, the NCAA football scheduling process makes a mockery of the concept of competition, as seen in statements like "My Georgia Bulldogs won a tune-up game against I-AA Western Kentucky on Saturday."
This sort of thing is why I think we should give less credence than usual to "competitive balance" accounts of why it's necessary to pay NCAA-level atheletes at sub market rates. Malcolm Gladwell gets into the whole debate over whether or not caps do promote balance, but it's obvious that in its major sports the NCAA doesn't even take rudimentary steps to ensure anything resembling balanced competition. They've just set a very low salary cap -- theoretically, $0.00 per year, though everyone knows every program cheats to some extent --so that university managers can reap the profits.
Rumsfeld Again
Andrew Sullivan:
Another blogger joins the chorus and suggests replacing the Pentagon's Captain Queeg with Lindsey Graham. I think the Democrats would be atypically shrewd to center their fall campaign on national security by focusing on Rumsfeld. They should attack him for losing the war, for not sending enough troops, and for wrecking the most high-stakes military mission in a generation. If a defense secretary who has bungled two wars cannot be replaced after six years, then we have no accountability in government.
I've said this so many times I'm growing hoarse, but this is silly. It would be one thing if Rumsfeld were in office, then made some missteps, and then Bush fired him. Presidents sometimes hire people they wind up regretting. But Rumsfeld's been in office for almost six years. And Bush has gotten rid of many members of his national security team. Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and Richard Haas were all ditched. A lot of your prominent "liberal" national security experts -- Richard Clarke, Rand Beers, Flynt Leverett -- used to work in the Bush administration (see also Anthony Zinni). Rumsfeld is around because Rumsfeld's policies are Bush's policies. Dumping him would, at this point, be a meaningless cosmetic change.
This Rumsfeld-obsession plays a genuinely pernicious role in our national discourse. The basic reality of the matter is that between September 2001 and Spring 2003 the bulk of the American political and media establishments endorsed the key elements of the Bush foreign policy. Over the subsequent 18 months or so, it became obvious to the bulk of this establishment that the Bush foreign policy was a moral and practical disaster. Rather than conclude that they were operating from mistaken premises and that they should come up with some new, authentically different ideas, the predominant impulse has simply been to say "we could have gotten away with it to if it wasn't for that meddling Rumsfeld!"
Well, no. Rumsfeld's ideas were bad ones. But the bad ideas -- the policies, Bush's policies, The Washington Post's policies, Andrew Sullivan's policies, etc. -- are the issue here, not Rumsfeld personally.
Nothing Wrong With Losing
Fred Kaplan is, as usual, very good in his latest. I wanted, however, to highlight something he says that expresses a very common sentiment that I think ought to be called into question: "Meaningful, multilateral sanctions seem a dead end at this point, in any case; to continue to push for them, when crucial governments are set against them, only makes the United States and the United Nations look more foolish."
I know I'm tilting against the overwhelming consensus here, but I think it'd actually be good to see the United States make a serious proposal for multilateral something-or-other that we'd like to see happen, to get some support for the proposal on the Security Council, to put it to a vote, lose the vote, and then complain about the loss but accept it as legitimate. It seems to me that this is how the Security Council ought to work -- not unlike a legislature, where people regularly introduce proposals that they know are going to be defeated. Obviously, Bush isn't one to care about this sort of thing, but I think establishing a trend in that direction would be of enormous benefit to the UN over time.
Home for the Holidays
Bush is letting detainees out of the CIA-operated clandestine "black sites" and shipping them to Guantanamo Bay. What's the deal? Nobody knows for sure what secrets lurk in the heart of Bush, but Spencer Ackerman has informed thoughts:
Unless it rejiggers the military tribunals to bless torture/coercion, KSM and other Al Qaeda figures might in fact be set free by the courts. Is Bush so cynical as to force Congress into the odious position of either setting the stage for murderers to walk out of Gitmo or blessing torture? Of course he is!
What a lovely country we've become.
Just...Can't...Stop...
Okay, I said no more Lee Siegel, but Leon Wieseltier's views on the matter as found at the end of The New York Observer's coverage are just too bizarre not to note:
Mr. Wieseltier was sanguine about the situation. He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,” and saw the issue more as one having to do with the nature of the Internet itself.
“The larger problem, of course, is that we planted our flag over a piece of the Wild West known as the blogosphere. This left us divided against ourselves,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Since we do make ourselves factually and morally responsible for what appears under our flag, we have to apply the same stringencies to our blogs, too. I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.”
Seriously? The larger problem is that the blogosphere is the Wild West? Because pre-internet it wasn't possible for people to lie? I was a young kid back before there were blogs, but my understanding is that it was always possible to, say, write a letter to the editor and sign a false name. It's also always seemed to me in my personal history of internet use that it's not especially difficult to avoid lying. Nor do I think anyone in the blogosphere believes that a person's first thoughts are his best thoughts. This is, as they say, quite obviously false.
The striking thing about Siegel's blogging, however, was the unbelievably low quality of his second thoughts. It's one thing to toss off the notion that bloggers are like fascists and then, after getting criticized for it and thinking some more deciding that was an unwise overstatement. Siegel's approach, however, was to think about the issue and pen an elaborate defense of the proposition that Markos was, in fact, a fascist. Similarly with the Kincaid matter. Siegel went from a perhaps thoughtless and sloppy expression of some critical thoughts on Kincaid to an elaborate, yet evidence free, accusation that Kincaid was a pedophile. It's a curious manner of behavior, but one that has everything to do with Siegel's own pathologies -- seemingly a hefty dose of status-anxiety -- and very little to do with the blogosphere as such.
Bragging About Torture
Petey in comments below notes a rather shocking portion of today's Bush speech where he's bragging about his administration's authorization of torture:
Continue reading "Bragging About Torture" »
In Defense of Rumsfeld-Bashing?
I've been critical of Rumsfeld-bashing as an approach to conducting progressive national security policy several times recently. Always, several people pipe up to say I don't get it -- this is a political gambit and, they think, a good one. That didn't seem very compelling to me because it didn't strike me as a very good gambit; it seemed to me to actually shield Bush and congressional Republicans from responsibility for their actions. But if the GOP leadership is blocking votes on the Democrats' stunt, then maybe it's a good stunt after all.
The other possibility would be that both parties' leaders are making a mistake. Certainly, that's possible. But I'm not super-confident pitting my sense of this against the judgment of the hacks working for both teams, so if everyone thinks it's a good gambit it probably is. Still, on the merits I feel this lets way too many people off the hook way too easily.
Divides
Kevin Drum was making the argument the other day that Democrats aren't really divided about national security issues. There's something to what he's saying, but I also think it's problematic in a variety of ways. I guess I'll try to do an opus on this subject at some point, but for now let me just note something minor, an LA Times op-ed by Nancy Soderberg, a Democratic Party foreign policy practitioner in good standing -- the number three official on the NSC in the first Clinton administration and the number two member of our UN delegation during his second administration -- the sort of person who'll very plausibly have an important job in the next Democratic administration.
The subject of the op-ed is that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina are forming an aliance to create a regional alternative to the International Monetary Fund and also that, back in January 2005, Argentina used its power as a sovereign state to essentially default on some debt it had incurred. Soderberg thinks this is bad. Very bad. So bad that she breaks out the classic Americanism that "Democracy is at risk in Latin America." As Robert Farley says "Argentina's position on loan repayment has absolutely nothing to do with its status as a democracy." Chavez really is an anti-democratic leader in many respects, but obviously the United States of America -- like all countries -- makes diplomatic agreements with non-democracies on a regular basis.
One could go on, but the basic shape is clear. America needs to use its power in the region in order to maintain its power in the region and occassional deploy that power on behalf of international lenders and we need to engage in a lot of bogus rhetoric about how what we're really doing is standing up for democracy. And this is, as I started off saying, a Democrat's position. Now does that mean "Democrats are deeply divided over Argentina?" Of course. Most people never think about Argentina and don't have opinions one way or the other. But the difference in underlying attitudes is very clear. A lot of Democrats are peddling what you might call neoconservatism with a human face, or promising us a smarter, more effective imperialism rather than putting forward genuine alternatives to current policies.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh
As promised, some further analysis of Bush's contention that torture is awesome because torturing Abu Zubaydah led him to "identif[y] one of KSM's accomplices in the 9/11 attacks -- a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh." Spencer Ackerman writes:
A Nexis search for "Ramzi Binalshibh" between September 11, 2001 and March 1, 2002--the U.S. captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002--turns up 26 hits for The Washington Post alone. Everyone involved in counterterrorism knew who bin Al Shibh was. Now-retired FBI Al Qaeda hunter Dennis Lormel told Congress who Ramzi bin Al Shibh was in February 2002. Abu Zubaydah getting waterboarded and spouting bin Al Shibh's name did not tell us anything we did not already know.
That's a month before Zubaydah's capture, for the record. And, presumably, the FBI knew something about this matter before revealing it in public statements to congress. Bush is, once again, just making stuff up. Will he get called on it? I'm not optimistic. Obviously, it will be difficult to convince the American people of this, but Bush-style routine application of torture is a genuinely unsound investigative technique. There's a reason this is the best example Bush can come up with of the utility of his methods -- his methods don't work. Historically, the main use of torture has been to generate bogus confessions. Sometimes, this is deliberate policy -- Stalin very much wanted a lot of bogus confessions and using torture he got them. Why, exactly, Bush is so interested in ginning up this kind of pseudo-information I couldn't say, but pseudo-information is precisely what he's getting.
Against Quarterbacks
First NFL game of the season tonight. I've thought things over and, damnit, if I'm going to live in DC the rest of my life (and I probably am), then it's time for me to become a Redskins fan. Conveniently, I can kick things off by defending Joe Gibbs against Bill Simmons' smears:
To the dumbest plan of the year: the Redskins investing in two free agent receivers (Antwan Randle-El and Brandon Lloyd) and an expensive offensive coordinator (Al Saunders) to go with their expensive gamebreakers (Clinton Portis and Santana Moss) … only they're going with a washed-up Mark Brunell at QB again. How does that make sense?
I like this plan. Quarterbacks are overemphasized. Obviously, a star quarterback is a wonderful thing to have. But saying your team could use one is kind of like saying your NBA team needs a dominant big man. Personally, I need a pony. The question is, what can you do about it? It's not like there was some no-brainer alternative available. Brunell, who's clearly not a great quarterback, nevertheless QBed the team to a winning season. Then the idea is to add some parts -- Randle-El, Lloyd, Saunders -- that count as clear upgrades over what the offense used to have, and you stand a very good shot of doing better next time. The only real alternative would have been some kind of crapshoot or else just doing nothing.
Inequality Knocks
David Brooks makes some good points about inequality in today's New York Times, knocking down some oversimplistic populist notions. In response, Jared Bernstein makes some better points, noting that a slightly more sophisticated view vindicates all the key elements of the populist position. The key Brooksian rhetorical gambit is to do things like, "people blame A, but when you look at it, A is only responsible for 10-15 percent of the phenomenon, so..." but when you put together three or four things that are reach responsible for non-trivial shares of rising inequality, together you have a very large policy-related phenomenon.
What's more, it's always worth emphasizing that the conventional view of what constitutes "policy choices" gets a little narrow. In his excellent booklet The Conservative Nanny State Dean Baker highlights a bunch of almost-never-discussed policy choices that, were we to change our policies, would have a substantial egalitarian impact. The "skill premium," for example, could be easily diminished by importing more skilled professionals from abroad. Anyways, read Bernstein, read Baker.
UPDATE: Also read this from Baker specifically on the Brooks column.
The Blair Factor
Apparently, Tony Blair's in all kinds of trouble and will leave office soon. Isaac Chotiner sees this as some sort of tragic turn, and I suppose there's a sense in which he's right. Still, I can't help but feel that, in the USA at least, Blair has tended to escape his fair share of the blame for the Iraq mess. I'd forgotten about this myself, but a little while back I was having dinner with my grandparents and my grandfather mentioned that he'd been against the Iraq War but turned out and decided to support it on the strength of Blair's endorsement. I can't totally reconstruct what my thought-process was at the time, but once he mentioned it it seems to me that similar considerations played a role in my own (badly wrong) thinking about the issue.
People tend not to be up front about this kind of thing, but clearly in the real world decision-making is highly heuristic. When leaders you think of as smart and admirable get behind a bad idea that ought to reflect poorly on the leader, but what it often does is make you think better of the idea. In that sense, I tend to think Blair was more influential than is often recognized in terms of moving American public opinion in Bush's direction.
Of course the same thing could be said about many of the congressional Democrats. They backed the war in large part out of perceived political expediency. But the fact that the Democratic leadership -- Daschle, Gephardt, etc. -- was supporting the war served to make the anti-war position look marginal. So the politics of the issue became largely circular -- the leaders of the opposition were supporting the war because it was the politically safe bet, but it was the safe bet in part because the leaders of the opposition were supporting it.
Americans as Insurgents and Counterinsurgents
Via Brad Plumer, a new paper for Cato by Dr. Jeffrey Record on the US military's counterinsurgency problem. Specifically, Record argues that effective counterinsurgency strategies run against deep-seated elements of American military culture ("the American way of war") and that the defense establishment is essentially incabable of learning lessons about how to do this better no matter how many times the problem is pointed out to them. Record's conclusion is that whenever possible -- and it's usually possibly -- we should simply avoid embarking upon actions that are going to put us in the position of waging counterinsurgency warfare. Fascinatingly, Rich Lowry calls the paper "excellent" while also saying he doesn't "agree with [Record's] bottom-line that we should give up trying counter-insurgency campaigns altogether." Then I wonder what he thought was excellent about it?
At any rate, if I may make a slightly idiosyncratic point about this, I think that at least some of the American military's cultural aversion to counterinsurgency is related to the strong Southern cultural influence on the US Army and to the peculiarities of the American Civil War.
Continue reading "Americans as Insurgents and Counterinsurgents" »
Rhode Island Update
Turns out my question as to why Rhode Island was doing so well and the rest of New England so poorly was based on a bad map. Wages are actually down in Rhode Island, but up in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
Synergy
Obviously, they don't actively coordinate their activities, but I'd think it should be obvious that Bush and bin Laden have a synergistic relationship. OBL fairly clearly times the release of his videos so as to assist George W. Bush's political career, presumably on the grounds that Bush's policies generate the high levels of global polarization that can help a fringe group like al-Qaeda gain traction.
Triumph of the Will
Neoconservative national policy analysis really only had one tune to play, albeit set to occassionally different beats. You need more force, and more will to use force. No matter what the circumstances. So Charles Krauthammer spins and whirls around the issue of withdrawal from Iraq. It turns out, though, that the country is in "A Civil War We Can Win." If, that is, we have the will. But, of course, our national will won't be enough:
Yesterday Maliki took over operational control of the Iraqi armed forces, the one national security institution that works. He needs to demonstrate the will to use it. The American people will support a cause that is noble and necessary, but not one that is unwinnable. And without a central Iraqi government willing to act in its own self-defense, this war will be unwinnable. [emphasis added]
How sweet it is. Another typical bit of analysis is that Krauthammer now advocates striking a compromise with the Sunni insurgency. He now sees this as essentially a group of rational actors on behalf of Iraq's Sunni population looking for more money and political power. The sort of people who can and should be bargained with. This, of course, is the analysis of the situation you could have gotten from liberals one or two years ago. In time to do some good in other words. But that was at a time when Krauthammer was busy calling anyone who thought that appeasers and saying all we needed was the will to crush our foes.
Consumer-Driven Health Care
Ezra Klein has a nice post about the hard-to-mention problem with drives toward consumer-driven health care -- consumers lack the basic competence to make these kind of decisions. That reality gets driven closer home to me every time I have one of my relatively rare encounters with the health care system. To take just a small example, yesterday afternoon I went to my dentist for a routine tooth cleaning. First, the hygenist scraped around with that scraping thing. Then she went at me with some other water-shooting, vibrating device. Then, again with some different scraping tool. It all seemed more-or-less like a correct tooth-cleaning procedure to me. But then again, if she'd stopped five minutes sooner it also would have seemed correct. Or if she'd gone five minutes longer. How do I know she really needed to do the second round of scraping? Or, for all I know, maybe there should have been a fourth go-round with something else.
The experience, morever, certainly wasn't a pleasant one. But I'm not displeased with that simply because it was, in parts, painful. According to her, the pain was my fault, I've done an inadequate job of flossing the gap adjacent to my wisdom teeth. That sounded plausible. But maybe she was lying. How would I know? Are my teeth even clean -- how would I know? And this was for the simplest, most common medical service around ... but to the customer, it's utterly mysterious.
Divided We Stand
Yesterday I said I'd offer up some fuller thoughts on Kevin Drums notion that Democrats actually are in agreement about national security matters. One slight problem with Kevin's view, I think, is that it comes with the proviso that only "if you take out, say, the Chomsky wing on the left and the Lieberman wing on the right," then you find that "there's a surprising amount that the rest of us agree on." In part it gets a little tautological to say that if you take a political movement, then remove its dissident elements, what you're left with is unity. That aside, though, there is something to Kevin's notion. But also, I think, something wrong with it.
The unity he's talking about has been purchased at the price of a great deal of vagueness. Now there's always going to be vagueness coming from politicians who have an understandable desire to avoid getting themselves pinned down. Which is fine, politics is politics. But if you watch the community of non-politicians in the progressive camp, you'll find people who do articulate more specific ideas. And while either set of ideas can be fitted into the same overarching framework of platitutdes, they're genuinely different ideas. I thought one useful way of exploring this might be for me to talk a little bit about Peter Beinart's book, The Good Fight. There are a few reasons for this. One is simply that the book took a lot of criticism from bloggers for what I think were sort of the wrong reasons. Another is that my book is going to be on a similar sort of subject, but is going to reach substantially different conclusions. Last, Beinart's a good case precisely because he's fully disavowed the Iraq War, but I think still falls on the "hawk" side of an enduring divide within mainstream liberalism so looking at his ideas is a good way of showing that disagreement isn't just disagreement about Iraq.
Continue reading "Divided We Stand" »
Homage to Stalin?
One of the odder, though probably not very significant, things about the current political debate is that recently I've been seeing rightwingers abandonning the traditional -- and correct -- conservative interpretation of the Spanish Civil War in favor of a rather dated leftwing take. It takes him a little while to get there, but Ross Douthat explains it all. I guess -- maybe -- this has something to do with the Trotskyite origins of neoconservatism or something.
Confessions
James Wimberley and Mark Kleiman team up to mount the argument that in Bush's Abu Zubaydah speech the other day he offered up what amounts to a confession of having ordered torture (banned by 18 USC 2340) and war crimes (as defined in 18 USC 2441) both crimes that carry hefty punishment under American law.
Sick as it is that the President would do the things he's done, it seems to me somehow even sicker that he proudly admit having done them in public speeches, believing that such confessions strengthen, rather than weaken, his domestic political standing. Sickest of all is that if you made me guess, I'd say Bush is probably right and his advocacy of torture and cruel and degrading treatment (to the point of death in many cases) is a political asset. Certainly, I hope I'm wrong or a sad and shameful episode in our national history will get even sadder and more appalling.
Atlas District
I've often mocked the Post's usually lame coverage of the local nightlife, but their only somewhat behind the curve article on the H Street Northeast scene is actually quite good and manages to move beyond Joe Englert's boosterism for his own projects. It fails, however, to answer my really pressing question about the situation which is whether he personally concocted the Atlas District name for the neighborhood or whether there's some genuine tradition of that. Google doesn't indicate much authenticity, but you get a lot of results from Atlases talking about the District of Columbia, so real information may be lurking in there someplace.
At any rate, as Julian explains when I went out there last weekend with a posse of libertarians "Jane Galt" got her hubcaps jacked, so there's more authenticity to the scene than a second glance would indicate. What's more, authenticity is sort of overrated.
Dreaming of the Caliphate
The President actually sort of curtailed the demagoguery in today's radio address and offered a recognizable argument about his counterterrorism agenda:
So this week I've given a series of speeches about the nature of our enemy, the stakes of the struggle, and the progress we have made during the past five years. On Tuesday in Washington, I described in the terrorists own words what they believe, what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it. We know what the terrorists intend, because they have told us. They hope to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire across the Middle East, which they call a Caliphate, where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology.
Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks, "A great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous [Caliphate]." Al Qaeda and its allies reject any possibility of coexistence with those they call "infidels." Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: "Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us." We must take the words of these extremists seriously, and we must act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.
Now if you take this with the appropriate level of seriousness, it really does lead to the conclusion that there's no point in trying to redress Muslim grievances (i.e., engage in "appeasement") since the emergence of a pan-Islamic Caliphate organized along Taliban lines and bent on recovering swathes of lost Muslim land that include all of Israel and, from time to time, all of Spain is not going to fly. The flipside, though, is that I don't think we really should take these particular words all that seriously.
Continue reading "Dreaming of the Caliphate" »
Balance of Interest-Group Terror
Tim Lee has a good post about the phenomenon of "regulatory capture", where a scheme allegedly aimed at consumer protection or some other worthy public interest goal is really being pushed by incumbent companies seeking to keep competitors out. What's interesting is that at the end Tim goes on to do what he has in the past -- offer fears of regulatory capture as his basis for oppose net neutrality regulations. As he's kind enough to acknowledge, the fly in the ointment of this argument is that incumbent telecom firms aren't in favor of these regulations.
This and some related points are essentially the basis of my somewhat vulgar sense that net neutrality regulations are a good idea. The main companies opposed to them are companies that, it seems to me, could potentially have a lot to gain from screwing me over. Conversely, while net neutrality certain does have its corporate backers -- just not in the telecom sector -- the pro-neutrality companies overwhelmingly seem to be ones who have an interest in me getting high-quality internet access at a reasonable price. It's possible that everyone's just making a mistake, but I tend to trust the lobbyists and so forth of the world to figure these kinds of questions out more-or-less accurately.
Better Late Than Never
The New York Times points out -- just a couple of days late -- that Bush's speech on Abu Zubaydah was a crock of shit, though naturally they put it a bit more gently.
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