Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.
That's your Washington Post reporting. I also feel like this directly contradicts reporting that was in major papers just last week. Persona issues and local controversies are, of course, always good campaign fodder. Spending the "vast majority" of one's war chest on that, however, does seem like a bit of a desperation move.
On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. According to the report, “a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein’s government ‘did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.’” In fact, Hussein tried to capture Zarqawi.
This morning on Meet the Press, Cheney repeatedly cited Zarqawi as the link between pre-war Iraq and al-Qaeda. When Tim Russert mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Cheney said he “hadn’t seen it.”
Justin Peters questions NFL coaches habit of claiming to work so hard that they almost never sleep. I certainly hope the coaches are just lying about this. That kind of long-term sleep-deprivation is going to do way more damage to your ability to keep a level head and make good decisions than any possible extra preparation time could compensate for.
I meant to plug these guys a while back, right after Tom turned me on to them, but there's a fairly obscure Baltimore-based band by the name of Karmella's Game who have a curiously well-designed website as well as a rocking album, The Art of Distraction. I saw Mike Crowley last night, and he was complaining about the unreliability of my music recommendations, so perhaps I should say more. I like this band a lot, but I like lots of bands featuring female singers and plenty of synthesizer. Others may find them less appealing. You can check out some songs on their MySpace page, though their most blogger-friendly song, "The Revolution Will Be Cybercast," isn't up there.
Reihan Salam says his "sense is that many on the left are bothered by the massive increase in income and wealth among the top 1 percent because they believe this threatens the democracy by giving a small handful of households outsized influence." That's not really what bothers me about the massive increase in economic inequality, but in response Brad Plumer rounds up the empirical evidence for the "outsized influence" thesis and it's really quite compelling.
This paper from Larry Bartels is especially telling.
The season premiere's been available On Demand for days, but I waited to watch it at its actual airtime so that I could gather my crew and also see the episode in its high definition form (why doesn't Comcast make HBO shows available on HD On Demand?) and I . . . don't have that much to say about it. I will say that I was concerned the show might head downhill and, so far, there's no particular evidence of that. Instead, a comment about the earlier seasons.
An anniversary post is, under the circumstances, unavoidable. But what to say? Maybe something on a personal note. From the time when I was about five years old onwards, my family lived on 12th Street with south-facing windows. Our apartment was really quite a bit north of the World Trade Center, but due to the lack of intervening tall buildings we had a very clear view of the Towers and they would totally dominate the view. Dominate it, that is, on clear days. Like distant mountains, our view of them was pretty highly sensitive to the weather. Haziness or fog would obscure them somewhat. On the heavier days, they would entirely fade out of view and the sky would look strangely blank.
By the time the towers fell, I was in college and wasn't living full-time in that apartment anymore. As a result, I've never quite gotten used to the new view. What's more, there isn't much of anything that was tall enough or close enough to be revealed by the towers' absence. It's just a blank sky. To me, it looks as if the city's descended into a perpetual fog.
The Towers were one of those New York landmarks that I barely ever actually visited in practice. I went there once, I think, in high school when I had a French exchange student living with me. And I was in the vicinity a couple of times to go to Century 21. But I think I've been to the Ground Zero site more times than I was ever inside the building whose absence it marks. Giant skyscrapers simply have a way of dominating the experience of people who live in vaguely in the vicinity even if you never really go there. Which, I suppose, is the point. And that's really the extent of my practical connection to the events of 9/11. Nobody I really knew died there, though of course like all New Yorkers I had various connections of some kind of another to some of the victims. Still, in an odd way I took those murders personally and when I think back to it I still do.
"We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost." So says an Army officer summarizing a new report by the US Marines' top intelligence guy about the situation in Fallujah. It's an odd habit of the American Army to even bother making the distinction. If you're losing a war politically, you're losing the war.
Let me also pass on a point I heard Robert Pape make last week, namely that even though a certain number of the bombings you see in Iraq are genuine core instances of terrorism -- just blowing up civilians for being members of some targeted group -- most attacks are more narrowly focused than that. You see a lot of this kind of thing where people trying to sign up to work for the Iraqi government get killed. Just as liberals tend to point out that the United States government and other western powers can often be well-served by a policy of deliberate restraint, this is also true for irregular combatants in Iraq. The most over-the-top, randomest, most terroristic attacks in Iraq tended to be perpetrated by Zarqawi and his people who had a rather unsubtle view of strategy. His absence from the scene may actually wind up hurting out cause in Iraq, simply because it will let smarter, less brutal leaders step up to the plate.
I think John Mueller's "False Sense of Insecurity" argument about terrorism goes two far in a couple of respects, but it's mostly correct and overwhelmingly provides a crucial counterbalance to the tendency toward alarmism that's overtaken the country in recent years. Thus, it's great to see that he's written the lead essay for the 9/11 anniversary edition of Cato Unbound. The specific argument he makes in this new piece I agree with more-or-less entirely.
This can't go over well with his colleagues on the Corner:
Second-lamest line (I am working here from Cheney's appearance on MTP yesterday): the one about how SH was so involved in terrorism, because he was paying money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. This is deeply unconvincing. Any secular-Arab dictator looking to do a little triangulation with the religious elements in his population & neighborhood would have done the same. And these folk were blowing themselves up in Israel, not the U.S.A. I don't approve of suicide bombers, in Israel or anywhere else, but to advance this as evidence that SH was hunkered down in conference with people planning attacks on the U.S.A. is, again, lame.
It's worth saying that, pre-war at least, this business about the suicide bombers was a kind of double-pronged ridiculously. On the one hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam's bucks for martyrs was indication of a looming Baath/Qaeda terror threat against the United States. On the other hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam's financial support was the key driver of Palestinian terrorism and that Palestinian terrorism was, in turn, the sole driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. No more Saddam, and the whole problem would just go away. The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. Absurd. Just absolutely ignorant and absurd. And yet this kind of thinking has been the official basis of national policy for five years and will continue to be for years to come.
Eric Alterman's been fired by MSNBC, for whom he's written the "Altercation" blog and been associated with in various capacities for a long time now. Media Matters is apparently going to host the blog in the future, and good for them. One keeps hoping that the "no liberals allowed on television" rule is going to get relaxed, but it seems to be growing more entrenched.
Krugman is good as usual, let me add something, though, to a bit of a cliché:
The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda’s leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.
No matter, declared President Bush: “I truly am not that concerned about him,” he said about bin Laden in March 2002, and more or less stopped mentioning Osama for the next four years. By the time he made his what-me-worry remarks — just six months after 9/11 — the pursuit of Al Qaeda had already been relegated to second-class status. A long report in yesterday’s Washington Post adds detail to what has long been an open secret: early in 2002, the administration began pulling key resources, such as special forces units and unmanned aircraft, off the hunt for Al Qaeda’s leaders, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.
According to Rand Beers, the more important move is the one Krugman vaguely alludes to in the second quoted paragraph rather than the more famous stuff in the earlier paragraph. What happened is that at more-or-less the exact same time as Bush said he was "truly . . . not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden -- March 2002 -- the president put his money where his mouth was by pulling special operations forces out of Afghanistan so that the units could reconstitute in preparation for their next mission -- preparing the battlefield in Iraq.
This is important not just in a vague "maybe if they were around we would have had OBL" kind of way. These are the troops who have the sort of language ability and training to work with mid-level foreign leaders that make them well-suited to taking the lead on difficult tasks like helping to reconstruct a country devastated by a couple of foreign invasions and a lengthy civil war. Whether or not they would have been able to locate bin Laden is a bit unknowable. Doubtless, they would have been helpful for that. But what's certain is that these resources would have allowed us to make much more progress toward achieving our goals in Afghanistan. To agree with what I think Atrios is saying here, after 9/11 some form of war against the Taliban was inevitable.
In a typically odd piece of analysis, Stanley Kurtz tries to knock down the Mueller Thesis by pointing to a bunch of evidence that al-Qaeda's leadership would like to mount many additional attacks against the American homeland. This is presumably the case, but so what? Assessments of threats need to be capability-based. You see this all the time from the right, however, which has become increasingly invested, both politically and emotionally, and maintaining a constant state of panic and hysteria.
Portraits of the looming menace of "Islamofascism" are routinely drawn with reference to to the alleged movement's alleged goals, with these goals, in turn, defined quite vaguely. It's good to have some sense of that stuff, of course, but it's much more crucial to know which things might realistically occur. The latter, typically, is much less fear-inducing than the former.
Easily the strangest thing I've ever seen on television is Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, a Japanese cartoon parody of Japanese cartoons. Now available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube:
I was hoping my debut as a Redskins fan would feature a win but . . . not so much. And, yes, I suppose one has to concede that a better quarterback would have helped. On the other hand, in a close game just about everything matters and Washington clearly could have stood to have had, for example, a better kicking squad. It seems that under the new scheme with a super-powered defensive coordinator and a super-powered offensive coordinator, nobody's coaching the special teams unit.
More to the point, I was hoping that Antwan Randel El was going to mean I would see some awesome trick plays. Instead, zero trick plays. Very disappointing. Nothing beats a trick play.
... they sleep more, according to a new paper referenced in an Alex Tabarrok post. As the graphic reproduced below indicates, the key to their success is greater "sleep efficiency":
The poor manage to spend the most time in bed and yet get the least actual sleep due to long "sleep latency," the time spent in bed trying to fall asleep. I've got a fairly downscale sleep profile. I'd like to see some further research on this. In the United States, it's always interesting to look at class issues through both the income lense and the education lense and see which has more explanatory power. Age, marital status, and whether or not you have children also seem like obvious demographic factors to look at. Personally, I find that a lot of my best work gets semi-done during periods of sleep latency, in that that's often when I figure out what I'm going to write the next day. Is that genuinely inefficient?
Bill Kristol and Rich Lowry team up in today's Washington Post:
The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment. This means the ability to succeed in Iraq is, to some significant degree, within our control. The president should therefore order a substantial surge in overall troop levels in Iraq, with the additional forces focused on securing Baghdad. . . .
Administration spokesmen have jettisoned talk of "staying the course" in Iraq in favor of "adapting to win." If those words are to have meaning, the administration can't simply stay the course on current troop levels. We need to adapt to win the battle of Baghdad. We need substantially more troops in Iraq. Sending them would be a courageous act of presidential leadership appropriate to the crisis we face.
Thrilling, thrilling stuff. Now, as I recall, twelve months ago it was September 2005. And twelve months before that it was September 2004. And four months earlier still, it was May 2004, when Kristol editorialized "It is true that the mistakes of the past year have had a dispiriting cumulative effect. It is true that it is harder to recover now than it would have been a year ago. But we can't win if we don't apply ourselves anew to trying to win." His solution: "The president orders Secretary Rumsfeld to send 50,000 more troops to Iraq to win the war. He also orders the secretary of defense to submit a plan to increase the overall size of our armed forces so that it is sufficient for the tasks ahead in the global war on terror." Somehow nothing that's happened over the past 28 months is in any way relevant to the assessment of the situation. America is perpetually on the brink, Bush is perpetually in need of enhanced seriousness about victory, and more troops are perpetually the answer.
Note also Kristol's April 24, 2006 call for "serious preparation for possible military action" against Iran, which "would be easier if the situation in Iraq improved--which implies an urgent push to make progress there, with the deployment of more troops if necessary." But if more troops go to Iraq, who's going to fight Iran? Even more troops: "Planning for action in Iran would be somewhat easier if the president finally insisted on a far-too-long-delayed increase in the size of the military."
I was going to call this the hawkery of fools, but really knaves is more like it. The wars are all going to be easy before we launch them, and the folks raising piddling questions should be dismissed. When the wars don't work out, it's always because we've been insufficiently warlike. When the wars produce broader strategic problems, we need more wars. And, of course, more troops. Always more troops.
Lawrence Kaplan once again tries to makes the case in The New Republic against leaving Iraq. Rebuttals from Sam Rosenfeld and Kevin Drum get at most all of the key points.
I have to say that I'm starting to find the appeals to idealism here quite tiring. It's worth going back and reading what the advocates of imperialism said during the high-tide of empire-building. They, too, were very idealistic. Having the right kind of wanting to help attitude just doesn't do very much work in these kind of circumstances. The effort to have the US government in general, and the US military in particular, run the nation of Iraq is inherently problematic. Having worthy ideals doesn't really make it less problematic.
Take a gander at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shaking hands with Iranian President Mamoun Ahmadenijad (call it a fair use of ISNA's photo). Going to Teheran for the meeting is a sensible thing to do. After all, Iran's right next door so they have plenty to talk about. But how can it possibly be that it's both absolutely vital for the United States to make a massive, open-ended military commitment to one of these governments and also absolutely vital for the United States to refuse to sit down and attempt good-faith negotiations with the other? Is Maliki now part of the unappeasable Islamofascist menace? How does this fit in with the 1939 narrative?
We turn to the Corner to see what the conservative movement's best minds have to say about these developments and find a multi-part series of posts where Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne just quote from a chat the White House seems to have organized between Bush and some friendly journalists about which our conservative analysts have no actual analysis to offer. We learn that, according to Bush, "The ideological struggle is being manifested as radicals attacking young democracies . . . the extremists and radicals are flocking to Iraq to stop the flourishing of democracy.”
Now that I'm not at the Prospect offices, I tend to spend my days drifting from one WiFi enabled coffee place to another in search of variety, internet access, and caffeine. Today, I've been to three different spots -- two independent outlets and one Starbucks -- that were suffering coffee cup shortages. Two that didn't have cups for large iced coffees and one that was missing medium-sized hot cups. What's the deal? Is there some regional cup-shipment emergency? Can we blame al-Qaeda for this turn of events? I demand action!
Looks like frontrunner Adrian Fenty will be our new Mayor here in the District. Though he'd been in the lead for quite some time, Fenty was, of the two leading contenders, the candidate of change and change is in the works. I didn't vote for him. My thinking, roughly, is that his reformist zeal is indicative of an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the possibilities of urban governance. The sad truth of the matter is that the most serious problems afflicting largish American cities like Washington simply aren't things that local government can do very much about. Complacency about social justice questions is a bad thing, but it needs to be addressed at a fairly high level. Attempts to do it at the small-unit level are likely to be counterproductive.
Under the circumstances, I think the most useful thing DC government could use would be some fairly aggressive rollback of the business licensing process and various land use regulations aimed at protecting the interests of incumbent property owners. Since nobody was promising anything like that, the candidate of continuity and competence seemed like the correct choice. The District has a lot of problems, but things are getting better rather than worse, and that's not nothing once you adopt an appropriate level of fatalism vis-a-vis the issues. On the other hand, this was not a line of thought I was totally thrilled with, so I can't say I'm heartbroken Fenty won. Hopefully he'll surprise me and aggressive reform will make everything awesome.
Obviously, it is the case that the folks tasked with trying to engineer a Democratic Senate were hoping to see Lincoln Chaffee lose his primary election, but it strikes me as a bit absurd to headline your Chaffee coverage "In Setback for Democrats, Incumbent Wins Republican Senate Primary" as if the main story in a Republican primary is the Democrats. The winner's name somehow doesn't even manage to make the headline. And so it goes with contemporary press coverage . . . essentially everything that happens in the world is, according to the press, a political win for the GOP and a setback for the Democrats.
In the real world, meanwhile, Chaffee's position in the general election is hardly unassailable. If Harold Ford is really leading in Tennessee then you have to consider this a month wherein the Democratic outlook is quite good.
Here's a good one. Leon Wieseltier takes on liberals who've been misinterpreting Reinhold Niebuhr and manages to offer quotations from zero lliberals who actually adhere to the misinterpretation that's alleged at hand. Names of said liberals? No.
I mean, seriously, is there anybody out there who thinks that the problem with Bush's foreign policy is that he has a bad domestic policy? Wieseltier's quite right to term that an odd point of view to take up, and not a very sound reading of Neibuhr, but it's such an odd point of view that nobody adheres to it. At any rate, I certainly grow tired of these incessant efforts to wield Brent Scowcroft as a bludgeon against liberal hawks' liberal critics. To be sure, there were problems with Scowcroft's approach to world affairs, to wit a seeming indifference to the suffering of foreigners. That said, when you see liberals say something nice about Scowcroft or Scowcroftish ideas they're clearly talking about his ideas on a different subject, namely the inadvisability of launching unilateral preventative wars and the availability of alternative methods of coping with medium-sized hostile states.
NYTmisses the boat on General Richard Zimmer's assessment of the Marine intelligence account of Anbar province. Read the story and it's clear that General Zimmer is doing as much as he possibly can to signal agreement given the context.
Everytime I see John McWhorter's byline I'm prepared to become infuriated, but he's devilishly clever and totally correct about The Wire. David Simon has a lot of political opinions that strike me as somewhat unsound and that strike him as reflected in the show, but the actual content of the show is so good that it actually supports much more nuanced interpretation than the one Simon seems to have.
I do, however, worry a bit that Season 4 may get unsound in a heavy-handed way. In particular, there's something of a cliché out there where we're supposed to think that the reason kids get involved in drug dealing is that the school system isn't good enough. The truth is probably more like the reverse -- it's more-or-less impossible to teach kids effectively when they're too busy dealing drugs. School outcomes tend to follow socioeconomic conditions rather than determining them. I hope the show avoids that pitfall.
But the decline in equipment readiness is nothing compared with the growing manpower crisis. The Army is trying to keep the dam from breaking, but it is running out of fingers and toes. After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June. Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.
Alarmingly, this drop in boot camp attrition coincides with a lowering of recruitment standards. The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year. Even as more allowances are made, the Government Accountability Office reported that allegations and substantiated claims of recruiter wrongdoing have increased by 50 percent. In May, for example, the Army signed up an autistic man to become a cavalry scout.
This is clearly no good. The sort of counterinsurgency war the administration says it wants to keep fighting in Iraq, and that I agree we need to keep fighting in Afghanistan, probably requires a somewhat higher standard of soldier than was widely available in the pre-9/11 regular Army. Instead, we're reaching down to a lower one. This strikes me as among the good reasons to withdraw from Iraq sooner rather than later to create the circumstances under which we can start reconstituting our forces. For the longer term, though, it's long past time to look seriously at revisiting the ratio of spending between the military's different components. Simply put, the current international situation puts relatively less strain on the capabilities of the Air Force and the Navy and relatively more on those of the Army and Marine Corps than did the Cold War. Fewer ships and planes and more, better-trained, better-compensated infantry would serve the country well. Similarly, within the Army there's a need for less firepower and more manpower than what we currently have.
This is no particular knock on the Air Force and Navy. Rather, it's simply a fact about the world that different situations call for giving different relative weights to the different services. The United States doesn't face any serious rivals for control of the sea or the air and, what's more, the foreign countries with the most capabilities in those arenas are our close allies.
Probably the most annoying tick you see frequently from liberals is what I can only describe as a kind of hysteria about efforts to mobilize Christian sentiments in order to advance conservative political goals. Rather than simply noting that the religious right is composed of people whose policy agenda liberals mostly disagree with on the merits and who, therefore, liberals wish had less political influence the tendency is to paint an alarmist portrait of the looming menace of theocracy. Everyone, genuinely, needs to take a deep breath and put this all in perspective. The good news is that two recent book reviews -- one by Peter Steinfels in The American Prospect and one by Paul Baumann in The Washington Monthly try to bring some calm to the table.
All to the good. I wonder, though, has anyone seen anything like that coming from the pages of National Review or The Weekly Standard? Obviously, lots of over-the-top rhetoric goes in the other direction, too, as secular liberals get accused of all manner of absurd sins. I feel like I never, ever see conservative intellectuals trying to bring a sense of proportion and calm to the table about that. Which, really, is too bad. There's a fairly constant pressure on the progressive pundits of the world to do our best to become more intellectually dishonest and less willing to take on our own side's quirks and sacred cows. The thinking -- and I don't think the thinking is mistaken -- is that liberal politics has been hampered by a sense that a lot of the spokespeople for "our side" have been playing with one arm tied behind our backs and need to learn to play by the right's rules and that party discipline needs to be applied to liberal writers. That, for obvious reasons, is an outcome I'd sort of prefer to avoid, but, again, I can't say that I think the analysis is mistaken.
I can't say I'm surprised to find that Martin Peretz's new blog The Spine is utterly uncongenial. I do, however, find it at least somewhat noteworthy that he's chosen to dedicate his energies toward pushing particularly disreputable rightwing causes defendingThe Path to 9/11 and and Scooter Libby. There's nothing up there nearly as predictable as a post about how Israel roolz and Palestine sux, it's like there were whole never-before-explored corners of darkness in his mind. Words of "wisdom":
Everyone has a spine. But some people are spineless. I mean this in several ways. One is a common and simple thought. If you shy away from saying what you believe, most especially when men and women are being counted, you are spineless. Spinelessness is an affliction of our civilization. Sometimes it is called "prudence." Even if that's what it is called, it often seems to me weak and pithless. But spinelessness is also an expression of social politics. It is called being "correct," even if what one is saying is palpably false. The choice in such a circumstance, people who calculate this way seem to think, is either to be correct or to offend. While I don't claim to be especially brave, I know that I am not spineless. I do not set my course by other people's lights. And this is one reason why I've called my blog The Spine.
The good news, obviously, is that it's now much safer to read The Plank so, on the whole, one has to count the Spine Era as a positive development.
Among the man tawdry episodes involved in the selling of the Iraq War, the tawdriest was the one that came at the very end. After all the months of debate, lies, hype, more debate, handwringing, warmongering, exaggerations, etc. we came to the moment when IAEA inspectors were back on the ground in Iraq looking into Saddam's nuclear program. They said there was no nuclear program. They were roundly ignored -- the statement simply got no purchase in mainstream media or political circles. The war was on. Months later, everyone was scratching their heads wondering where the WMD were. Years later, people are still debating how the facts were gotten so wrong. The fact remains, though, that before the war, the IAEA was in the country saying the Bush administration was full of shit. I bring this all up as prelude to Dafna Linzer's Washington Post article on the IAEA and Iran:
U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.
Think about that for a while. And also think about the quality -- intellectual and moral -- of the men and women who would look at the past several years of American and world history and decide that an outrageous and dishonest report on Iranian nuclear capacities was exactly the sort of thing the US congress should spend its time working on. Simply put, there's a miasma of insanity, dishonesty, and hubris floating around the circles they operate in that makes them grossly unfit to govern.
Chris Bertram notes that the "Euston Manifesto" movement "a British-based initiative by various self-described leftists some of whom were big supporters of the Iraq war and all of whom share an obsession with the idea that 'Enlightenment values' are under threat from a nefarious coalition of Islamists, postmodernists and Chomskyites" has launched an American outpost featuring -- naturally enough -- a new manifesto (or perhaps it's a meta-manifesto) on the subject of "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto." The curious thing, as Chris points out, is that:
[The list of signatories] contains figures not usually thought of as having much to do with the left as traditionally construed. They include Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz and Ronald Radosh. Laqueur has become the victim of a Mark Steyn-like obsession with demography and recently gave a positive review of Michael Gove’s execrable Celsius 7/7 in the the TLS, Peretz – a member of the pro-war “Democratic Leadership Council” – has just joined the advisory board of Lewis Libby’s defense fund, and Radosh is a regular writer for David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.
As a point of correction, let me note that Peretz is the owner/editor of The New Republic and has nothing in particular to do with the Democratic Leadership Council. Signatory Will Marshall is the head honcho of the Progressive Policy Institute which is the DLC's think tank. The leadership of the DLC/PPI nexus is, however, composed of people who self-consciously identify as progressives and really ought to be viewed as such. Peretz and Radosh, however, are different cases. Much the same could be said of signatory Fred Siegel who's not a hawkish liberal or a moderate liberal -- he's just not a liberal. You can ask him about that if you'd like. One searches in vain through his c.v. that signatory Robert Leiken is any sort of liberal. At any rate, I don't recognize a lot of these names, so I'll stop.
The combination of the roster of signatories with what can only be called the remarkable vacuity of the text suggests that this is another signpost on the road during which a certain number of liberal intellectuals will become conservatives. The doctrine spelled out explicitly -- that fundamentalist Islam provides a poor basis for governance, that terrorist attacks are immoral, that it would be better if Iran didn't build a nuclear bomb, that anti-semitism is bad, and that an Iranian nuclear first strike against Israel would be a very bad thing indeed -- is almost frightening in its banality. The inference that the reader is plainly intended to draw from the statement -- that those of us who've been agitating against those who are agitating to start a war with Iran are anti-semites, apologists for terrorism, and perhaps eager to see the population of Israel wiped out in an unprovoked nuclear first strike -- is offensive in the extreme.
David Bell reminds us a bit about the history of the college application essay:
Essays are supposed to reveal an applicant's "character," but in fact they have been tainted goods ever since universities started using them to evaluate applicants. Last year, in his history The Chosen, Jerome Karabel demonstrated once and for all that Harvard, Yale and Princeton first started putting an emphasis on "character" in admissions in the first have of the twentieth century as a way of keeping out Jews. Blond Protestant boys from good families who played football, sailed, and didn't bother studying too hard had "good character"; thin Jewish boys from immigrant households who spent all their time reading and arguing did not. That prejudice disappeared from the admissions process long ago, but more recently the application essay has been corrupted from another direction: by wealthy parents who hire consultants for tens of thousands of dollars to game the system, "advising" students on their essays (i.e. writing them), and also arranging for just the right range of activities and "experiences" to make the essays compelling to admissions officers.
This is true, but I think people tend to breeze too quickly past the point where Bell claims that "that prejudice disappeared from the admissions process long ago." It's true that the particular pressure to limit the number of Jewish students at elite colleges has disappeared from the admissions process, but the uncomfortable reality is that it's been replaced by a system designed -- whether intentionally or not -- to limit the number of Asian students at the very same college.
This is pretty well outside this blog's usual terrain, but last night I was hanging out with my friend Sommer and her sister Samantha who's in town on behalf of Amnesty to raise awareness about a situation of which, I must admit, I was totally unaware of -- the fantastically high rate at which women are being murdered in Guatemala, with the murderers operating with what amounts to utter impunity:
More than 2,200 women and girls have been brutally murdered in Guatemala since 2001. Up to 665 cases were registered in 2005; 527 in 2004; 383 in 2003 and 163 in 2002. In 2006, 299 cases have been reported between January and May -- a faster pace than in 2005. . . .
According to Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman, up to 70 percent of murders of women were not investigated and no arrests were made in 97 percent of cases. In the few cases that are investigated, the process is usually flawed -- forensic evidence is not properly gathered and preserved, few resources are allocated to each case and witnesses are denied protection.
The full Amnesty report is here. There's been very little coverage of this in the United States, but the BBC has done a couple of informative articles on the subject. Now, unfortunately, nobody quite seems to know exactly what the policy remedy is here in part because nobody quite understands what's happening. Amnesty does have some ideas, however, and one of those web form letter thingies they'd like you to take a look at, so please do.
John Cohn reminds us that nobody seems to have noticed the recent joint DLC/union event in which the leaders of the centrist outfit and the two major labor federations announced joint support for various things and, in particular, the DLC endorsed the Employee Free Choice Act which forces more knowledgable than I regard as vital to making it much more feasible to organize workers.
Cohn wonders a bit if this rapprochement is more tactical or strategic. Without any special insider knowledge, I would mark myself down for "strategic" simply because EFCA is really a strategic issue. Unions take stands on all kinds of issues, so pretty much anyone is bound to agree with them about some stuff and disagree about other stuff. The core issue of EFCA, however, is unions themselves -- marking yourself down for labor law reform is to say you'd like to see a revivial of the labor movement in America, whereas opposing or staying aloof from it is to say you'd like to see it fade away. Let me also note that recently I've heard various economists of a conservative or libertarian stripe express significant skepticism that public policy measures serious influence unionization rates. That could be true, I suppose, but it makes corporate America's die-hard opposition to organizing-friendly labor laws and labor law enforcement hard to explain.
Atrios notes the president's continuing inability to decide whether Osama bin Laden is the Most Important Dude Ever or else just "not a priority" before remarking, "It's unclear if taking Bin Laden off the world stage would really reduce any threats of terrorism - how would I know."
Well, I wouldn't know either. I'll pass on some notions about this that I've gleaned from others. One question in dispute is the extent to which the perpetrators of things like the Madrid and London bombings have actual communication with al-Qaeda Central, i.e. bin Laden and/or Ayman al-Zawahiri. For a while, the predominant sentiment was that there wasn't any, but subsequent investigations seem to indicate that these people were in contact with someone or other in the vicinity of Pakistan, possibly the big two. Another thing is that some folks feel that bin Laden is simply very good at doing those taped performances and written statements. Were he killed or captured, someone else would step up, but that someone might be less skilled. On the other hand, at least some of America's counterterrorism professionals maintain that Zawahiri rather than bin Laden is actually the brains behind that stuff. I recently heard Rand Beers take the view that simply nobody knows what the answer to that question is. Which, I guess, is a longwinded way of saying it probably would make a difference to kill or capture him, but nobody seems to me to have a convincing account of how big a difference.
That said, there's a certain importance to simply having justice be done (as Atrios writes, "some reason I thought bringing a mass murderer to justice might be a wee bit important") especially because the President once upon a time committed us to this end and launched a war that had getting OBL as one of its main aims.
The Democrats' strategy of trying to essentially hide behind the skirts of the handful of Republican torture opponents appears to be working, which I would have thought unlikely as of a couple of weeks ago. I do, however, wonder a bit about its wisdom. At the end of the day, the odds that Democratic candidates are going to pick up a lot of votes from strong torture advocates remains low, this gambit notwithstanding. Conversely, by relying on McCain et. al. to do the heavily lifting, Democrats are essentially denying themselves the possiblity of reaping whatever rewards may exist for standing up for basic decency and morality against Bush's depredations.
What's more, it seems to me that ducking national security fights involves some bad optics merely as such. A lot of doubts about Democrats and security issues have less to do with concrete policy than with essentially characterological concerns and if you worry that liberals are timid and easily frightened, well, then this is some fairly timid and frightened-looking behavior.
On the other other hand, however, I do continue to think that the tactical skills of the current Democratic legislative leaders have been largely underappreciated. As Amy Sullivan pointed out in the Spring, they're actually pretty damn clever and effective considering the objective difficulty of operating as a minority party.
This debate's been roiling over at the Prospect and I waded in with a take roughly along these lines, but I think Krugman really nails it:
Consider this: The United States economy is far richer and more productive than it was a generation ago. Statistics on economic growth aside, think of all the technological advances that have made workers more productive over the past generation. In 1973, there were no personal computers, let alone the Internet. Even fax machines were rare, expensive items, and there were no bar-code scanners at checkout counters. Freight containerization was still uncommon. The list goes on and on.
Yet in spite of all this technological progress, which has allowed the average American worker to produce much more, we’re not sure whether there was any rise in the typical worker’s pay. Only those at the upper end of the income distribution saw clear gains — gains that were enormous for the lucky few at the very top.
That’s why the debate over whether the middle class is a bit better off or a bit worse off now than a generation ago misses the point. What we should be debating is why technological and economic progress has done so little for most Americans, and what changes in government policies would spread the benefits of progress more widely. An effort to shore up middle-class health insurance, paid for by a rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans — something like the plan proposed by John Kerry two years ago, but more ambitious — would be a good place to start.
The thing of it is is that in order to articulate the point properly, Democrats are going to need to re-learn the word "inequality," something that seems to have vanished from their vocabulary in the late 80s or early 90s.
Seems like more and more conservatives are writing this column about how it might be better for the GOP to lose control of the house, which I can only take as a sign that the GOP will, in fact, do so. What's more, the conservatives who think this would be good are right!
It has begun. And I must say that I sympathize. The extent of the critical consensus on the show's awesomeness is a bit odd. The extent to which people who aren't TV critics (myself, say) have decided to become volunteer boosters for David Simon is positively creepy. Nevertheless, though the backlash is understandable, it's unjustified. The Wire really is the best television show ever. The consensus, however, is just one of several pieces of evidence for the proposition that it won't hold that title very long. In a mature medium, you're just never going to have everyone agreeing. But the history of people even trying to create what would today be recognized as quality television programming is simply very short. Nothing from before the 1990s holds up at all and even something as good as the beloved Buffy is rather mechanically crude compared to a contemporary understanding of how you're supposed to put serialized drama on the screen.
Someday, someone or other will decide they ought to actually try to compete with HBO in terms of putting good shows on the air instead of just having stuff (Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica) just fall into their laps. Or maybe there won't be television networks at all and everything will be sold individually On Demand, building a high premium on intense fan loyalty into the distribution system. That's when you're going to see the true Golden Age of Television, a period in which critics seriously disagree with each other about which shows are best, and in which you won't see the Best Show Ever title turn over as rapidly as we've seen in the Sopranos-Wire cycle.
That doesn't make Iran benign. But it does raise questions about whether the claim Arendt made about totalitarian regimes--that their messianic character made them inherently expansionist--fits Ahmadinejad's, too. A war against Islamic totalitarianism has clear boundaries: It means a struggle against violent salafis. A war against Islamofascism does not, and that is precisely the point: It lets the Bush administration add enemies--first Iraq, now Iran--while implying that they share Al Qaeda's ideology and represent the same kind of threat. That's not true, and five years after September 11, it has left Americans increasingly confused about who we are fighting, and increasingly skeptical that we can win.
Quite so. My level of worry about a war with Iran, meanwhile, has just gone up several notches. Was speaking to what's got to count as one of your more dovish Israeli politicians, someone eager to make peace with a genuinely independent Palestine that would have Jerusalem as its capital city, who kept saying repeatedly that he thought another war between Israel and Iran in the not-too-distant future is all but inevitable. Hezbollah, in his view, is nothing but a "commando division of Iran" and Hassan Nasrallah "is a division commander of Ahmadenijad." He dismissed a question about a looming Iraq-Iran alliance by saying Iran is simply taking control of the government in Baghdad and that "this is another good reason to topple the regime in Teheran." I suppose I see where he's coming from, but a person who thinks that sort of regional dynamic is going to be -- of all things -- conducive to a comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't thinking very clearly.
Naturally, Charles Krauthammer thinks we should start a war with Iran. Why anyone would pay attention to the man who proclaimed Iran "months away" from a nuclear bomb in January I couldn't say. There was also this hilarious moment in April 2003: "Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem."
So he has a credibility problem. And various reading comprehension problems. The Klein / Rosenfeld tag team at Tapped does a good job of demolishing most of this, but there's more. Consider: "The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age." Infinitely more likely than . . . Harry Truman? Just a little sloppy writing and foregetfulness, I imagine, but it's still pretty bizarre to think that someone would be so slipshod with their own column in a widely read newspaper. It's also, I think, indicative of a generally slipshod approach to the world, an inattention to detail and Krauthammer's trademark casual disregard for the truth.
The growing consensus seems to be that Thomas can indeed coax a playoff-contending 40 wins out of these misfits by playing a lot of guards and going up-tempo. That's still the way I'm betting, too, figuring that Stephon Marbury and Steve Francis are so desperate to spruce up their reputations that they'll find a way to coexist. For 82 games, anyway.
Let me first note that if Stein really thinks this, he should have given the Knicks a much higher offseason rating. He has them ranked as the number ten offseason performer in the Eastern Conference but is also predicting a dramatic improvement in performance -- they only won 23 games last year and nothing about a strategy of playing a lot of guards and going up-tempo sounds like it will do much to improve a team whose problems relate to making tons of turnovers and playing poor defense. What's more, two of New York's Eastern Conference cellar-mates -- Toronto and Charlotte -- took actual steps toward improving through such gambits as not trading away their lottery picks. Meanwhile, Stein fails to note that the Knicks made the fairly insane offseason non-move of suddenly deciding to get stingy and not resign Jackie Butler who could have been kept for a very reasonable price by Dolan standards.
Daniel Benjamin and Michele Flournoy point out that we can't send any more troops to Iraq because there aren't any available. There are, of course, literally some additional soldiers hanging around who could be mobilized in a crisis, but at the moment all of the Army's combat strength is either deployed abroad or else somewhere in the reconstitution phase. This is also the difficulty with the retrospective version of the "more troops" theory which holds the occupation force should have been much larger in the beginning. An operation tempo of that scale wouldn't have been sustainable. Indeed, even the current tempo isn't genuinely sustainable -- it's causing recruiting problems and deteriorating troop quality while seriously degrading the amount of available equipment.
I note that Fred Kaplan pointed this all out in June 2005, but nobody seems to have paid attention. Meanwhile, it's unclear to me that more regular Army troops would do very much good. If you look at it, it's our Special Operations Forces units who've really been able to make a difference but, naturally, such units are in rather short supply. Had we concentrated our energies on a single counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan -- a context where we enjoyed more local, regional, and global legitimacy and were able to get some non-trivial assistance from allies -- then we might well have had the manpower necessary to pull off a good one. But this stuff turns out to be genuinely difficult, whether in the aftermath of a well-founded war (i.e., Afghanistan) or an ill-advised one (i.e., Iraq) and it was really the hight of hubris to think we could just move on to a second mission while an important one was still incomplete.
An anniversary post is, under the circumstances, unavoidable. But what to say? Maybe something on a personal note. From the time when I was about five years old onwards, my family lived on 12th Street with south-facing windows. Our apartment was really quite a bit north of the World Trade Center, but due to the lack of intervening tall buildings we had a very clear view of the Towers and they would totally dominate the view. Dominate it, that is, on clear days. Like distant mountains, our view of them was pretty highly sensitive to the weather. Haziness or fog would obscure them somewhat. On the heavier days, they would entirely fade out of view and the sky would look strangely blank. 
Take a gander at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shaking hands with Iranian President Mamoun Ahmadenijad (call it a fair use of 
Looks like frontrunner Adrian Fenty will 
Everytime I see John McWhorter's byline I'm prepared to become infuriated, but he's devilishly clever and 
I can't say I'm surprised to find that Martin Peretz's new blog 
Among the man tawdry episodes involved in the selling of the Iraq War, the tawdriest was the one that came at the very end. After all the months of debate, lies, hype, more debate, handwringing, warmongering, exaggerations, etc. we came to the moment when IAEA inspectors were back on the ground in Iraq looking into Saddam's nuclear program. They said there was no nuclear program. They were roundly ignored -- the statement simply got no purchase in mainstream media or political circles. The war was on. Months later, everyone was scratching their heads wondering where the WMD were. Years later, people are still debating how the facts were gotten so wrong. The fact remains, though, that before the war, the IAEA was in the country saying the Bush administration was full of shit. I bring this all up as prelude to Dafna Linzer's 
Chris Bertram 
Marc Stein has a 
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