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September 17, 2006 - September 23, 2006 Archives
Incompetence Again
Jonathan Chait makes the case against the "incompetence dodge" argument. I see three main strands of counterargument here:
- "[T]he more we learn about the war's conduct, the more we learn that the administration didn't just make the normal sorts of mistakes that inevitably occur in wartime; it was almost criminally negligent." In other words, Bush was really inept.
- "When the authority of government dissolves, people retreat to the safety of tribal solidarity, and under such conditions they can do savage things of which they never thought themselves capable. Once the expectation of chaos sets in, it can spiral out of control." In other words, the sectarian divisions now plaguing the country are the consequence of poor initial management, and not the cause of problems.
- Last, the conclusion: "The funny thing is that, in other contexts, liberals don't dispute the notion that Bush administration incompetence caused otherwise preventable catastrophes. Almost no liberal believes otherwise when it comes to, say, the response to Hurricane Katrina. If Bush could have bungled Katrina this badly, isn't it just possible he could have done the same thing in Iraq?"
I think Katrina is a useful example to bring up in this regard. What I would say about it is that, clearly, the Bush administration badly mishandled that situation and, as a result, things became much worse than they might have been. On the other hand, though, it's not Bush's fault that a hurricane hit New Orleans. There was nothing FEMA possibly could have done that would have made a levy-breaching hurricane hit on New Orleans somehow non-catastrophic; Bush took a bad thing and made it worse, he didn't take a benign occurence and make it bad.
Continue reading "Incompetence Again" »
Adapting Minds
I've been searching for a pretext to plug David Buller's book Adapting Minds which I'm working my way through, and today's David Brooks column offers an excellent opportunity. Brooks writes:
Consider all the theories put forward to explain personality. Freud argued that early family experiences relating to defecation and genital stimulation created unconscious states that influenced behavior through life. In the 1950’s, the common view was that humans begin as nearly blank slates and that behavior is learned through stimulus and response. Over the ages, thinkers have argued that humans are divided between passion and reason, or between the angelic and the demonic.
But now the prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.
This is precisely the rhetorical move Buller's book is concerned with. You start with the notion that the mind/brain is a physical and biological system created by the process of evolution. This is what Buller calls "evolutionary psychology." But then you leap to a rather different notion -- what Buller calls "Evolutionary Psychology" -- that the mind is a massively modular system whose models are adaptations to conditions prevailing during the Pleistocene epoch, i.e. "the millenniums when humans were hunters and gathers" or the "environment of evolutionary adaptadness." Buller's argument, and it's quite convincing so far, is that while the evidence for evolutionary psychology is very strong, the evidence for Evolutionary Psychology is quite weak.
Creative Commons Photos
As you may have noticed, I've started including images with a lot of the posts here -- one of the benefits of blog-consolidation is that I get to put more time into each post -- which I think is kinda neat. It's also worth pointing out that it would be an utterly infeasible method of operating without the combination of the Creative Commons search page and the Flickr photo-sharing website. The basic idea of Flickr is that you get an account, take some photo's with your digital camera, upload them to your page, and then anyone can see them. Even better, though, the have a function where you can set it to, as a default, release your photos under a Creative Commons license. Then, with the power of untold numbers of (presumably amateur) photographers combined and searchable, a humble blogger has a vast photo library at his disposal.
This is one of those signposts of progress that's essentially impossible to measure, but it's real nonetheless.
What To Say About Iraq
Suzanne Nossel tries her hand at advice to progressive candidates. I think it's pretty good. Forthcoming in the Prospect I have a piece where we tried a bit of a gimmick -- instead of an article about what a candidate ought to say, just write out a speech a candidate ought to give. I'll provide a link when it's available.
Climbing Mount Improbable
Andrew Sullivan takes on the incompetence question: "the more we find out about the spectacular recklessness of this administration's conduct of the war the less persuasive it is that this operation was always doomed to failure. In my view, although the war was always going to be extremely difficult, it wasn't necessarily doomed from the start. It was the administration's relentless, politicized incompetence that doomed it." Let me just note that this is an extremely weak claim being made on behalf of the underlying policy concept. It "wasn't necessarily doomed" though it was bound to be "extremely difficult."
I'd be interested in seeing someone who thinks along these lines venture some vague probabalistic estimates. It wasn't "necessarily doomed" but was it likely to succeed? Or are we merely claiming that there was some chance of success? Ten percent? One percent? And how does that feed into policy analysis? Obviously, you wouldn't want to try and introduce a bogus false precision to these kind of calculations. Still, it seems to be that before launching a war of choice, you're going to want some better odds of success than "not necessarily doomed."
Wire 4.2
Clearly, one of The Wire's great strengths is its ability to draw parallels between the different domains of Baltimore life it depicts. Sometimes, though, I feel like the get too blunt and heavy-handed with this stuff. Having Clay Davis directly echo that one hopper's words on the ethics of accepting cash gifts from drug dealers seemed like a bridge too far. The parallel was clearly there in the story one way or the other, and bludgeoning you with it struck me as an atypical lack of respect for the audience's ability to "get it" by just watching events unfold.
Preconditions
Jackson Diehl explains that "the still-evolving unity pact" between Hamas and Fatah to form a coherent government in the Palestinian Authority and a unified approach to Israel and the West, "isn't likely to impress either Olmert or Bush, since it almost certainly won't commit Hamas or the new government to formal recognition of Israel or an unqualified renunciation of violence." I have to say that I find this kind of mindset -- which was also in evidence last week when I discussed these issues with an Israeli politician -- a little bit puzzling. From where I sit, it seems to me that formal recognition of Israel and an unqualified renunciation of violence would be Israel's main objectives in a negotiation aimed at a permanent status treaty.
Such a treaty would demarcate the borders of Israel and Palestine, provide for the mutual recognition of those borders by the two states, entail recognition of the two states by the rest of the world's countries, and establish peace between the two states. That's the goal -- something that would be the outcome of negotiations, not a precondition for them. That's how wars end; first you have a cease-fire to facilitate negotiations, then if you reach an agreement the agreement contains provisions for recognition and a renunciation of violence. Insofar as Hamas simply isn't amenable to any kind of reasonable settlement (which certainly seems plausible) it seems to me that it would be in Israel's interest to get that fact plainly on the table rather than having everything stuck in a meta-negotiation about preconditions.
"Soft Eyes"
Craig Jerald wonders about the "soft eyes" reference in the title and dialogue of Wire 4.2 -- I don't really get it either. Google does, however, reveal the existence of a book called To Teach With Soft Eyes: Reflections on a Teacher/Leader Formation Experience which is a possible referent.
For all the Wire-blogging you can stomach, check out this site dedicated entirely to the show. On a more substantive note, this here from Sam Harris about how liberals are too soft on terrorism (or something) is totally, utterly, incredibly whack, but MovableType keeps eating by draft posts about exactly how whack it is. Fortunately, Kevin Drum's on the case but as usual he's a bit too nice. Why is Harris perpetrating these smears that he knows perfectly well he has no evidence for? Why is The LA Times publishing them? It's a messed up world.
Missing the Point
Since Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s article about Coalition Provisional Authority personnel practices specifically took on Kate O'Beirne's husband and Michael Ledeen's daughter, I've been eager to see the pushback from the Corner. Ramesh Ponnuru and Katherine Jean-Lopez oblige, but both seem off-target to me. They focus their ire on the implication on the insinuation that the CPA was handing out "posh perks" and plum patronage jobs pointing out, plausibly, that these are basically hardship assignments and not really super-desirable.
That seems like a reasonable riposte on the narrow issue, though my understanding is that life inside the Green Zone was actually fairly pleasant during the relevant period. It also completely misses the point, however, which is simply that the CPA was being treated as something more like an extension of the Republican National Committee than a serious institution of government. Not only did this compromise the quality and qualifications of the personnel, but it had an insidious impact on the operations of the CPA. "They don't call it the Republican Palace for nothing" was the joke at the time. The upshot being that the civilian side of the operation was being run with a mindset in which there was perfect overlap between the political interests of the Republican Party and with the national interests of the United States in its policy toward post-war Iraq.
The upshot was that the entire thing was being run as a propaganda operation, an enormous press conference for U.S. domestic consumption. That ends up desperately compromising various things, most crucially the flow of information up and down the chain of command and from outside and inside the government. The political interests of the GOP just ran toward painting as pretty a picture as possible of events on the ground, while the interests of sound policy required an accurate assessment of the situation and a realistic portrait of events. If, for example, people had a more realistic understanding of what was going on in Iraq then various political milestones might have been used to much greater advantage as a way of getting the U.S. out of Iraq in a credible way that left a not-absolutely-horrible situation behind. Instead, deep institutional commitment to the view that we were making progress when we were, in fact, regressing led us to let these milestones slide and then publically commit the country to unrealistic -- and often incoherent -- long-term objectives.
Anonymity Versus Lying
Lee Siegel chats with Deborah Soloman and explains:
No, it never occurred to me at the time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.
I think Internet-anonymity is a little unfortunate, but it's an understandable second-best alternative given that lots of people don't really have the option of posting opinions on controversial topics under their own names. That said, this just isn't what Siegel did. He specifically pretended to not be Lee Siegel under circumstances where the fact that he was Lee Siegel was obviously germane to the issue at hand. What's more, Siegel is a professional writer who published under his own name all the time, including on the very website where he was pseudonymously commenting. He had no legitimate reasons for anonymity and wasn't really being anonymous at all -- he was just lying about his identity.
They Said My Methods Were Unsound
Henry Abbot at True Hoop remarks that "The Wages of Wins blog keeps having all these team analyses, but they're of no use if you don't buy into the author's central theory of how wins are produced" and that "10,000 applications of the same formula seems to educate little, especially when that formula has been met with mediocre reviews by some respected names in the field, and quite frankly fails the common sense test." That seems very misguided to me. Performing team-by-team preseason predictions is precisely what the authors of a controversial method of quantitative analysis ought to be doing.
The criticism one would make of the WoW methodology is that even if you grant that they've succeed in decomposing the elements of team success, they're method of breaking down individual players' contributions is highly insensitive to the way actual basketball teams work. Consequently, the fact that in retrospect you can add up a team's "wins produced" score and get a number very close to its actual wins has little value in rebutting that criticism. The real test is what kind of predictive value the WoW analysis has, so offering preseason analysis that we can then test against reality is precisely the correct, stand-up thing to do and if you're interested in the general subject of quantitative analysis of the NBA it makes sense to pay attention.
Speaking of Unsound Methods
I'm in a bit of a bad mood, and this news doesn't really help matters: "Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday."
But now here's the rub. Cooperating with Syria on our common interest in combatting Salafist terrorism seems like a very good idea to me. Certainly a much better idea than trying to provoke conflict with Syria by nonsensically lumping it in with some "Islamofascist" bogeyman. And yet, since the United States shouldn't be in the torture business, colluding with Syria in order to have people tortured is not the sort of cooperation we should be engaged in. That's my view, and it strikes me as a coherent one reflecting a standard liberal worldview. "Cooperation good; torture bad." Somehow, though, to the Bush administration we should cooperate with Syria only insofar as it once provided a convenient mechanism for the conduct of torture. That, it seems to me, is a truly deranged worldview.
Even More Incompetence
The new edition of BloggingHeads features an epic three segment battle between myself and Jon Chait about Iraq, incompetence, liberal hawks, etc. In addition, since I stopped working out of the Prospect offices and moved at roughly the same time, I had to try setting up my camera in a totally unfamiliar location and let's just say I think it might be my worst lighting ever, which is a fairly impressive feat in light of the track record.
Achievement Gap
At last, ceaseless Wire-blogging leads to an actual policy issue as Zachary Norris recalls his days in the Baltimore City school system: "I had no formal teaching experience and no real qualifications other than a college degree and a strong desire to 'close the achievement gap.' I joined the Teach For America program and ended up teaching in Baltimore for three years. The experience was humbling."
But what would it mean -- what could it mean -- to close the achievement gap between high- and low-SES students in American schools? For a whole variety of reasons, this just doesn't seem like it's going to be possible. At the outer limit, more prosperous parents are always going to be able to re-open the gap by investing even more resources in their kids' education. An education and child development arms race to the top might not be a bad thing, but it wouldn't close any socioeconomic gaps. To do that, you actually need to tackle inequality itself. In the context of a reasonably egalitarian society, a well-functioning school system shouldn't exhibit massive achievement gaps, but in the context of a wildly inegalitarian one there's no way the school system can singlehandedly set everything back to zero. See also super-intern Conor Clarke's thought on the latest homework "debate."
Secession Nostalgia
Okay, this is weird. Via Dave Weigel, a Raw Story report about Saxby Chambliss' remarks at a recent closed-door meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to one version of the story, Chambliss said "We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we’d be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln." According to Chambliss' office, that's a misquotation and he really said "If Gen. JEB Stuart had had better intelligence, we’d all be meeting in Richmond right now."
I don't see what difference the alternative versions make. Either way, Senator Chambliss sees himself presumptively as a loyal citizen of the Confederacy who just happens to be working in Washington, DC because the CSA's bad intel lost them the war. What's more, he seems to feel that the entire US Senate would have been located in Richmond in the event of a southern victory.
War Clouds, Plus -- Worst Idea Ever
 Fred Kaplan wonders if the "prepare to deploy" order that's "been sent out to U.S. Navy submarines, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers, and two mine-hunting ships" means we're going to war with Iran. Sam Gardiner, former US Air Force Colonel, concludes that we are in a new report (availble in PDF) for the Century Foundation. Gardiner says the preparations for war "will not be a major CNN event." Instead, they "will involve the quiet deployment of Air Force tankers to staging bases" and "additional Navy assets moved to the region." Gardiner makes the point that while nobody's talking about a land invasion of Iran, significant elements in the government do have more ambitious goals than simple surgical strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strikes are very unlikely to actually resolve the perceived Iran issue, and there are administration figures who've convinced themselves that a sufficiently wide air target set will prompt regime change in Iran. One should note that the curious thing about air power is that the professionals involved in managing it have a longstanding, cross-national, and incredibly pernicious habit of massively and systematically overstating its efficacy in accomplishing all sorts of implausible things.
At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes -- in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran -- and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.
Now I rather doubt that's going to happen. Typically, Bush dials down the crazy factor a notch or two relative to what comes out of the OVP. Nevertheless, it's a sobering reminder that we have genuine lunatics operating in the highest councils of government at the moment. It's an extremely dangerous situation.
Half A Friedman
Spencer Ackerman has plenty of substantive commentary on the first-ever press conference by the Baker-Hamilton Commission, chaired by GOP wise man James Baker and Democratic wise man Lee Hamilton and tasked with figuring out what the hell to do about Iraq. I prefer, however, to make jokes: "For reasons that he declined to elaborate upon, Hamilton said the next three months in Iraq will be 'critical,' particularly in the areas of securing Baghdad, national sectarian reconciliation and the provision of basic governmental services to Iraqis."
Thus, one Hamilton equals 0.5 Friedmans.
Jokes aside, though, I prefer not to get too thick in the weeds of exactly when we should leave Iraq. The main point, from where I sit, is that we not stay on this current track where we're going to be there essentially forever. So the question, to me, is always "well, if in 1 Friedman or 0.5 Friedmans or however many Friedmans you like, Baghdad still isn't secure, then can we leave or does this need to continue forever?"
Labeless
Tim Lee recounts Chris Anderson's recounting of the story of the band Birdmonster which not only aggressively used web-based publicity efforts to gain attention for the band before it got offers from record labels, but eventually started getting offered deals. Deals they turned down: "We're not anti-label in principle, but the numbers (risk vs. reward) didn't add up."
That's interesting. And, clearly, digitial technology does a whole bunch of things that tend to undercut the rationale for the record label as it's been traditionally understood. At the same time, I have to think it would be odd to see tons of folks want to follow down this particular path over the long haul. Just because technological changes may make it easier to do publicity, marketing, distribution, etc. on a DIY basis doesn't necessarily make doing things that way appealing or advisable. After all, there's no particular reason to think people ready and able to produce music people want to hear are going to have enormous aptitude or inclination to do this other stuff once they're in a position to get someone else to do it for them in exchange for money. That could be the case even if, in some sense, the numbers "don't add up." The simple added convenience of outsourcing functions outside one's core areas of interest/competency has value. More likely, you'll just see the nature of services that bands get in exchange for a chunk of their earnings will shift as the structure of the music industry shifts with it.
Mind The Gap
Kevin Carey responds to my skepticism about the possibility of "closing the achievement gap" in public education by saying "it's all a matter of how you define 'close the achievement gap.'" And so it is. Carey says under one definition ("erase all academic differences between students of different economic backgrounds") this is impossible, whereas under a different definition ("bring all students, including low-income students, up to defined minimum levels of proficiency") it's realistic. I suppose I agree with that.
On some level then, this is perhaps a meaningless semantic controversy. Nevertheless, it certainly seems to me that the phrase "close the achievement gap" strongly implies a desire to narrow or eliminate (i.e., "close") the differential achievement level (i.e., "gap") between high-SES and low-SES rather than a desire to bring low-SES students up to a minimum level of achievement. That latter goal doesn't seem to have any particular relationship to the concept of a "gap" that ought to be "closed." Which returns me to what I think I was saying initially, namely that our education system could serve low-SES students better, and we ought to endeavor to do so. Doing better on this score would have a variety of benefits, but a significant reduction in inequality, even inequality in educational achievement, isn't likely going to be among those benefits.
Andrew Rotherham wants to note that in policy terms No Child Left Behind is in fact geared toward Carey's goals. That is an important point, and I think NCLB was a pretty good bill. To me, though, the "close the achievement gap" rhetoric lies somewhere between pernicious and misleading. As Rotherham emphasizes, there's no measures a liberal society can take to prevent socioeconomic inequalities becoming educational inequalities through the mechanism of higher levels of high-SES parental investment in education. So insofar as you care about educational inequities, you really need to tackle broader socioeconomic inequities.
Dixie Jews
Revelations about George "Macaca" Allen's heritage have some folks wondering to me how a nice Jewish boy could have turned out to be such a Stars & Bars loving racist. As I've been pointing out, it's contrary to stereotype, but Jews have a long history with the Confederacy. Over to your right, you'll see Judah P. Benjamin who I'd thought was the first Jewish Senator. He turns out to have actually been the second one, representing Louisiana in the Senate in the 1850s before resigning when the southern states seceeded. He then became the Confederate Attorney-General (the USA had never had a Jewish cabinet secretary at this point) and later held some other CSA cabinet posts.
Benjamin's status as first Jewish Senator turns out to be somewhat complicated because of the case of David Levy Yulee who converted to Christianity before being elected to the Senate, but who had been a practicing Jew earlier in life. Yulee, too, was a southerner who also resigned his seat during the Civil War. So there you have it -- the Confederacy was Good for the Jews.
Meanwhile, a note on nomenclature. Josh Marshall uses the term "crypto-Jew" with reference to Allen. That's always been my preferred term for folks in the Allen/Albright/Clark category of having Jewish ancestry but not knowing about it. Another crucial category is the "stealth Jew" -- persons like myself who are acknowledged Jews with very non-Jewish names. My successor at the paper I edited in college was a Jewish fellow by the name of Andrew Ujifusa so the Independent was, at the time, ground zero for the vast stealth Jew media conspiracy. Conversely, you have pseudo-Jews like Sam Rosenfeld -- goys with super-Jewish names.
Mahmoun's Style
I keep talking about this with people in real life, but it deserves a blog mention as well -- Mahmoun Ahmadinejad has a pretty sweet hipster style. It all starts with a beard not unlike the one I and many of my twentysomething male friends sport. But it goes deeper. The man went without a tie to address the UN General Assembly. And I was in a bar where the TV was showing his interview with Anderson Cooper (it's DC, these things happen) and while there was no sound, he certainly looked witty and charming. There was also this clip of him walking down some hallway shooting the shit with Kofi Annan. It's like diplomacy! Bush should try it. One gets the sense that he's getting his stody red tie-wearing ass kicked this session by sundry third world goons and it's really not a proud moment for the United States
Wins for Kofi
As "everyone" . . . um . . . "knows" the UN is weak, useless, and ineffectual. And, certainly, it looks that way if, like most American observers, you only harp on problems and failures while giving absolutely know consideration to the objective difficulties the organization faces. The UN Dispatch exists, in part, to counter that sort of remorseless spin and over there Mark Goldberg's pointing out that Kofi Annan's been completing some extremely successful diplomacy that's making the resolution of the Israel-Lebanon War look much more hopeful than I would have thought it reasonable to expect.
Lead Abatement
Campus Progress put on an event yesterday where they screened Season 4, Episode 3 of The Wire and then had a Q&A with David Simon and Ed Burns. Since it was a political crowd, the questions were all about "the issues" and it confirmed my sense that the creators of this extraordinarily subtle show have a rather crude take on what it all means. Nothing they said about politics really bothered me, however, except for what Burns said when somebody mentioned that one problem inner-city kids face is that many of them start life off hobbled by lead poisoning.
Burns was completely dismissive of this notion, holding that the real toxins out there are you, me, capitalism, and America's indifferent consumer culture. Kids who grow up in the ghetto and become violent criminals are just engaged in a rational response to the environment they've been plopped into. Lead is just an excuse to avoid coping with the real issues. Well, it'd be a shame to use the existence of lead poisoning as an excuse to avoid coping with other, deeper problems. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge lead poisoning is a very real problem. What's more, it's a problem with a clear-cut solution. We know how to implement lead-abatement procedures and, in fact, lots of them have been carried out. It just costs money, so poor people suffer. But it doesn't cost an especially large amount of money -- funds could be appropriated, the problem ameliorated, and America would be a better place for it. In a sense, nothing would be thereby "solved" but conditions would improve.
Terror
I think Democrats really ought to be worried about poll results indicating that "Republicans have nearly doubled their lead when voters are asked which party they trust most to protect the nation against terrorism." In particular, I think you've got to worry that some time in late October, Osama bin Laden is going to release a new tape or letter which is going to say something like "things are looking up, the Bush administration is discredited and the Democrats are poised to take control of the United States congress soon." It's clear that OBL and his collaborators have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of western domestic politics, and one of the most undercovered stories of the year has been Ron Suskind's revelation that the CIA concluded that bin Laden's fall 2004 missive was designed to help secure Bush's re-election.
The good news is that fully 61 percent of voters say the war in Iraq is "diverting resources that could be used in other ways to fight terrorism" whereas only only 26 percent regard it as "the most effective way to fight terrorism." I think it's clear that there should be an opening here to argue that what we need to do is stop diverting resources and start using them in a more focused, but still aggressive manner.
Nixon in Teheran
Michael Hirsch outlines what one can only characterize as an appealing fantasy scenario in which George W. Bush suddenly comes to his senses and decides to have a "Nixon in China" moment and strike a grand bargain with Iran. This is grounded in a fairly sound analysis of the actual situation, but it's pretty obviously not in the cards. Nixon, for all his many flaws, did have a grasp of the basic concept of the Cold War -- that it was about containing the Soviet Union -- whereas Bush's approach to the "war on terror" seems grounded exclusively in fantasy life. We're so far from a diplomatic opening with Iran, that we hear "It’s fair to say that Dr. Rice thought this was a bad idea. A really, really bad idea" when the idea was merely for the President of Iran to talk to members of the Council on Foreign Relations about stuff.
Rice, of course, is the moderate foreign policy voice in the administration. So where the impetus for this is going to come from, I couldn't quite say. Realistically, the only question on the table is whether Bush is going to totally shit the bed by starting a war with Iran (to be sure, with bombs and missiles rather than soldiers and tanks, but still -- it'd be a war) or whether things will drift along dangerously and unsatisfactorally until someone else takes office and gets the chance to try to fix things.
UPDATE: For more on this, you have to read Lawrence Kaplan's explanation of why he doesn't think there'll be a war with Iran soon. Roughly speaking, according to Kaplan, Bush is determined "to go the last mile" with diplomacy "in the name of mollifying the Europeans" and that will take a long time. But this is just the point. The conception of diplomacy held by Bush and what passes for doves in the administration is an odd one. In essence, the White House is willing to give Iran a variety of opportunity to pre-emptively surrender on all issues in order to demonstrate that "diplomacy has failed" and war is necessary. What they're not willing to do is conduct diplomacy, i.e. make good-faith efforts to resolve outstanding issues in US-Iranian relations in a cooperative, mutually beneficial manner.
In essence, then, diplomacy has been taken off the table. Iran will be given time to decide whether or not it wants to surrender, and Bush will be given time to try and shape US domestic opinion in a favorable direction. The policy, however, is one of confrontation and the administration -- like Kaplan -- persists in seeing the crucial variable here as Iran's subjective assessment of American resolve.
Idle Threats
Another word on Iran. Hawkish-minded commentators seem to be observing that the Iranian regime doesn't appear especially frightened by the prospect of American air strikes. They're concluding from this what they invariably conclude from everything -- that we need to be more hawkish in our posture in order to frighten Teheran. They assume that the Iranian leadership's lack of fear is based on their estimation of our military capacities, our resolve, or something along these lines. They ought to consider another possibility -- Bush's threats aren't very scary.
American experts disagree on the extent to which air strikes can destroy or set back the Iranian nuclear program. I have no idea what anyone is basing their estimates of this question on. There's universal agreement, however, that we can't destroy everything if for no other reason than we can't be sure where everything may be. Thus, the Bush administration's démarche amounts to the following -- either abandon your nuclear program or we'll partially destroy your nuclear program. This is not a very difficult choice to make. In addition, the regime in Teheran probably believes that unilateral American strikes on Iran will create the opportunity for an enormous propaganda win for Teheran, both domestically and internationally. All else being equal, they'd prefer not to have their nuclear program even partially destroyed. But since not having the program destroyed isn't on the table, and the administration isn't putting anything else of note on the table in exchange for voluntary disarmament, it's a no-brainer to just let the bombs fall where they may.
On The Reading List
I've always been puzzled by the realignment theory of American elections. I never really studied US history or US politics at the college level, so I've never been in a position to claim to be able to assess the arguments offered pro and con for this account of things. It's clear that American political journalists act as if the political science underlying realignment theory is strong and sound. I've also always felt, based on my philosophical background, that the theory looked like a slightly absurd superstition. But who was really to say? Then I saw that one of Steve Teles' recommended books for aspiring journalists is David Mayhew's Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre of which Teles remarks:
American political journalists continue to talk as if "realignment" was still a meaningful phenomenon. Mayhew shows in this cool and clinical book that it's not, and what is more, probably never was. He also makes some very suggestive comments on what might substitute for realignment as a large-scale explanation for political change.
Sounds like a book I should read. Since it would be a prejudice-confirming book at this point, though, I suppose I should also ask the collective wisdom of the internet to recommend a book making the case for "realignment" as a phenomenon with meaningful explanatory power.
Compromise: Torture Now Legal
So it's legal analysis of the Bush-McCain War Crimes Legalization Act you want? Then why are you reading my site? Check out Marty Lederman's take which is, basically, that this is bad. New York Times editorial page says it's bad. Washington Post editorial page says it's bad. In other words, this is bad. McCain, Warner, and Graham sold out.
Which reminds me of an aphorism that I've heard various attributed to several figures from the Clinton White House -- "When someone comes to me with a plan that involves the moderate Republicans holding their ground, I tell them: 'bring me another plan.'" Sometimes, it winds up being the only plan you've got, but that way lies disappointment.
Jim Webb
I don't do many -- or even necessarily any -- posts along these lines, but it occurs to me to mention that if you've got some cash to spend on a good cause, you could do worse than donating to Jim Webb's Senate campaign. He's a good egg, a bona fide Iraq War opponent from before it was cool, who has an actual knowledge of national security policy that would be an asset to the Democratic Senate caucus and not just a vote for Harry Reid (though, of course, votes for Harry Reid are excellent things indeed). What's more, Webb has precisely the right sort of background and demeanor to separate his correct views on these issues from politically unpalatable cultural resonances. Even better, his opponent is George Allen, who's essentially pond scum in the form of a politician.
The trouble is that Webb isn't very good, personally, at fundraising. What's more, for a very long time, his race looked like a desperate long-shot that it wasn't worth pouring resources into. Recently, though, enough has come out about Allen that a Webb win is very realistic in principle. The trouble is that Allen has over ten times as much cash on hand as does Webb. Outside groups will presumably try to help Webb out, but there's only so much that can be done in that regard. Some money from readers like you will help. There are, of course, plenty of other worthy candidates out there (I like Diane Farrell, for example) but Webb's cash situation seems especially dire and the general situation in Virginia is otherwise quite favorable to the Democrats.
Religious Wars?
I'm giving up an adjectives with which to describe America's Worst Columnist, but he "observes" today that Christianity's better than Islam because "the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up." Kevin Drum remarks:
It's this kind of blithe, self-congratulatory nonsense that makes me wonder where the "clash of civilizations" crowd parks their brains. Cleverly, Krauthammer restricts himself here to "religious wars," and it's true that Christendom hasn't had a genuine religious war in quite a while. But Christendom sure as hell hasn't given up on war — not among ourselves, and not against others. Just to name a few, and just to stay within the past few decades, we have Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Malaysia, Suez, Iraq again, Greece, and Germany. And it would be easy to add a dozen more if I felt like it.
Even this, however, seems to me to concede far too much to Krauthammer. What were the Serbs and the Croats doing in the Krajina if not engaging in a bit of the old "sectarian violence?" Surely the contrasting cyrillic and roman alphabets weren't the key issue here. Yes, obviously on some level they weren't fighting about the fine points of Orthodox versus Catholic theology either, but the same is true of, say, Shiite-Sunni conflict -- it's not really about the proper successor of the prophet. Rather, sect is a key component of identity, and you have some identity-related fighting. One could also look at the attitude of the Maronite clergy during Lebanon's Civil War for a good example of a recent Christian religious war.
This is not to deny the obvious fact that there's a seemingly greater quantity of Islamic-inflected violence in the world. On the other hand, Muslims aren't mistaken in their belief that an awful lot of Muslim-populated land (the West Bank, Chechnya, Kashmir, Sinkiang, etc.) seems to be in the hands of non-Muslim states against the will of the local population. That hardly justifies many of the gross acts of violence that have been perpetrated in the name of "liberating" those territories, but it's not as if this stuff happens for no reason or because Muslims are just weirdly atavistic. Members of other religious groups (again, the Lebanese Maronites are apropos here, as are the Armenian Christians of Nagorno-Karabakh ) are by no means averse to the deployment of violence when they think this is going to be an expedient method of escaping alien domination.
Adam Morrison
A somewhat silly ESPN feature asks who the next young NBA star will be. Three panelists write about Adam Morrison. What will become of him, I couldn't say. I do notice, however, that nobody mentions Gerald Wallace in this regard. It seems to me, though, worth noting that Wallace and Morrison appear to play the same position and to be on the same team. What's more, as best I can tell, Wallace is Charlotte's best player. Since it's the Bobcats, I haven't ever actually seen them play so the "best I can tell" isn't necessarily very good. But the numbers indicate that he's very good. The Wages of Wins guys give him a WP48 rating of 0.335 which is quite high.
What's more, that's not one of these WoW idiosyncracies. John Hollinger gives him a 21.35 PER and says he's a good defender. He scores in modest quantities but very efficiently, rebounds well, and gets a lot of blocks and steals. I'm not seeing superstardom here by any means, but he's good, and it seems inherently problematic for a team to have its best prospect and its best player playing the same position.
Listen to Arianna!
Oh, Christ. Arianna Huffington notes that Democrats have somehow once again convinced themselves that "the economy" will be the key issue in the midterm elections and this is what Democratic candidates need to focus on. Pardon me while I go vomit. I mean, look, people who feel their economic circumstances are super-dire are going to vote for the Democrats one way or the other. They will, that is, unless they're convinced that voting Democratic will get their family killed by terrorists. And the latter, obviously, is what the GOP is going to say.
Nor is ducking the question going to somehow get people to fail to notice that this is what the Republicans are saying. People pay attention to that sort of thing -- it's kind of a big deal. One has to convince the voters that the Republicans are wrong about this and that, instead, the Bush administration's dangerous conduct of national security policy is imperiling the country. It's not as if the opposition party has nothing to work with here. One might note the fiasco in Iraq, for example. Or OBL's still-at-large status. Our bizarre herky-jerky stumbling into wider regional conflicts that will further take the focus off of al-Qaeda and others directly trying to kill Americans. This isn't brain surgery.
On the other hand, it's not so easy that voters are going to believe it if Democrats don't even try to make the case. What's more, ducking security fights looks weak. It looks weak because it is weak. It demonstrates a lack of confidence in the party's own ideas and people. It re-enforces everything the GOP is trying to say. Democrats need to knock this off and engage with what's pretty clearly the central issue of our time.
Update!
Ezra says the item below is based on a story that's basically inaccurate. Well . . . that makes a difference!
L'Shana Tova
Happy New Year! Went to synagogue with my local relatives, have some thoughts that are somewhat delicate and shall be shared at a later time.
American Exceptionalism
Darrin McMahon observes that "Whereas you can go to almost any small college in America and find, say, a professor or two of French or German history, you will be hard-pressed to find a professor of American history anywhere in France or Germany." Kevin Drum puts this in the "things I didn't know" file. Yesterday, I made some vague efforts to ascertain whether or not it's true, at least as applied to France where I sort of speak the language. It was a bit hard to say. At ENS one of the thirteen historians on the faculty is an Americanist.
Delving beyond that, though, I couldn't really tell what was going on. The truth of the matter is that the American system of higher education and the French system of higher education are very different so I don't even know what a valid comparison would be.
[Expletive Deleted]
Good to see macho posturing coming to the Department of Education. Lurking inside this Inspector General's report (PDF):
Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR, never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags.
Via Andrew Rotherham.
Torture as Investigation
Vladimir Bukovsky:
Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.
It goes on, including tales of Bukovsky's own experiences as a victim of Soviet torture and deserves to be read in its entirety. But this here is essentially the key point at hand. While you can obviously imagine or gerrymander or stipulate a situation in which torture might yield useful information, in practice the systematic authorization of torture creates an army of butchers, not a crack investigative team. Bush, Cheney, and those around them remind me of Nietzsche's line about staring too long into the abyss. They've become transfixed, hypnotized almost, by the evils they believe themselves to be fighting. Obsessed to the point where they've clearly developed an admiration for the brutal methods, ruthless dishonesty, and utter secrecy with which the enemies of liberalism conduct themselves.
But these things they're so eager -- determined, really -- to cast aside aren't frivolous luxury to be abandonned in times of peril. They're the very essence of what makes our system of government work. They're what makes it worth preserving, as a matter of ethics, but also as a matter of practice vital to the preservation of our way of life. Liberal democracy isn't a fluke occurrence that just so happens to have survived despite its drawbacks. It's actually a superior method of organizing a state. The idea that the country is being run by people who don't understand that is sad and frightening. The idea that the very same people claim to be embarked upon a grand mission to spread our system of government around the world is like a horrible tawdry joke, but doubly frightening in its own way.
Fake Inconsistency
I have various points of agreement and various points of disagreement with this review, but let me note its deployment of one of the world's most annoying rhetorical tropes:
Recall how during the 1990s, it was taboo in liberal circles in the United States, Canada, or Western Europe even to suggest that the Balkan wars might be the result of centuries-old ethnic hatreds. That was wicked conservative realism voiced by morally indifferent Republicans such as Brent Scowcroft, and denounced with eloquence by progressive internationalists such as Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power. I made speeches to this effect myself when I worked for Human Rights Watch – insisting, with Kantian moral certainty, that wars are never ascribable to ancient ethnic hatreds (Yugoslavia), and that there can be no peace without justice (Sierra Leone), and that impunity always rebounds (Chile). The progressive position was that ascribing the Yugoslav wars to ancient ethnic hatreds rather than the manipulations of present-day politicians was an immoral and cynical ploy to avoid getting involved. Today, on the other hand, a card-carrying liberal realist such as the Democratic Party’s Kos Moulitsas can write, “It’s clear that in the Middle East, no one is sick of the fighting. They have centuries of grudges to resolve, and will continue fighting until they can get over them”.
Ha, ha -- that crazy left, always changing its mind! But, look, Samantha Powers, Michael Ignatieff, and "the Democratic Party's Kos Moulitsas" are different people. By contrast, there are only two political parties. Consequently, a bunch of people who are all "liberals" or "Democrats" or what have you are bound to disagree about a bunch of things. For evidence that people are changing their minds, or changing their tunes, or becoming hypocrites, you need to identity actual individuals who changed their minds, not different people disagreeing with each other.
Now With Data
David Bell offers up some information on France's alleged ignorance of American history: "Of the roughly 100 French universities and graduate centers in the humanities, fewer than ten presently employ any historians of the United States at all. The principal French center for North American history, CENA, currently has 46 members and associates, of whom less than a third hold full-time faculty appointments. By contrast, the North American Society for French Historical Studies has 886 members, of whom the large majority hold full-time faculty appointments teaching the history of France."
France's population, conveniently, is almost exactly one fifth of the United States' so it's easy to see that even when you scale up, NASFHS is substantially larger than CENA. On the other hand, I believe CENA is an actual institution (like Harvard's Center for European Studies) rather than a professional association, so I'm not sure how comparable this is at the end of the day. But, to return to my original point, French higher education and American higher education are so different that it's hard to know how to generate legitimate comparisons. Generally speaking, though, American higher education is widely regarded as the best in the world along a variety of dimensions, so it shouldn't be surprising to see that American universities really do cover France substantially better than French universities cover America.
The flipside would be that at the primary and secondary level, French kids seem to receive a pretty strong level of instruction in the English language, whereas American foreign language education is famously weak.
Da Bulls
Chris Mannix comes forward with a bold proposition: The Chicago Bulls will win an NBA championship in the coming season. It's a bold prediction, but not one that he seems to have supported with very much argument. I agree with him that we can expect to see the team improve considerably, but it's worth keeping the baseline in mind. The 2006 Bulls were a mediocre team at best, putting up a .500 record in the weaker conference. They were good defensively, but at sixth in the league not super good. And they were actually quite poor (22nd out of 30) on offense. Nothing they've done this offseason looks to me likely to dramatically improve the offense, and even if you think adding Ben Wallace would suddenly make them the best defensive team in the league a championship seems like a longshot.
I think that were one to be inclined to make a preseason wager, the smart bet is for a Miami repeat. Not necessarily because they're the best team in the league. But I expect the post-Wallace Pistons to decline quite a bit, and don't think anyone else in the East has improved to that level. So of the top four teams in the league, three (Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio) are all in the West which winds up making Miami's odds look pretty good.
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