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October 8, 2006 - October 14, 2006 Archives
Let There Be News
Do the financial problems and looming editorial cutbacks at The Los Angeles Times signal a giant social problem as we become a news-poor society? Michael O'Hare makes the case. Personally, I tend to take an optimistic view of the technology-driven decline of the newspapering business model. The thing of it is that the very same IT developments that are killing newspapers also make it possible for newspapers to have much broader reach in terms of the sheer number of people for whom it's convenient to read them. On the internet it's a simple matter to habitually scan the front pages of three or four different major papers. It's also a simple matter to go read a newspaper published in England or Australia or South Africa or Lebanon or Singapore if you happen to have reason to believe that it'll contain something you're interested in.
In other words, the world could move to a state where there are orders of magnitude fewer papers than their used to be but wherein individual consumers actually have substantially more news sources they can draw from in practice.
The fly in the ointment, on this optimistic take, is local news. Really big cities will probably be okay. And residents of medium-sized cities should have better national and world news options than ever before. But who's going to be the guy who does investigative reporting into government corruption in a medium-sized city? I couldn't really say. Local news websites like DCist are a valuable contribution to our media ecology, but much like political blogs they don't really seem able to substitute for the core news-gathering function of a local paper. One possibility is that this is an area where we're going to have to hope to see some philanthropic activity; NPR provides a partial model for a heavyweight, somewhat decentralized news-gathering non-profit operation.
Fighting al-Sadr
I keep wondering about this and keep not seeing any reporting on it, but when, exactly, did we make the policy shift that the United States is at war with Muqtada al-Sadr's militia again? As you'll recall, there was a period when we weren't fighting his forced. Then there was a period when we were fighting his forces. Then there was a settlement and we weren't fighting. Then his political party participated in the elections and even took seats in the Iraqi cabinet. But now we, along with Iraqi government troops, are fighting him again. When did this happen? And why? I'm not criticizing, per se, but I'd like to know what's going on and I'd think people would be more interested in this sort of subject. Instead, you still hear talk about "succeeding" or "failing" in Iraq but it's not obvious what the administration is even trying to do.
Partition?
We're seeing a renewal of talk about partitioning Iraq, with the London Times reporting that the Baker commission likes the idea. Kevin Drum and Juan Cole vote "no." I think there's a very fundamental problem with this policy, namely that Iraq isn't our country to partition. "We" simply aren't in a position to decide whether or not this should be done, you'd need a real Iraqi consensus in favor of the idea and it would need to be negotiated out by Iraqi political leaders.
Nick Kristof offers up a more appealing suggestion -- listen to the Iraqis and do what they want, commit to leaving the country in a relatively near future. This could very well generate a mess, but it is what Iraqis want to see happen, and any alternative is essentially guaranteed to generate a mess under circumstances where Iraqis want us to leave.
Going for It
Giants-Redskins game has now featured not one but two plays where offenses faced fourth and short in opposition territory, elected to try field goals, and then . . . missed the field goal. The Redskins' version of this was especially egregious since it was fourth and one and they were down thirteen points. Attempting longish field goals when you could be going for shortish fourth down conversions really doesn't seem to me to make much sense outside of specialized end-of-game situations; a missed field goal is such a bad outcome in terms of field positions that I'm not even sure this qualifies as playing it safe.
Blast From the Past
Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie, "Back Iraq: It's Time for a U.S. Tilt", The New Republic, April 27, 1987.
Nukes for the North
North Korea conducts a nuclear test and America's non-proliferation policy is officially a mess. At this point, there are two kinds of questions one can ask. One set is about non-proliferation policy as such and what one needs to do to get it back on track. Another specifically concerns North Korea. When we were talking DPRK on BloggingHeads, Dan Drezner made the point that there actually are a couple of steps that could be taken that really would stand a decent chance of bringing the Pyongyang regime to the breaking point, namely an end to the money coming in from South Korea under the "sunshine policy" and a shift in Chinese policy aimed at facilitating, rather than preventing, DPRK residents from crossing the border into China.
The trouble is that nobody especially wants to see the North Korean regime actually collapse. Certainly the South Koreans aren't looking forward to needing to assume responsibility for a relatively large and incredibly impoverished country. The reuinification of Germany has created a lot of economic and social problems for the former West Germany, and this would be like that situation on steroids. China, meanwhile, isn't enthusiastic about the idea of giant cross-border refugee flows. The issue for US policymakers then becomes whether there's anything we might be able to offer in terms of assistance that would make Seoul and Beijing more comfortable with ending their efforts to prop up North Korea's government, and whether that's something we would actually want to offer.
Similarly, would we actually want to see North Korea collapse, or would that make the nuclear situation even worse since, presumably, we don't want to see those weapons and material floating around.
Happy Columbus Day!
The concept of the long weekend has questionable meaning when you don't really have a job, but everyone likes a holiday nonetheless. These days, Washigton, DC overwhelmingly presents itself to the world as a northeastern city rather than a southern one. Traditionally, however, that's not been the case; a phenomenon which is represented on days like this one. Real northeastern cities -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. -- are all deeply marked by the legacy of "white ethnic" immigration from the pre-1920s era of high immigration. Cities like that, as a consequence, have genuine Irish-American traditions on St. Patrick's Day and Italian-American ones on Columbus Day. But in a town that doesn't have a Little Italy or a North End, Columbus Day signifies nothing.
Euston in America
Jeffrey Herf on the Open University blog announces the launch of NewAmericanLiberalism.org, a rather crudely HTMLed offshoot of the Euston Manifesto project designed, as Herf puts it, to call for "a 'new political alignment' among those ranging from the democratic left to 'egalitarian liberals.'"
In addition to the co-authors, the now 178 signers include many people who are closely associated with The New Republic, notably Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, past and recent contributors such as Daniel Bell, David Bell, Walter Laqueur, Daniel Goldhagen, Robert Leiken, Benny Morris, and Ronald Radosh, and a host of other very distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and policy analysts too long to be included here but readily available on the websites. The full list of signers is at the website.
An awful lot of these people seem to me to just be rightwingers, a stratnge starting point for a reconstruction of American liberalism.
Battlestar: Iraq
Obviously, like all decent people I wasn't around the house watching television when the season premiere of Battlestar: Galactica aired Friday not. Less obviously, I forgot to DVR it and I thought all was lost. Fortunately, someone or other decided to mail Spencer screener DVDs of the first two or three episodes, so I was able to watch the premiere yesterday. Rather hilariously, what they sent out didn't have all the special effects completed, so you'd repeatedly see on-screen text like "VFX: Raptor Landing" or "VFX: Explosions." Nevertheless, I think I understood what was going on.
It's pretty bold of them to have gone down the path of offering up such a straightforward Iraq analogy. In particular, they've done what really nobody's been willing to do in American politics which is try to cast a sympathetic eye on the insurgency. Of course, this is easier to do allegorically where you get a chance to paper over the fact that the Iraqi insurgency's substantive ideas about the nature of a just Iraqi state are rather repugnant. Nevertheless, I think it does do a good job of capturing the basic logic of occupation and rebellion. The cylons say they're seizing control of New Caprica for humanity's own good.
But who on the human side is going to believe them, especially given their past history (and note the USA's previous support for Saddam's regime, betrayal of the '91 intifada, decades-long indifference to the question of Arab democracy, view of Israel-Palestine universally regarded as anti-Arab by Arabs)? So people fight back. So the cylons fight back in turn. But cylon efforts to tighten their control merely reenforces their pre-existing bad image. The insurgents have much more leeway in adopting extreme tactics because they're not an alien force. They have a presumption of legitimacy while the occupiers have a presumption of illegitimacy. That Baltar is, in fact, the democratically elected leader of the Colonies is neither here nor there, for the simple fact of collaboration with the occupiers trumps the legitimacy of elections.
Get Clear
Via Greg Djerejian, a classic up-is-down moment from Team Bush: "Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's grip on power."
Or, more briefly, the failure of our policies demonstrates the need to adhere to our policies more rigidly. It's like we're being ruled by the cast of a Twighlight Zone episode.
White Power?
For arguably the first time, the city politics plotline really took center stage in last night's Wire with a continued focus on the way Carcetti's campaign is being aided by his friends in the Baltimore Police Department. Consistent with the spirit of season four so far, racial issues have been brought to the foreground in a way they weren't in earlier seasons, as I think we're pretty clearly supposed to see Major Valchek as motivated primarily by a desire to see one of his own in City Hall. From Valchek's perspective as, in essence, a dead-ender as commander of the Southeastern District, that seems to make sense. He's a pissy old man, entrenched in his position, but without hope of future advancement, so he can indulge his whims. Deputy Chief Rawls' pro-Carcetti sentiments, on the other hand, strike me as difficult to understand.
Rawls, presumably, would like to be commissioner. It seems to me that, logically, Carcetti is the last candidate who's going to be in a position to make that happen. As keeps being emphasized, his only hope of winning is for Tony Gray to split the black vote. Under the circumstances, to secure re-election, Carcetti's going to need to seriously bolster his support from African-Americans. Meanwhile, his law-and-order campaign is walking a knife's edge. On the one hand, the inner-city poor are the primary victims of crime so his emphasis on those issues gives him some access to that constituency. On the other hand, African-American voters tend (with reason) to be suspicious that efforts to mobilize concern about crime are, in practice, just part of the politics of white supremacy. Firing a black police commissioner to replace him with a white one would be a fiasco. Burrell, by contrast, has ample wiggle-room to reward supporters (see, e.g., Herc) irrespective of race.
If Conditionals Were Ponies
Fareed Zakaria's through with the Iraq War and says it's time to pack up and start heading home. Andrew Sullivan comments "I'm not there yet and willing to give the military one last try, if Rumsfeld is fired and a serious new plan for regaining control is unveiled." Personally, I'm willing to buy a $2 million townhouse if someone gives me $2 million to buy a house with. What does this mean? It's an escapist fantasy, not a position on the issues.
Rumsfeld isn't going to be fired and Bush has made his Iraq policy clear -- leaving is losing, so we'll just stay and people will keep dying. One can support that policy or one can cast one's lot with the opposition, but the leopard isn't going to change its spots and devise a magical new plan for victory.
Crude . . . It's a Compliment
Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn't been kept up to the Chriatian White standard. The she turned the disruptor off.
"Two million," I said.
"My kind of man," she said, and laughed. "What's in the bag?"
"A shotgun."
"Crude." It might have been a compliment. That's William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" and I like it. Smart, articulate, clever people are sometimes so smart, articulate, and clever that they fail to see that sometimes crude solutions are the best ones. Which I mention by way of introducing Ann Friedman's column on "The Byline Gender Gap". She's hardly the first person to have noticed that even in the progressive media there seem to be very few women publishing things. Nor does she have an especially novel analysis of why this is the case. Indeed -- and here's where the meritorious crudeness starts to come into play -- she doesn't do much analysis of why it's the case at all. She just sees a big problem and proposes a crude solution: "I've come to believe that a target percentage for women's bylines should be set in the editorial policies of each publication, at least in the short term."
I think she's right. This is obviously not the most abstractly elegant fix, but I don't think resolutions to do better in the future will have much impact unless they result in a reasonably clear operational rule of the sort suggested here.
The Root of Evil
With Iraq a shambles, North Korean testing a nuclear device, and Iran pursuing uranium enrichment, The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler and Peter Baker revisit the "axis of evil" speech. They underplay, however, the extent to which the speech isn't merely an ironic reminder of what a bad president Bush is, but was actually constitutive of Bushian badness. Usually, a speech is just a speech, but this was an exception. At the time, it was widely understood that the administration was contemplating a war to depose Saddam Hussein. Under the circumstances, lumping Iran and the DPRK in with Iraq as an "axis of evil" played as a weirdly diffuse and nonspecific threat to overthrow the governments in Teheran and Pyongyang. A threat that we had no capacity to carry out in the short term. This precipatated the recent round of nuclear crisis in North Korea and managed to undermine some then-ongoing cooperation with Iran on Taliban and al-Qaeda issues that stood some chance of leading to a broader rapprochment.
What's more, as "axis of evil" apologists like Michael Rubin make clear, plunging the world into crisis and closing off diplomatic options was part of the plan. "Clinton administration attempts to engage the Taliban and the North Korean regime were folly. Any attempt to do likewise with Iran would be equally inane. Certain regimes cannot be appeased." And, clearly, it's true that some men you just can't reach, but why should we think this phenomenon has suddenly become so widespread? And why not try? The Clinton administration's efforts to pursuade the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden didn't work, but it was surely worth a shot, especially at a time when full-fledged war just wasn't on the table as an option.
If it comes to war in the end, then good-faith efforts to resolve outstanding issues without war are integral to giving the war legitimacy. In the North Korean case, Clinton's policy was working pretty damn well. It led to a non-ideal outcome, but things got much worse when we tried things Bush's way. Cooperating with Iran, similarly, was paying dividends until we stopped trying it. Similarly, we reached a perfectly reasonable negotiated settlement with Libya even under Bush. It's regime change as panacea that's worked really, really, really poorly. It'd be nice if this worked -- snap your fingers and get a better regime -- but it doesn't work, and not seeing that is just dumb.
I'm So Bored With the DPRK
Nevertheless, Eric Alterman, excerpting from one of his books, has a good rundown of the Bushies long-running fuckup of this policy issue. To some extent, pointing fingers is neither here nor there since we can't just go back in time, but when you have outcomes as bad as the ones these guys are generating, it really is vitally important to note that the country is wrestling with extremely thorny problems that have gotten so thorny overwhelmingly because of George W. Bush's appallingly poor leadership. Demands will be raised for Democrats to offer up brilliantly appealing solutions, but as on Iraq there are no brilliantly appealing solutions left precisely because the GOp has done such a bad job.
ADL Overboard
Todd Gitlin's take on the Anti-Defamation League's shameful efforts to intimidate people out of hosting a talk by Tony Judt is probably the best one I've read. Again, for the record, I think Judt's espousal of binationalism for Israel-Palestine is fairly daft. Still, he's a smart, well-respected guy, people are rightly interested in what he has to say, and reasonable people would just let him speak. It's especially noteworthy -- and unfortunate -- that this is the ADL we're talking about here which is not really an "Israel lobby" institution, as such. It's a bit of a sensitive subject to raise, but I get a sense that over the past few years the ADL has been wrestling with the problem that there's arguably too little anti-semitism in the United States to justify the existence of an organization of its size dedicated to combatting it. But the staff and leadership need to do something all day, so they've started fighting phantom anti-semitism in the form of vigorous criticism of Israel.
The conflation of anti-semitism with "has political opinions I disagree with" is, however, unlikely to prove Good for the Jews in the long run. Lurking somewhere in this Spine post is the notion that Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter are, not too left-wing, but . . . anti-semites. This I find to be a ludicrous notion. Political disputes are just that, political disputes. Meanwhile, I've never really understood why Carter is so loathed in "pro-Israel" circles; it seems to me that the Camp David Accords and attendant arrangements have been an unambiguous boon to Israel -- I never seem to see Carter-haters suggesting a return to the previous situation. Israel should be so lucky as to have more American presidents engaged with the conflict in such a constructive way. Bush has been much more "supportive" of Israel, but what's actually been accomplished?
What Would John McCain Do?
My assumption has been that if John McCain becomes President of the United States this would be an improvement over George W. Bush in some respects but not on the topic of national security policy where, if anything, McCain seems to be a more committed militarist than Bush. John Judis, who despite the TNR affiliation has sound views on such things, writes "I have liked John McCain ever since I met him almost a decade ago" and finds him a relatively congenial politician, nevertheless, he's very much opposed to McCain's current foreign policy views:
And therein lies my McCain dilemma--and, perhaps, yours. If, like me, you believe that the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, then you are likely disturbed by McCain's early and continuing support for it--indeed, he advocates sending more troops to that strife-torn land--and by his advocacy of an approach to Iran that could lead to another fruitless war. At the same time, he has shown an admirable willingness to reevalute his views when events have proved them wrong. The question, then, comes down to this: Is John McCain capable of changing his mind about a subject very close to his heart--again?
Judis ends up being fairly inconclusive on this question. My initial instinct when the I read the piece late last week was to say that I didn't see any particular reason to think McCain was likely to change his mind. Interestingly, however, I was at a Cato event today where two different old-school Republican realists seemed very optimistic that McCain might shift and adopt the much more reasonable views of his friend Chuck Hagel. Again, I don't really understand what the basis for this belief is, but it's undoubtedly in the air and something to keep an eye on over the next couple of years.
Point of Clarification
This here is actually an onion-chopping incident from when Spencer was cooking fajitas for the house. Catherine went to Rite Aid to secure the bandages, while I took over chopping duty and Spencer demonstrated tremendous professionalism by grilling the beef without dripping blood on it. A delicious time was had by all. Just another slice of life from the exciting world of professional political journalism.
If We Build It, Will People Stop Paying Attention?
I think the idea of building a giant wall across our southern border doesn't make very much sense. For one thing, I simply disagree with those who think we have a serious "too many Mexicans" problem in this country. Insofar as we do have a "too much lawlessness" problem related to the large number of illegal immigrants living here, I favor some form of "earned amnesty" as the most humane and economically reasonable method of regularizing the situation. Insofar as one is interested in seriously reducing the number of illegal immigrants, the thing that's needed is not a physical barrier but a well-designed system of employer penalties. People are coming here to get jobs, and if you can make it so employers don't want to offer the jobs to illegals, people will stop coming illegally.
Meanwhile, a wall is very unlikely to be effective. The country has a coastline, people overstay visas, you can hide people in the back of trucks, etc. People build walled borders to keep their citizens locked in, not as a method of immigration control. Meanwhile, the expense will be huge -- this is a very large wall indeed that we're talking about. On the other hand, like Tyler Cowen I can't help but wonder if a large, ineffective wall might be the best possible outcome for pro-immigration people at this point. It wouldn't really work, but it would sharply diminish political pressure to "do something" about immigration. Meanwhile, as a liberal I don't really have a problem with the idea of an enormous wasteful construction project. It's like a WPA-style jobs programs. And, of course, all the building trades work just north of the border will probably attract a lot of immigrants.
Birth Pangs
A new epidemiological study by Iraqi and American public health experts sponsored by Johns Hopkins and published in the Lancet has concluded that there have been 655,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq since the American invasion. Kevin Drum reminds us that an earlier methodologically similar study that also came to striking conclusions about the death toll was widely dismissed by hawkish pundits and the establishment press, but none of their objections actually held any water. Kevin also runs the numbers so we can see that of these 655,000 deaths about 186,000 -- 4,700 per month -- were killed by coalition forces or airstrikes.
That, obviously, is a lot. And it ought to be sobering to anyone who still thinks of this as an operation that's justifiable on anything remotely resembling humanitarian grounds, or that people who oppose the war can somehow be accused of indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people. This is a ghastly level of death under any circumstances, but it's rendered all the more horrifying by the extreme self-righteousness with which it's all been undertaken.
Libertarian Democrats
I thought I might comment a bit on Markos' "libertarian democrats" concept since, technically, abstract political theory is actually what I know about. But let me start off with a little political analysis. Insofar as we're talking about attracting libertarian voters, I think the case that libertarians should vote Democratic in 2006 is ironclad. A Pelosi-led House of representatives, and to a lesser extent a Reid-led Senate, would provide more of an obstacle to the Bush administration's imperialist instincts than the reverse. Either would offer some oversight of the executive branch and to some extent curb Bush's taste for gross abuses of power. Neither would really be in a position to enact any grandiose economic policy plans. So Q.E.D., as I see it. For the future, though, it's just going to depend on circumstances.
Meanwhile, I don't see any reason to believe it would be smart for a major political party to deliberately aim at the votes of some libertarian constituency. The reason is that, to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion. We're not literally talking about zero people, I know some of them, and some write blogs, but it's genuinely a rounding error in the scheme of things. You do have some people who adhere to the Economist-style center-right politics of the American elite consensus, and this view has some similarities with libertarianism, but this genuinely is an elite consensus voting bloc rather than a libertarian one. It's also not seriously accessible to the Democrats over the long-run because a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists. It's worth understanding that, at the end of the day, there's much less libertarianism in American society than people sometimes think.
Continue reading "Libertarian Democrats" »
International Height Gap
Mark Cuban's addressing big picture issues about the globalization of basketball here, and I don't have time to decide what I think about his views, but this is an interesting observation: "If you look at NBA rosters and estimate that there will be about international 75 players that make team rosters, in glancing at that list, fewer than 10 are under 6'5."
Why would that be? Best guess is that the bulk of athletically talented people in the 6-6.5 feet range are encouraged to try to become tall soccer players rather than short basketball players. Once you get into the super-tall height ranges then even in Europe the bulk of athletically gifted people are encouraged to give hoops a try. This reminds me of something I've often been curious about. How many people in the world are over seven feet tall? And how many of those people are between the ages of, say, twenty and thirty? And out of that group of 20-30 year-old seven footers, what proportion are playing professional basketball in one league or another?
The Bus
For some reason, in today's offering Tom Friedman decided to write a totally coherent argument and then just tack one of his signature baffling mixed metaphors on at the end, rather than weaving it through the whole story. Friedman's main point is charmingly correct -- a lot of the problems we're grappling with would suddenly become much easier to solve if we were getting whole-hearted cooperation from China and Russia rather than extremely grudging semi-cooperation. Unfortunately, Friedman doesn't provide much of a solution except for exhortation. He wants "China and Russia [to] get their act together and understand that [widespread nuclear proliferation] is a much bigger threat to their prosperity than a post-cold-war world in which U.S. power is pre-eminent" and for "Russia and China [to] get over their ambivalence about U.S. power." Clearly, though, this isn't going to happen merely from us asking them impolitely. After all, ambivalence about US power is a natural thing for Russia and China to feel.
We're very powerful. And our basic story about why other countries shouldn't worry that our massive power will imperil their interests is "trust us -- we're the good guys." But the things we do don't always seem good to other governments. And, indeed, "being good" is sometimes bad for other governments. If you were in charge of the Chinese Communist Party, you probably wouldn't find talk about the United States spreading freedom and democracy around the world especially reassuring.
The upshot is that we're bound to be more concerned about proliferation than the Russians or the Chinese are. For us, it's an unambiguous bad. For them, it has its upsides and its downsides. But we could really use their cooperation. The question becomes what, in practice, would it take for us to get that cooperation and then are we willing to offer it? Importantly, it means we're going to need to set priorities. How much do we care about Taiwan? How committed are we to keeping the door open to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. If giving up on those kind of things could genuinely secure Sino-Russian cooperation on Iran, North Korea, and al-Qaeda is that a good deal, or a bad one?
"When The War Came"
Fans of the Decemberists will by no means be disappointed by their new offering The Crane Wife. Non-fans, on the other hand, probably won't find anything to turn their views around. For my part, I'm a fan. It's schtick, but it's good schtick. Never one to miss a good political tune, I thought I might as well highlight this part of "When The War Came"
A terrible autonomy
Is grafted onto you and me
A trust put in the government
Is all their lies are heaven sent
'Til the war came
'Til the war came
Or, to put it more shrilly, Bush lied, thousands died.
Some Random Links
- Gilbert Arenas is weird. The thing about the burgers and the thing about sleeping on the couch are especially odd.
- George Soros has a new good cause.
- Alex Beam quotes me in a funny piece.
The Libertarian Vote
David Boaz, executive vice president at Cato, and my friend David Kirby have a new study out on "The Libertarian Vote" that, in direct contradiction to what I said yesterday, purports to demonstrate that there's a largish libertarian constituency -- 9 to 14 percent of the population -- and that it's a persuadable constituency both parties should be trying to compete for.
I find this pretty unconvincing. The trouble is that the poll question they're basing their work on are incredibly generic. Things like "Some people think the government is trying to do too many thingaygs that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country's problems. Which comes closer to your view?" America is famous, however, for having voters who want "small government" but don't actually want to shrink any major government programs. Lots of people may think the government "does too much." Cutting Social Security benefits, however, is very unpopular. So is cutting defense spending. The number of people who want to cut both is actually quite small. For fairly obvious reasons, there isn't much public demad for "more government" as such. Instead, there's appetite for specific governmet initiatives and the government gets "big" because the initiatives add up.
Blaming Bill
The big new GOP talking point is that we should ignore George W. Bush's massive and evident policy failures in North Korea and instead . . . blame Bill Clinton who hasn't been in office in six years and under whose administration the DPRK wasn't building nuclear bombs. Fred Kaplan lays the smack down.
Community of Democracies
Over at TPM Cafe, they're discussing the Princeton Project of National Security's final report. In his trenchant critiques I think Stephen Walt makes a few good points, but is also being somewhat unfair and John Ikenberry's reply is pretty convincing. The real problem I have with the PPNS report is its idea of a Community of Democracies. I could imagine supporting versions of this idea but the PPNS has some suggestions that I think are seriously pernicious. In particular, Appendix A of the report suggests that "Action pursuant to article four and consistent with the purposes of the United Nations, including the use of military force, may be approved by a two-thirds majority of the parties." Article 4, meanwhile, says "The Parties recognize that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe – mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberative starvation and exposure to disease – but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the international community."
To many liberals, this is going to sound nice. Nevertheless, it's going to play as an anti-Chinese, anti-Arab, anti-Russian military alliance and we can expect the excluded countries to respond accordingly. This goes back to what I was saying yesterday about priorities. The problem this is designed to address, presumably, is that authoritarian countries, especially Russia and China, can use their power at the UN to block authorization for humanitarian military interventions. Without denying that this is a problem in the world, I don't think that it makes sense to think of it as the problem.
On much more pressing issues for American security, we could really, really use the cooperation of Russia, China, and the Arab states. Issues like nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea and trying to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict. If we want cooperation from these states on our top priorities, that's going to mean we need to defer to them on issues that are less important to us. The Community of Democracies, in this formulation, is the exact reverse, creating a new fault-line in the international community and essentially saying that we regard these countries as second-class members of the world order who would be smart to obstruct our designs.
Captain Trips
It's one of my hopes that, someday, I'll be able to say in good faith that Democrats have sound views on my pet cause of intellectual property law. Today, however, this pops up in my inbox:
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leadership, and senior members of the Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to President Bush today calling for immediate action to promote and safeguard American intellectual property (IP) around the world. The Democrats made the case that cracking down on piracy and theft of American IP is critical to restoring economic growth, creating jobs and shrinking the trade deficit.
Some of this relates, according to the press release, to counterfeit auto parts and since I don't even really know what that means I'm not going to say Pelosi's wrong about it. As it pertains to software, music, and movie piracy, however, she's all wet. Developing countries have always had weaker IP protections than rich ones. Certainly, the United States had very weak IP in its early days. That's simply a rational response to the objective situation. Now it's arguably true that the contemporary situation (internet and so forth) calls for globally uniform intellectual property rules. But there's no way that we should achieve that goal by having everyone adopt US IP policy. Our current IP regime is too strict for the United States, and from the perspective of developing countries optimal policy would be even weaker than what would be optimal for the United States.
The problem is that the WTO/TRIPS process has been captured by a handful of large first world companies and is propounding a set of rules that don't reflect the interests of average Americans or average Europeans much less average Chinese people. I'm not, in general, a critic of the free trade concept, but the multilateral trade regime has become increasingly focused on this business (which, despite the name, is only "trade-related" in the loosest possible sense) rather than the lowering of barriers to the exchange of goods and service. Really the only mitigating factor is that they've names the global IP agreement TRIPS, making it reminiscent of Captain Trips, the deadly plague that wipes out humanity in The Stand.
Baker-Hamilton
This is interesting. Apparently, the Baker-Hamilton Commission is proposing that the administration choose between one of two options for forward-looking Iraq policy, either of which would be an improvement over the current situation. One of the members or staffers of the commission, however, doesn't seem to have liked this idea at all so he leaked the plans to Eli Lake who spins the commission's proposals as "rul[ing] out the prospect of victory for America" a framing for them that makes it much more politically difficult for the president to adopt Baker-Hamilton ideas.
Warner Out
So . . . turns out Mark Warner's not running for president. The announcement leads, rather shockingly, to a good point from J-Pod who I think is correct to believe that Virginia-based politicians attract disproportionate buzz due to their proximity to Washington, DC. In particular, a really large proportion of "Washington" insiders actually live in Virginia and are these guys' constituents.
How To Out Without Really Trying
K-Lo: AWFUL POST[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
The reporter here in the Washington Post this morning seems to be insinuating that these staffers are a gay couple — but he doesn't actually say so. If that is not the case, it's outrageous to insinuate.The three — chief of staff Scott Palmer, deputy chief of staff Mike Stokke and counsel Ted Van Der Meid — have formed a palace guard around Hastert (R-Ill.) for years, attaining great degrees of power and unusual autonomy to deal with matters of politics, policy and House operations. They are also remarkably close. Palmer and Stokke have been with Hastert for decades. They live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse and commute back to Illinois on weekends.
In all honesty, if she hadn't mentioned it, it wouldn't have occurred to me to read that as an "insinuation" that Palmer and Stokke are a gay couple. They're roommates. It's unusual for older people to have that sort of situation and, therefore, it seems like a sufficiently noteworthy fact to put in an article. And, yes, now that she points it out, I suppose one might think they were lovers. When my roommate and I lived in a two bedroom rowhouse, people sometimes mistook us for a gay couple. Not being bigots, we didn't take that to be "outrageous to insinuate." Rather, it was a misunderstanding. These things happen.
PNAC Democrats
In a TAP Online article published yesterday, Michael Lind devises a term worth putting into circulation -- "PNAC Democrats" -- to describe Democrats who sometimes agree to sign letters written and circulated by neoconservative clearinghouse the Project for a New American Century. This is a mode of behavior that, I think, has to stop. Unlike Lind, I don't think it's the case that anyone who signed any of these letters is, ipso facto, a full-bore neocon himself. Some of the things their letters say are defensible. Nevertheless, signing them is not defensible.
When PNAC Democrats like Peter Beinart, Ivo Daalder, Michele Flournoy, Will Marshall, Michael O'Hanlon, and James Steinberg do something like sign PNAC's letter on the need for more American ground forces they serve to further cement the notion that people like Frank Gaffney, Bill Kristol, Cliff May, Daniel McKivegan, Danielle Pletka, and Gary Schmitt should be taken seriously as authorities on national security policy. Well, they shouldn't be taken seriously. And nobody serious about improving America's national security should be publicly collaborating with them.
Black Coffee
Everyone admired George Kennan and his famous "long telegram" and, indeed, everyone wants to be the George Kennan of the post 9/11 era. One thing that's little noted, however, about Kennan's piercingly insightful essay on how the United States should structure its policy toward Russia was that it was written by America's ambassador to the USSR who was, in turn, a longtime specialist on Russian and Eastern European issues, and his analysis was based on deep engagement with and knowledge of Russia and the Soviet Union. In other words, as US policymakers turned from a focus on Germany (World War II) to a focus on Russia (the Cold War) they turned to Russia experts for their insights. One might have expected something similar to happen after 9/11, but it didn't, overwhelmingly because what longtime students of the Middle East had to say wasn't convenient for the pre-existing political agendas of America's bipartisan national security elite. Instead of getting analyses representing the range of views actually existing in the field, we got Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, two people ready to tell policymakers what they wanted to hear.
This is all by way of lengthy introduction to Qahwa Sada ("Black Coffee") "a new blog-journal by Middle East experts, edited by Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark." Lynch and his blog have been an invaluable resource for me as I've tried to understand these issues and he has a great roster of contributors lined up. I expect it to become a must-read resource.
Technical Problems
My computer's making an odd buzzing noise; got an appointment to have it checked out at 7PM but I warn you it might stop functioning at any moment, leaving the blog post-less for a little while.
More Lancet
Daniel Davies has your ultimate refutation of critics of the Hopkins/Lancet study of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the invasion:
That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
As Davies says, the only way the survey could be giving us the wrong answer on the qualitative question is if the study is fraudulent. Maybe the survey respondents didn't really say what the Hopkins team said they said. But that's a very serious charge to bring against serious professionals and not one folks should be tossing around in the total absence of any evidence just because it would be politically convenient for them for the study to be somehow mistaken.
UPDATE: See also DeLong.
Teh Funny
The War of the Words: The Story of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders a new documentary now on the internet near you. Part one; Part two. Further installments forthcoming.
Via Ezra Klein.
A Question of Motives
Fresh from identifying Jimmy Carter, architect of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and Michael Moore (who, not to get too anti-semitic about it, obviously deals with a lot of Jews working in the movie business) as anti-semites, Martin Peretz lashes out at the "questionable motives" (presumably anti-semitism) underlying recent efforts by George Soros and Mort Halperin to push America's Israel policy in a more constructive direction:
I did at least once hear [Soros] say that victims often end up as persecutors. It was clear what he meant. Actually, he stated it quite directly. Victims of the Nazis turned out to be tormentors of the Arabs. He was a little surprised that some in the audience booed. Well he also held different views from others in the crowd, many of them Holocaust survivors, about Jewish history during and after it.
Now look here, Soros is a Holocaust survivor, too, so one might think we could lay the Auschwitz card aside when debating the merits of his views. Meanwhile, in TNR's non-virtual pages, Leon Wieseltier explains that Tony Judt also hates the Jews. What with anti-semitism being so rampant even among Jewish intellectuals and financiers it's a wonder we've managed to survive for thousands of years.
Bush: Reality is Unacceptable
Jeffrey Smith in The Washington Post: "In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions." Unfortunately, he doesn't actually have any plans to cope with any of these "unacceptable" problems beyond railing at the skies. And the unacceptability of the world is rapidly on the increase:
In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes "unacceptable" or "not acceptable" as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.
Which is just to say that willpower, empty rhetoric, and idle threats won't change the world. You need to be willing to grapple with the actual world. Instead, as things get worse and worse, Bush reacts by escalating his level of self-righteousness.
Occupation is Hell
"U.S. forces unlawfully fired the heavy-caliber machine-gun bullet that killed British newsman Terry Lloyd after an Iraqi civilian put him in his car and attempted to take him to the hospital when he was wounded shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a coroner ruled Friday," reports the LA Times. "U.S. authorities denied wrongdoing and said the Marines deployed in southern Iraq during the early days of the war were following the rules of engagement."
It seems worth observing that it's extremely unlikely we'd be having this discussion or that there would be any sort of investigation at all were the dead person here an ordinary Iraqi rather than a western journalist. Acts of wanton murder against Iraqi civilians do get reported and to some extent investigated, but an Iraqi who's killed in a firefight is bound to be labeled an insurgent, simply ignored, or written off as "collateral damage." Meanwhile, the controlling legal issue is not whether or not the dead person was guilty of something, but merely whether or not the troops in question were following the rules of engagement. The highest law of the land is, in effect, "don't make an American with a gun afraid" under circumstances where the Americans with guns are ill-equipped to actually assess what's happening because they don't, for example, speak the local language.
Such is life under foreign military occupation, and it's no wonder that people don't enjoy it, whether or not the occupiers come to town professing their sincere desire to help and whether or not the occupiers' professed desire to help is, in fact, sincere.
The Azeri Mirage
Jim Henley notes an emerging talking point among the "bomb Iran" crowd, focused on the fact that Iran is only very slightly over half Persian. This leads them to conclude that we could, perhaps, try to wreak ethno-sectarian division on Iran and plunge that country into Iraq-style chaos. If you look at living conditions in Iraq, you'll immediately conclude that this is a pretty immoral approach. If you look at social conditions in Iran, you'll also conclude that this isn't going to work.
Iran's Kurdish minority is legitimately mobilizable, but that's only 7 percent of the population. The whole game in terms of Iranian ethnic minorities is the Azeri population, which at 25 percent or so of the total is very large and, in fact, exceeds the population of Azerbaijan. The trouble, from a fomenting-dissent point of view, is that Azeris are very well-integrated into Iranian society. You may, for example, have heard of Muhammed Khatami, Iran's most recent former president. He's half Azeri. More to the point, you may have heard of Ali Khameini, Supreme Leader of Iran. He's Azeri. As is the current Minister of Energy, and various leading Iranian cultural figures.
That's by no means to say that Azeris are all supporters of the regime. Obviously, the regime has many Persian opponents as well as Persian supporters. The Azeris, however, are just like that. Well-integrated into overall Iranian society, with many in various degrees of opposition while many others are leading figures in the regime itself.
Robots?
One of the articles is by a good friend of mine, but I have to say it was a bit odd of Slate to commission two pieces (Spencer Ackerman / Troy Patterson) about Season 3 of Battlestar: Galactica both written by people who haven't watched the earlier seasons. This perhaps explains why both authors so blithely refer to characters played by Tricia Helfer and Lucy Lawless as "robots" which I think is a mistake. There's a long science fictional history of human-esque robots, androids, and cyborgs -- R. Daneel Olivaw, the T-800, etc. -- but the humanoid Cylons aren't like that.
Continue reading "Robots?" »
Baltimore Crime
Criminal activity in Baltimore isn't just a television show, it's also a major campaign issue in the Maryland governor's race where Charm City's real life white mayor Martin O'Malley is trying to unseat Bob Ehrlich. O'Malley proudly claims that he "teamed up with the Police Department and the people of Baltimore to enact a public safety strategy which produced the nation’s largest big city reduction in violent crime at the time – nearly 40 since 1999." Ehrlich retorts that there are still an awful lot of murders in Baltimore -- 261 in 2000, down to 253 in 2002, but back up to 269 in 2006.
I don't, as a rule, recommend agreeing with Republican attacks on Democratic candidates, but I have to say that this seems pretty damning. You don't normally see murder trends and overall violent crime trends diverge like this unless the police department has just started underreporting robberies and assaults (ironically, exactly what Carcetti accused Mayor Royce of doing in the debate on The Wire).
The New Justice
Abdul Rahim Al Ginco flees to Afghanistan in 2000, where he's taken prisoner by the Taliban, tortured, and under the duress of captivity and torture forced to appear in an al-Qaeda propaganda video. For his trouble he's spent years as a prisoner of the Bush administration in Guantanamo Bay.
Craziest Paragraph I've Read in a While...
... and the award goes to ... Bill Kristol:
Bush has two more years. Whatever happens in November's elections, the country cannot afford his all-U.N.-all-the-time defensive crouch. It is not too late to increase the size of the military; to work with Japan, rather than kowtowing to China, on North Korea; to institute an interdiction regime around that country; to act with a coalition of the willing to bomb airfields and aircraft assisting genocide in Sudan; to help the democrats in and near Russia; to insist on real sanctions and pressure on Iran, backed by the threat of force; and generally to stop huffing and puffing about what is unacceptable and intolerable--only to then accept the unacceptable and tolerate the intolerable.
I'm speechless. Fortunately, I'm throwing a party in about ninety minutes so there's plenty of booze around the house.
Quote of the Day
"Leon Trotsky . . . one of my favorites"
-- Tim McCarver. One of his favorite whats? It's a bit outré, but I'm a Kerensky fan.
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