« October 8, 2006 - October 14, 2006 | Main | October 22, 2006 - October 28, 2006 » October 15, 2006 - October 21, 2006 ArchivesOctober 15, 2006Air PowerJohn Quiggen points out that part of the disconnect between the Iraq War revealed in the Lancet/Hopkins study and the Iraq War people think they know is that the American press does extremely little reporting on the air war in Iraq, even though US airstrikes are a constant feature of Iraqi life. Murtha Strikes BackAgainst "defeatocrat" bullshit from the GOP. AlternationsI'm a little suspicious of most generational analyses, but leaving generic doubts aside there certainly is an interesting pattern in the data shown in the chart accompanying David Kirkpatrick's Times Week in Review article. You see a kind of cyclical pattern where an age cohort with lots of Democrats is replaced by a cohort with few Democrats. The interesting thing is that this isn't the sort of pattern where you have kids rejecting their parents' fashions. Instead, it looks like twentysomethings, our fiftysomething parents, and their parents are all unusually Democratic while the interstitial cohorts are the unusually Republican ones. On the other hand, one thing the chart pretty clearly shows is that party identification doesn't actually tell us very much. Absolutely every age group except 35 and 36 year-olds contains more soi disant Democrats than Republicans. Nevertheless, Republicans clearly win plenty of elections. More PuntmaniaLosing to Tennessee is bad enough, but am I reading this drive chart correctly to say that Washington got the ball on the Redskins' 40, advanced 25 yards to the Tennessee 35 and then . . . punted while losing in the second half? And that for their trouble Tennessee wound up with the ball on their 27 yard line? What About The Bad News?The shoe that hasn't really dropped so far in Iraq is the continuing unresolved status and borders of Kurdistan. As sectarian violence spreads into northern Iraq, including Kirkuk, you've got to figure we're getting closer to the dropping of that shoe. It's not clear to me from the article whether there was a specifically Kurdish angle to the Kirkuk incidents here, but one way or another nothing's going to go down in that town without Kurdish forces ending up involved. Brice Family ValuesI haven't mentioned this yet, but all the scenes featuring Namond getting pressure from his parents to stop goofing off and start buckling down to get serious about his career as a drug dealer have been absolutely priceless. I wonder, though, if anyone actually finds those conversations believable? I suppose I have no idea what incarcerated drug gang soldiers say to their teenaged sons, but a priori I don't really buy it. At the same time, I don't really care. Precisely what makes the so brilliant is the direct symmetry between what Wee-Bay and De'Londa tell their son and the way parents of The Wire target demographic's socioeconomic class act. Those kind of symmetries and resonances, both external and internal (as in the migration of the phrase "it's all in the game" to Carcetti) to the show are at the core of its appeal and what makes grandiose claims about it plausible. October 16, 2006Proliferation PessimismOne of the most subtly insidious notions to gain purchase on the American psyche is the view you might call "proliferation pessimism" -- that it would be unfortunate if places like Iran and North Korea got nuclear weapons, but there's ultimately nothing we can do but resign ourselves to a world of massive proliferation, where those countries go nuclear and so do a great many others. Proliferation pessimist William Langewiesche makes that argument in the LA Times: In Islamabad, an official close to the nuclear-armed Musharraf regime said to me: "The best way to fight proliferation is to pursue global disarmament. Fine, great, sure — if you expect that to happen. But you cannot have a world order in which you have five or eight nuclear weapons states on the one hand, and the rest of the international community on the other. There are many places like Pakistan, poor countries which have legitimate security concerns — every bit as legitimate as yours. And yet you ask them to address those concerns without nuclear weapons, while you have nuclear weapons, and you have everything else? It is not a question of what is fair, or right or wrong. It is simply not going to work." Now the thing of it is that this is correct. The only way to combat proliferation is in the context of universal disarmament. Not immediate universal disarmament, which is unrealistic, but universal disarmament as a long-term goal. The the other thing of it is that this is exactly the context the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other diplomatic accords established. And, as Joe Cirincione explains, that non-proliferation regime was actually working fairly well until conservative politicians made the United States start pulling away from the rules. It wouldn't be easy to get the global disarmament regime back on track, but it's a bit frightening that such a large segment of the policy elite in The World's Only Superpower seems to have decided that "not easy" equals "impossible." We're talking, remember, about big, long-term structural goals so you don't need to get everything done at once. But here's what some steps might look like. New AdsDemocratic operatives oft stand accused of not really knowing how to play this game, but when I saw this DSCC attack on George Allen on TV last night, all I could think was "man, that was a good ad." Perhaps people are learning. It still does strike me every election season, however, that political advertisements seem incredibly crude compared to the ads used for most commercial products. Or, rather, when there's no election ongoing, you see two types of ads. Some are nice, slick spots put together for national brands. Some are incredibly crude spots put together for random local brands. Politica adverisements tend to look like the latter sort of ad -- as if no advances had been made in the theory or practice of advertising over the past twenty years. It's odd. Subpoena ThisPaul Krugman makes the familiar-to-the-blogosphere case that party, not personnel, is what matters when you go to vote in a couple of weeks. Party control matters most of all because, on the one hand, "moderate" Republicans are basically frauds, and, on the other hand, because only a Democratic-controlled congress will provide the oversight and accountability that the country desperately needs. I agree and, certainly, I hope Krugman's many readers in the great state of New Jersey will listen to him. And, of course, Krugman's not alone. All of progressive Washington is fervently hoping to see some Democratic chairpersons haul some scumbugs up to testify and issue some subpoenas. There is, I think, a potential fly in this ointment. Past administrations have been quite aggressive in seeking to maintain executive branch secrecy, and absolutely everything we know about the Bush administration suggests that they would be much more aggressive about this. In particular, team Bush adds to the natural reluctance of any administration to comply with opposition party oversight efforts (see, e.g., Bill Clinton), an elaborate constitutional theory of presidential omnipotence, a strong temperamental disposition in favor of secrecy, and the notion that everything it does falls under cover of prosecuting an endless quasi-declared quasi-war. It seems to me that the odds are good that faced with aggressive investigative efforts they'll respond with a strategy of total noncompliance -- simply refusing to hand over documents or make officials available for testimony -- pleading the need for wartime secrecy and seeking to provoke a constitutional crisis. America's Imperial TraditionRobert Kagan's cover story in The New Republic infuriated me to no end (shocking -- an infuriating Robert Kagan article! An infuriating TNR foreign policy feature! both at once!) but one has to concede that, taken literalistically, he's correct -- George W. Bush hasn't pulled the idea of imperialistic militarism out of his ass, this has long been an element of American political heritage and their are deep continuities between Bush's policies and some policies other presidents have pursued in earlier times. Why Kagan thinks this observation has justificatory power, I couldn't say. It's also important to note that times really do change and Bush's policies, though grounded in an authentic American tradition, are also genuinely novel. Let's review. Reality-Based Advertising?I recall having found the initial installments of the Dove "real beauty" ad campaign to be mostly annoying, but this video of what goes into producing a billboard image (or, by implication, a magazine cover, etc.) is pretty sweet. This via Ezra who has some additional apposite thoughts. Part of what's interesting about this stuff is that photo manipulation and the like has the same basic structure as your standard optical illusions -- knowledge and cognition has a very limited impact on perception. No matter how well you "understand" how the Rubin Vase works, you still fall prey to the illusion that the image is "changing" from faces to a vase. Similarly, even if you know the "right answer" to the T-Illusion game, the right solution still looks wrong. Just the same, no matter how well-aware I am that commercial images are heavily manipulated, they still appear authentic to me unless the manipulation is actually sloppily executed. The mere knowledge that manipulation is omnipresent in these contexts has very little impact on how I see them, and whenever I see something like that Dove video I find myself re-surprised by the scale of the manipulation even though I remember having seen these things before and know perfectly well how the world works. Market FailuresVia Henry Aaron, odds on winning the Eastern Conference in the NBA. Naturally enough, the Wizards are longshots. Much less naturally, the bettors are giving the Magic, Knicks, and Celtics better odds and have the Wizards even with the 76ers. Don't these guys know anything? The Boston, New York, and Philadelphia may all be higher-profile teams, but they're terrible to the Wiz' mediocre. New BlogToo Hot for TNR, a new production from Spencer Ackerman. Now all the residents of my house but me have their own blogs. Indeed, of the five of us I'm the only one who doesn't write for multiple blogs. Mid-October Fun!Steve Sailer writes: In this case, however, the area north of the White House actually is gentrifying as Matt Yglesias-types move in and is becoming more "vibrant" in the actual sense that people want to believe is true about a neighborhood. What people hope when they hear that a city neighborhood is "vibrant" (or any other cool sounding adjective) is that it means that pretty girls are out at night. That, when you get down to it, is the ultimate attribute of an urban neighborhood: attractive women. (For suburban neighborhoods, the ultimate feature is smart public schoolchildren.) And, yes, it's true -- where Matt Yglesias goes, the Ambition as a VirtueMaybe it's just 'cuz I'm an asshole, but I find myself a lot more sympathetic to Tommy Carcetti than a lot of Wire-watchers seem to be. It's his very cloying, grating, somewhat unprincipled ambition that, I think, makes it plausible that he'd be a good mayor. Politics is not, at the end of the day, a game in which the pure of heart are going to succeed, so you can just cross that option off your list of possibilities. What Carcetti has going for him is that he's clearly not the kind of guy who's going to be satisfied if his last job in politics is Mayor of Baltimore. To take the next step and become governor or senator and nurse vague ambitions for the White House he's going to need, on some level, to do well as mayor and improve the city. By contrast, you see a more pernicious type of politician in Clay Davis and Clarence Royce -- men who lack higher ambitions and are therefore motivated primarily by veniality. Race, as it so often is in American politics, is extremely relevant here. The record of African-American politicians running in majority-white constituencies is depressingly bad. As a consequence, African-American politicians holding jobs -- mayor, congressman, city council, state legislature -- in majority-minority constituencies tend to face sharply constrained horizons and therefore have incentive to settle for merely venial, rather than ambitious, conduct in office to the detriment of the communities they serve. Nowadays, of course, we have rising superstar Barak Obama and if he's joined in the Senate by Harold Ford we may have something of a trend on our hands. That would be a good thing on its own terms (and, of course, anything that puts more senate seats in Democratic hands is a good thing), but I think it would be particularly beneficial in terms of breaking that particular dynamic. October 17, 2006BallgazingAll the polls seem to indicate substantial wins for the Democrats in a couple of weeks but, to be honest, I just can't bring myself to believe it'll happen. Republicans, for those few cycles when I've really been paying attention, have always won. What's more, I feel like things have always looked good for the Democrats in October. Do I have any real basis for this pessimism? Well, no, on some level I don't. But I do keep coming back to the money gap. The turnout models that are used for midterm elections -- especially for House races -- involve an awful lot of imprecision and guesswork. This years' GOP ground game is, by all accounts, the superior of the two. And when you combine that with boatloads of cash that can be deployed during the final weeks, well, let's just say it continues to make me unconfident. Be all that as it may, there's a clear psychological advantage to pessimism. If Democrats beat my expectations and do win, then I'll be very happy with that. If they lose, however, that's something I've already resigned myself to and at least I'll be able to get some "I told ya so"s in. 300 MillionGood news for estimators everywhere, as the U.S. population has successfully shifted from "almost 300 million" to more-or-less exactly 300 million. Notwithstanding that large number, we remain a relatively sparsely populated land with about 31 people per square kilometer. Iraq, by contrast, has about 66 and there's virtually no chance the appalling bloodpath there will push them below our level. Germany has 232, South Korea 480, the Palestinian Territories 615. Spider HolesOne interesting trope I'm noticing is conservatives refusing to admit the obvious -- the GOP's ill political fortunes have something or other to do with Iraq being this huge mess. Mark Kleiman catches Glenn Reynolds doing an "election pre-mortem" that totally neglects Iraq. Fred Barnes meanwhile has some fun with parentheses: The Foley scandal did two things, both harmful to Republicans. It stopped Republican momentum in its tracks. (Also contributing to this were the negative spin on Iraq from Bob Woodward's book State of Denial and the faulty reporting on the National Intelligence Estimate.) Right, it was "negative spin" and "faulty reporting" that put people in a bad mood as opposed to, say, the large-scale refugee flows prompted by massive sectarian violence. I mean, I suppose one could argue that even though there were no WMDs in Iraq and even though the invasion's made a hash of the country, you're still glad we invaded. But even if you think this, should it be so hard to concede that the war at least looks like a bad idea to most of us who lack the deep historical insight to see why this bloodbath was worth it? Broken ConstitutionSanford Levinson makes the case that the celebrated US constitution is actually totally whack. I tend to agree. For a lengthier exposition of Levinson's views, see Cass Sunstein's review of his new book which lays out the argument in some detail. Sunstein is pretty dubious, but I find his counterarguments unpersuasive, except on the point that Levinson's calls for a "do-over" just seem utterly unrealistic. Let me try, however, to locate a more policy-relevant point here. The United States semi-frequently finds itself in the business of trying to assist other countries in making transitions to democracy. Thanks to our country's habit of Founder-worship, there's a tendency to push American-ish political institutions on other nations. Empirical research (see George Tsebelis' Veto Players for a summary of much of it), however, indicates that US-style proliferation of veto points makes democratic consolidation much more difficult. In the American context, an extremely large number of veto points serves, in essence, to impede progressive social reform, which is unfortunate. In young democracies without entrenched norms, however, it tends to simply encourage people to break the frequent deadlocks through extra-legal means -- coups or paralyzing street violence. This has been a particular problem in Latin America where the US influence has been at its highest. Is Menendez an Incumbent?The real fly in the ointment for the Democrats this cycle has been New Jersey, which really ought to have been a safe Democratic hold. Instead, the NJ Democrats' reputation for corruption, combined with problems with Bob Menendez as a candidate, and warm fuzzies for Tom Keane's dad, have made it a very tight race. The latest poll has Keane at 39 percent and Menendez at 42 percent. Menendez' narrow lead at a low level raises the question of whether or not we should think of him as an incumbent. Technically, he is, and normally an incumbent polling at 43 percent three weeks before an election is toast, lead or no lead. But Menendez has been in that seat less than a year, and lacks statewide name recognition, so maybe it's more like an open seat in which case he seems to be doing okay. Government By MoronJeff Stein sets out to ask some counterintelligence officials and the congresspersons charged with overseeing them if they know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni. The results are sobering. The lack of any interest in actually understanding what's going on in the Islamic world -- the preference for crude historical analogies, chest-pounding, and feel-good rhetoric -- in this country is both absurd and more than a little frightening. Via Jonah Goldberg. UPDATE: For a genuine challenge, does anyone understand the Zensunni/Zensufi split in the Dude books? October 18, 2006Art BrutIf Art Brut is coming to a town near you, I'd really suggest you check the show out. Their album is okay at best in my opinion, but the live performance is big-time fun. I've seen them twice now and certainly didn't regret a repeat appearance. Hollinger RankingsJohn Hollinger ranks every player in the league based on a formula he has for projecting next season's likely PERs. It seems to me that taking the useful-but-in-some-ways-questionable tool of the PER as a ratings method and yoking it to the useful-but-in-some-ways-questionable tool of using similarity scores to project future performance is not the best way to get value for your number crunching buck. That Kobe Bryant (28.11), Dirk Nowitzki (28.20), and LeBron James (28.17) all did roughly the same on the PER metric last seasons seems like a valuable observation. The projection formula, by contrast, doesn't really add anything beyond what obvious qualitative nostrums ("LeBron's really young, he'll probably keep getting better"; "Kobe's been playing for a long time now, what happens if he loses half a step?") can offer us. Delving into stats, Hollinger says that Agent Zero "might fare well if he played off the ball more, but the Wizards don't have anybody else to run the point." My strong recollection is that Arenas did play off the ball a non-trivial amount of time last year and that the Wizards do have someone else to run the point, namely Antonio Daniels. Stating the ObviousJohn Quiggin notes that more of the British military's top brass is speaking out about the ill consequences of the Bush/Blair Iraq invasion. This time, it's Brigadier Ed Butler noting that Iraq has prevented Britain, the US, and our NATO allies from working effectively in Afghanistan. Rather than succeed at one mission, we're now very much at risk of failing at two missions. Priorities, AgainI may say something about this at greater length later, but time grows short so for now let me simply note that the Bush administration today's signed a policy committing the United States to unilateral hegemony over outer space. This seems like a fairly peripheral concern at the moment -- there's no pressing space-based threat. At the same time, one imagines that countries like Russia and China aren't going to be thrilled with this idea. Coincidentally enough, right now we're trying to secure a higher level of Russian and Chinese cooperation over North Korea, which is a fairly pressing issue. So was it really necessary to announce this just now? Does the White House even think about that kind of stuff -- the idea that we should set priorities and try to avoid pissing people off over third-tier issues right when we're potentially on the verge of accomplishing something important? Flypaper in Middle Earth"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," notes Rick Santorum, an actual US Senator, though hopefully not for much longer. "It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.," Santorum continued. "You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States." This is, fundamentally, an old idea about Iraq and it continues to be a stupid one, though rarely has it achieved such an inane mode of expression as this time around. Dave Weigel tries to puzzle it out: Was Santorum referring to the hobbits' final approach up Mount Doom, when Aragorn (George Bush) was convincing the men of Gondor (Tony Blair) and Rohan (John Howard) to make a final, diversionary push at the Black Gates? Or is he referring to the entire quest of Frodo and Sam (300 million Americans), which was aided at various points by mystical creatures - the Ents, the Dead Men of Dunharrow - that don't have any easy relations in the real war on terror? Does Tom Bombadil have a role to play in this? Opting OutI can't say I've ever given much thought to the issue of how to increase the level of organ donations available, but switching from an opt-in system to an opt-out system strikes me as the obvious step to take. It would increase the number of organs available -- default rules always turn out to make a big difference -- while still clearly respecting the wishes of anyone who had strong anti-donation feelings. Offering enhanced incentives for donations of some kind, as suggested by the Post, might be a good idea, too, but I'd definitely like to see the results of simply converting to an opt-out system before doing much else -- it seems like a no-brainer to me. Moral ClarityMartin Peretz surveys the violence in Iraq, and discerns the cause -- the country turns out to be full of Muslims. Meanwhile, in comments SkipChurch gets more explicit: "Has anyone calculated the rate at which Islamic sectarian violence will get the Muslim population down to a manageable number, like two dozen or so? Then maybe some sort of Right of Return deal can be worked out for those people in Dearborn, Israel, etc." Airborne Toxic EventI read White Noise a couple of weeks ago and I think it's pretty damn great -- I recall last time this came up in a thread there were a lot of haters out there, but y'all don't know what you're talking about. Followed up with Mao II, which I thought was somewhat worse. At any rate, as a consequence of the above, I'm now obsessed with the phrase "airborne toxic event." Relatedly, Belle reports"I was talking to a Singaporean friend today and she said the haze might persist until--February?!" The haze? What haze? This haze, which doesn't really seem to have been covered in the American press, but which seems pretty interesting. The Deutsche Press Agency reports: Singapore has suffered an estimated loss of 50 million US dollars since the onset of the haze in early September, said an economist Thursday. "Some of the various losses arising from forest fires and haze include threat to public health, rise in respiratory illness, hospitalization and treatment costs," said Associate Professor Euston Quah, Head, Division of Economics, Nanyang Technological University. There was apparently a major haze event back in 1997 that, likewise, had serious economic consequences. I gather from this story that the primary source of haze is fires in Indonesia, and not actually anything under Singapore's control. Singapore's National Environmental Agency maintains an air quality index that allows you to track the extent of haziness. As long as the PSI stays below 100, allegedly, healthy people can go about their business as usual, though it may be a problem for those suffering from respiratory ailments. October 19, 2006Fun With CadaversKieran Healy, a genuine expert on organ donations, directs me to his 2006 DePaul Law Review article "Do Presumed Consent Laws Raise Organ Procurement Rates?" which concludes that the effect, if any, of opt-out versus opt-in systems is much smaller than I would have thought. In part, this is because countries with de jure opt-out rules still, in practice, tend to allow the next of kind a veto over donation decisions. He concludes that countries like Spain and Italy who've substantially increased their organ yields did so not with a quick legal change but because "they have invested effectively in the logistics of the transplant system." Much more on this and related topics can no doubt be found in his book, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. On Conspiracy TheoriesEzra's worried that disparagement of "conspiracy theories" is becoming a problem: I adore my dog-eared Hofstadter books as much as the next self-important pundit, but I'm done worrying about the paranoid style in American politics. More pernicious, I'm starting to think, is anti-paranoid punditry in American politics, in which scary-but-plausible theories are dismissed simply by calling them conspiratorial. Personally, I hate dog-eared books. Fortunately, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is available online, as a classic text should be. That said, what they taught me in the philosophy department was "when in doubt, draw a distinction." So here we go. One might have a "conspiracy theory" in the sense that your theory posits the existence of a conspiracy between some number of people to do some malign act. There's nothing wrong with putting forward conspiracy theories in that sense. People conspire all the time. The "official" story about 9/11 is, itself, a story about a conspiracy organized by Osama bin Laden under the auspices of al-Qaeda. The kind of conspiracy theory that gets pernicious is the kind that starts using the existence of the conspiracy to explain away all the theory's evidentiary problems. How come this piece of theory-undermining evidence exists? Well, the conspiracy planted it. And how come there's no forensic evidence? Well, the conspiracy destroyed it. That kind of thing. Theories that are problematic in this way needn't actually involve conspiracies. Young-earth creationists sometimes say that radiocarbon dating appears to indicate that the world is extremely old because God created the earth complete with misleading radiocarbon data. It's these kind of accounts that rightly deserve our aspersions, their tenets are catechisms of faith not real empirical propositions about the world. Ezra's correct, however, that we shouldn't let pundits (normally of a right-wing or establishmentarian bent) simply use the word "conspiracy theory" to discredit each and every account positing that powerful individuals sometimes (often, even!) work together in ways that are detrimental to the public interest. Manifesto...Yeah!It's a little bit miscast as a response to Tony Judt's broad-brush assertion that American liberals as a whole have failed to oppose George W. Bush, but this manifesto by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin and signed by many other worthies is good stuff nonetheless. It really strikes me as more of a response to the incredibly foolish "New American Liberalism" statement than to anything Judt wrote, as such. I am, as a general matter, pro-manifesto: The more, the merrier, says I. Networking (in a good way)Finally, a network for security progressives -- the National Security Network -- is up and running. It seeks to bridge the divide between the foreign policy experts and politicians in Washington aka "wonks" and local community leaders and the general public. An affiliated organization provides a communications hub where you can sign up and discuss ideas. Good stuff. My sadly neglected March 2005 masterpiece "Disconnected" was largely about the need for more such bridge-building institutions to create a progressive movement capable of doing the politics of national security in, to use some military jargon, a full-spectrum manner featuring copious quantities of jointness. Relatedly, it's good to see that the New America Foundation has recently hosted a couple of events -- including one going down this afternoon -- seeking to foster some constructive debate among progressives as to what our general foreign policy orientation should be. The Annals of ObviousnessProbably time to stop blogging for a few hours and work on something else, but The New York Times has a can't-miss scoop -- apparently some women use Halloween as an opportunity to wear risqué outfits. I'm thinking of pitching them a feature about how for a lot of kids these days Christmas is more about the presents than about the Jesus. The CoverupIn 1995, just three days into her tenure as Secretary of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, [Rep. Heather] Wilson [R-NM] removed a routine working file alleging that her husband had engaged in inappropriate contact with a minor. The file was then transferred to the department's attorney in her own Albuquerque office, where it soon went missing. Brian Beutler has the story. When You're Rich, The Word Is "Eccentric"Gilbert Arenas denies allegations of quirkiness. He seems pretty quirky to me. Relatedly, Bethlehem Shoals had an insightful post on how Agent Zero's eccentricity has gone from being the reason he's not a marketable star to the mechanism by which people try to market him. Basketball and Soft PowerUS treasury officials are investigating whether American basketball players who were paid to play for Iranian teams have violated US sanctions. Under the sanctions regime, a special licence is required by any American citizen providing services to Iran... Last year, 20 Americans were contracted to play for Iranian teams. They could now face fines of $50,000 (£26,700). Basketball is a popular sport in Iran, and many saw the Americans' involvement as a rare example of sport overcoming political tensions. However, this co-operation looks set to end, and there are now only two American players left in Iran. This seems misguided to me, but whatever. I've had the following, probably deeply unoriginal, observation on my chest for weeks now and this seems like a reasonable pretext for unloading. If you look at where baseball is popular outside the USA -- primarily Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Caribbean basin -- you're basically looking at a sport that's spread on the coattails of American "hard power" to regions of the world where there have been large US military deployments. Basketball, by contrast, is most popular in the areas where we haven't based troops -- Brazil and Argentina in Latin America; mainland China in Asia; Eastern and Southern Europe. And, apparently, Iran. What this signifies, I couldn't say. October 20, 2006So Happy TogetherGeneral in charge of the everything-old-is-new-again Baghdad security mission Operation Forward Together admits that it's failing. Jim Henley notes amnesia as to when the operation even began. Mahdi Army takes formal control over the city of Amarah. The Trouble With PartitionMore and more of my favorite people on "our side" of the national security debate seem to me to be edging in favor of the Biden-Gelb Plan for Iraq, involving a quasi-partition of the country into three pieces with a skeletal national government left behind to do foreign policy and distribute oil revenues according to an equitable pre-agreed formula. What's more, if this article is correct, a number of Republicans are prepared to use this as a fallback position in case the midterms go very poorly and backing the Bush Iraq strategy becomes untenable. I keep feeling like there's an extremely basic problem with this idea, namely that it lacks necessary support on the ground in Iraq. Kurdish leaders have no problem, conceptually with de facto partition, but they already enjoys the fruits of de facto partition plus they mostly have control over their oil. Sunni Arabs, who you might think would be the main beneficiaries of Gelb-Biden, don't like the idea and never have. Indeed, one of the main Sunni Arab complaints about the current constitution is that it went too far in the direction of decentralization. The Shiite community is split with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq tending to favor decentralization, the Sadr Movement tending to be vehemently opposed, and the al-Dawa people somewhere in the middle. As long as that's the case, I just don't see how the President of the United States and the head of CENTCOM are supposed to unilaterally announce that "we" are partitioning Iraq. Only Iraqis can partition Iraq. If enough Iraqi factions could agree on partition -- or on anything else -- that would be great, but absent political agreement there's simply nothing to be done from the outside and no reason for so many of our soldiers to be stuck in the middle of a dangerous situation that's beyond their capacity to control. Learning NothingFor a man who advocated extremely stridently on behalf of a policy which he now admits was a mistake and which has led, directly and indirectly, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people Jonah Goldberg's managed to maintain a remarkably churlish attitude toward people who disagreed with him about Iraq. Which is another way of saying that some conservatives now seem to be edging toward the annoying position of many former liberal hawks -- after years of insisting this pile of shit was a tasty stew, they're prepared to admit that it's actually a pile of shit but don't want to draw any conclusions from that fact. Iraq is a mistake, but all the attitudes and ideas about the world and America's role in it that led to the mistake somehow remain perfectly intact. The proposal, meanwhile, to hold a referendum in Iraq on whether our troops should stay is cute, but it founders on a lot of ambiguities about exactly how to word the question. Whoever was in charge of the referendum could rig it to have the desired outcome one way or the other. Doing that may be a smart idea, but you'd still need to decide in advance what the desired outcome is. Too Hot, IndeedI've known for a couple of days, but now I suppose it's public that Spencer Ackerman's gone from The New Republic: "The ostensible reason for my release concerns my relationship with Franklin Foer and the magazine's other editors. However, the irreconcilable ideological differences between myself and the top editors at the magazine have been clear to me for months now, and clear to them as well." So read Spencer's blog and look for his articles soon to be forthcoming in various other publications -- he's got a big story in the about-to-be-published issue of The American Prospect, among other things. And, yes, this means that I now live in a house of four people none of whom have jobs, per se. I probably shouldn't say any more about the particulars of this situation, but in an unrelated development Martin Peretz is mocking The Boston Globe for dully repeating itself ad nauseum that it would be good policy for the United States to make a strong push for Israeli-Arab reconciliation. And, yes, one does become bored hearing this and, indeed, bored saying it. Nevertheless, it sort of needs to be repeated endlessly in circumstances where the political agenda is controlled by people like Peretz. Traitors, Traitors EverywhereThere's been oddly little coverage of the new UN Secretary General -- a result, a suppose, of all these international crises and midterm elections. National Review Mario Loyola, however, found the time to talk a little shit. To nobody's surprise, he turns out to be mostly full of shit himself. In re: TetSpeaking of TNR, Alan Wolfe has a great short post at Open University on Tet revisionism and its applications to the Iraq debate. In short: This analysis is nonsense on stilts. There is no "military" theatre over here and "psychological" campaign over there. If insurgents convince Americans to withdraw their troops, they win the only military skirmish that matters. The notion that we "won" the Tet offensive is designed to keep alive the dangerous illusion that Americans never lose wars. In fact, we lost Vietnam and we are clearly on the cusp of losing Iraq. We could not win in either case because the people we were fighting against were able to mobilize more overall resources on behalf of their cause than we were on behalf of ours. Clauswitz would have understood. Tom Friedman does not. Yes, right, exactly. I could recommend almost endless reading on the basic Clausewitzian point here and, damnit, perhaps I will. October 21, 2006Mahdi ArmyLots of Shiite Iraqis think it's great. Torture, Does It Work?Jim Henley tries to draw a distinction: "It’s not that you’ll never get good information via torture. It’s that you’ll never be sure, absent checking and rechecking, whether the information you got was any use. Perhaps I should say, 'was true.' Obviously al Libbi’s statements were 'useful' - they were used to sell a war that our rulers were set on having. None of this has anything to do with our old friend, the Ticking Bomb Scenario." I would put it slightly differently. The issue here is systems. Not, if we employ systematic torture will we learn some true things, but if we employ systematic torture will we improve our intelligence overall? I think the answer to the latter question, drawing on history and the recent American experience, is pretty clearly "no." The bad information, and the problems caused by needing to weed it out, outweigh the former. As I've said before, the problem of intelligence isn't that we need "more information" it's that it's hard to distinguish the accurate information from the garbage. What torture mostly does is increase the garbage/accurate ratio. SickosCatherine mentions that the talk last night at the Florida Avenue Home for Unemployed Bloggers concerned the advisability of having sex with one's clone. Personally, I think names need to be named here. Sommer, Will, and Julian were firmly in the sex-with-your-clone is hott, while Catherine had wishy-washy views. I think this is gross. ClelandIt's not the biggest deal in the world, per se, but continuing liberal obsession with Max Cleland strikes me as a bit odd. Josh Marshall hails a witty Cleland line at a campaign event for John Tester and remarks: "If the Dems take Congress, that image will bookend the era of Bush mendacity for me, along with the attack ad the GOP ran against the triple-amputee Cleland in the 2002 election, questioning his courage during the run-up to the Iraq War." The infamous anti-Cleland ad was legitimately scummy, presenting a seriously distorted and underhanded view of the issues at hand. That said, what does Cleland's triple-amputee status have to do with it? Saxby Chambliss wasn't attacking Cleland's personal bravery, he was attacking Cleland's policies. Democrats over and over again seem to think that biographical qualities either are or out to somehow immunize nominees from political attacks based on national security issues and they keep getting burned. They need to get over it -- the world doesn't work that way and the world shouldn't work that way. This is on a par with whining that Republicans are politicizing national security. Well, guess what, national security is a political issue. The Democratic Party is full of politicians. They need to learn to do politics -- the whining just looks weak and pathetic. Meanwhile, there's a real lesson to be learned from the Cleland campaign. If you read Tom Ricks' Fiasco, Cleland more-or-less admits that he thought authorizing the use of military force against Iraq was a bad idea, but he voted to do it anyway because he thought it would inoculate him against GOP attacks. Cleland, sure, was not alone in this. But it didn't work. He couldn't take national security off the table, and he lost anyway. Had he acted more courageously and stood up for his beliefs, he almost certainly would have lost the election anyway. But had Democrats as a whole voted against the war, they'd be far better-positioned to take advantage of the sorry state of Iraq today than they actually are. In a pinch, it actually helps in politics to be right -- undue cynicism has fairly minimal benefits. That's the real lesson here. Queens of the CinemaIt's been a kind of theme weekend, as I went to see The Queen Thursday night and Marie Antoinette last night. Antoinette has several fantastic moments, but I ultimately found it to be a deeply flawed film with, in particular, some very serious pacing problems that make it dull in parts and rendering it hard to say what's really supposed to be happening thematically. It's a very interesting film nonetheless; I liked the occassional dollops of deliberate anachronism and they did an excellent job of portraying the fundamental weirdness of Versailees and 18th century society while also making the characters distinctly human. Also, Steve Coogan is just great in every movie I've seen him in. The Queen, by contrast, is oddly brilliant especially considering that the story -- about the response of the Royal Family and the Blair family to the death of Princess Diana -- is something I was pretty profoundly not interested in. The cast, however, is brilliant with the exception of Michael Sheen's Tony Blair, which is pretty good. Director Stephen Frears does a great job of staging scenes where nothing really happens except various people talking to each other, and nicely blends actual footage together with his dramatic scenes. Peter Morgan's screenplay, most crucially, actually takes this story and turns it into a fascinating movie of ideas with sympathetic portrayals of various different takes on the purpose and nature of the Monarchy and the concepts of duty and political leadership. Word to the WiseOne thing to keep your eye on is emerging tensions inside the Democratic Party which find their locus in the persons of Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emmannuel. Essentially, the way the centrist side of the argument is trying to set things up, insofar as the election returns are in some sense disappointing, this will be blamed on Pelosi, Leader of the House Democrats. But insofar as the election returns are encouraging, credit belongs to Emmannuel, Architect of the Great Victory. Damned if she does and damned if she doesn't, in other words. This Bull Moose post gives you a good example of the genre. He's expecting big things for the Democrats, and hails the wisdom of the House Democratic leadership, with said leadership comprised apparently of Emmannuel and Steny Hoyer. Pelosi, a liberal who thought invading Iraq was a bad idea before it was cool, who also happens to be the actual leader of the caucus, doesn't come into play. As I say, keep your eyes peeled. Also check out Zach Roth's excellent profile of Steny Hoyer in The Washington Monthly. Hoyer, clearly, would be a big step forward from his GOP predecessors as Majority Leader, but he's no great shakes and not the sort of dude who's going to, say, spearhead an exciting era of progressive reform. Meanwhile, many liberals have complaints of their own with Pelosi, some warranted others much less so. Folks should be aware, however, of the objective contours of this debate . . . the alternative to Pelosi is weak tea of the sort served by Hoyer and Emmannuel (who, I'll happily grant, is a pretty canny electoral tactitian) and not the leader of your dreams. |
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