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October 22, 2006 - October 28, 2006 Archives
Fred Kaplan's Take
Fred Kaplan, who offered up what I thought was an uncharacteristically blinkered and churlish dismissal of the first Lancet cluster-sample study of deaths in Iraq, has a more measured critical take on the newer study that raises two somewhat convincing points. One, as you may have seen on some other blogs is an argument developed by British academics Sean Gourley, Neil Johnson, and Michael Spagat who point out that the Lancet's household samples were located on "major commercial streets and avenues" rather than, say, back alleys. This significantly simplifies the logistics of doing the survey and for standard public health purposes works fine. For a war, though, it's at least plausible that the main streets might feature more violence than non-main ones.
Kaplan's other point is that the Hopkins account of Iraq's pre-war death rate (5.5 per 1,000 per year) is at odds with the UN's estimate (10 per 1,000 per year) and that if you take the UN's pre-war baseline, you wind up with more like 300,000 excess deaths than 650,000. I don't really know how to evaluate that dispute and I'm not sure anyone else does either. That said, this point from Kaplan seems to me like the crucial takeaway: "Let's say that the study is way off, off by a factor of 10 or five—in other words, that the right number isn't 655,000 but something between 65,500 and 131,000. That is still a ghastly number—a number that, apart from all other considerations, renders this war a monumental mistake."
He doesn't get explicit about this, but for my part the point would be that for a war allegedly justified at this point on what are largely humanitarian grounds to have any positive excess death rate is a scandal. A humanitarian intervention ought, on any reasonable view of the matter, save lives not increase the volume of death. The exact amount by which the death toll has gone up is sort of neither here nor there. On top of that, it's worth noting that there are other problems with the methodology that may be leading to an undercount. In particular, one assumes that in some instances entire households have been killed, but the Hopkins method isn't going to count any households like that.
Public Choice Models of Iraq
Tyler Cowen suggests a simple model, I'll explain and elaborate a bit below the fold.
Continue reading "Public Choice Models of Iraq" »
Unipolar Moments
Greg Djerijian asks whether America's "unipolar moment" is waning. The real issue here is that the unipolar moment prophesied by Charles Krauthammer in 1990 was always somewhat illusory. The true unipolar moment came not in 1990, but in 1946, when the United States enjoyed something like half of the world's economic output and a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Since that time, the long-term trajectory of US relative power had been distinctly downward. The collapse of the USSR bumped it back up, but not back to anything resembling 1946 levels and didn't alter the long run trajectory. Nor should this be a surprise -- sustaining the 1946 status quo would have been impossible and would have entailed miring the vast majority of humanity in a permanent state of economic misery. It's worth remembering that Robert Keohane's book on what happens to U.S. foreign policy After Hegemony was published in 1984 and locates the end of hegemony in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
For various reasons, by the dawn of the 21st century we'd arrived at a situation where only the United States maintained a serious capacity to "project" military power to regions distant from its borders. Nevertheless, a great many countries containing a majority of the world's people could not realistically be subjected to direct military coercion of this sort. In terms of non-military forms of power (including the coercive "hard power" of economics) the United States had long been the strongest player, but not strong enough to generate its preferred outcomes without cooperation from other major players. There's a reason, after all, while real or contemplated US military interventions during the so-called post-1990 "unipolar moment" have been concentrated in the Middle East and Africa -- these are the regions where there are no particularly strong local players so the sharp divergence in the great powers' ability to project force becomes decisive.
iPod Revolution
Steven Levy recounts and celebrates the "iPod Revolution," the story of everyone's favorite portable digital music device. Now, I've always been an Apple fan, always been a Mac user, and I'm glad to see the company prospering. That said, it's pretty irresponsible to do what Levy does here and leave out the roll a really dumb law and some business blunders by the record labels have played in the iPod's rise to hegemony.
In particular, if you went out and bought an iPod, and then you wanted to legally acquire some music for it, the only place you could turn was the iTunes Music Store. And, once you'd built up a library of songs purchased through the iTunes Music Store, the only place you can play the songs is . . . on an iPod. So if when your iPod's battery dies, you think to yourself "fuck this, I'm going to buy a different company's player," well, doing that will require you to re-buy all your music. So you buy another iPod, and you buy more music and you're further and further locked-in. Even better, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for a rival firm to construct a player capable of playing legally owned iTunes Music Store files. This is a great deal for Apple who, in virtue of being first, gets to entrench its advantage deeper-and-deeper but it's not very smart legislation.
Even weirder, using Digital Rights Management to produce this sort of circular lock-in wasn't Apple's initial plan for the music store. Instead, they wound up incorporating the DRM features that are key to their business model at the insistence of the record companies, who haven't actually accomplished anything for themselves (it's still very easy to illegally download MP3 files) while accidentally creating a new music industry juggernaut.
What a Nice Man! And So Well-Spoken!
The Derb observes that Barak Obama is "articulate." The man went to Harvard Law School and Oxford, of course he's articulate.
Tricks
I just wrote a draft of a forthcoming column on this subject and I thought it might be too out of left field, but fortunately along comes Sebastian Mallaby with the weird assertion of the day: "In North Korea and Iran, the United States has tried every diplomatic trick to prevent nuclear proliferation, making common cause with Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan, and wielding both sticks and carrots. The result is failure: North Korea has tested a nuke and Iran still presses on with its enrichment program."
Every trick? Really?
This sentiment is part of a bizarre American arrogance that seems to think "diplomacy" means "talking to people" and "every diplomatic trick" means "talking to them at great length." He's a trick we haven't tried vis-a-vis North Korea and Iran -- seriously offering to do things Pyongyand and/or Teheran would like us to do in exchange for them doing what we want them to do in terms of not building nuclear weapons. Similarly with regard to Russia and China. As I've been pointing out, we've been doing "everything" to get Russia and China on board with our North Korea policy except, well, setting priorities, making compromises, cutting deals and, um, conducting diplomacy. We want Moscow and Beijing to do such-and-such. Well, what do they want from Washington? Diplomacy means finding out what they want and then, if the price is worth paying, paying it.
That's negotiation, that's diplomacy. The Bush administration simply doesn't do it. It issues demands. And when it finds its demands can't be achieved through threats of force it . . . issues demands again. Sometimes it curtails its demands somewhat. What it doesn't do is diplomacy, the search for horses to trade, for positive-sum exchanges, for the reconciliation of competing interests.
Is Clone-Sex on the Curriculum?
Via Dan Drezner, a fine-grained distinction:
"It's not sexy sex sex, where we're talking about whips and chains, but we will talk about whips and chains," said graduating student Robbie Morgan, 33, who left her job teaching sex education in Chicago to attend the Sexual Diversity Studies program, one of the largest of its kind in North America.
Morgan does, however, allow that "We'll talk about whips and chains in a political, social, cultural, religious context of sexuality and how that sexuality affects those institutions." And there you have it. Admittedly, I took an entire class on Eastern European science fiction (good class, too), so there's a lot of random stuff being taught.
Surprising Support for Impeachment
Via Brad DeLong, talent show Greg reads a Newskeek poll indicating that 51 percent of the public would like to see George W. Bush impeached, whereas just 44 percent is opposed. Or, as Newsweek puts it, "Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a 'top priority,' but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done."
Impeachment -- a process which, if leading to conviction, would result in Dick Cheney becoming president of the United States -- lacks a great deal of appeal to me as an agenda item.
Two Sides to a War
I'm fairly certain I don't grasp the full complexity of the situation, but it continually strikes me that enthusiasts for military intervention in Darfur, insofar as they're not just poseurs eager to use the corpses of thousands as fodder for cheap UN-bashing (see also), are oddly in denial about the fact that there's an actual war happening with multiple sides. A feasible intervention against the government, it seems to me, would have to be an intervention on behalf of the rebels and their political agenda.
This is a course of action that nobody actually wants to explicitly endorse. Perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps Darfuri independence is a cause we should get behind. I'm skeptical that re-drawing all the lines on the map is the solution to Africa's problems -- seems more like a Pandora's Box to me -- but maybe someone can make that case. This other idea that an intervention could somehow proceed without us taking sides seems a bit daft.
Two Sides to a War
I'm fairly certain I don't grasp the full complexity of the situation, but it continually strikes me that enthusiasts for military intervention in Darfur, insofar as they're not just poseurs eager to use the corpses of thousands as fodder for cheap UN-bashing (see also), are oddly in denial about the fact that there's an actual war happening with multiple sides. A feasible intervention against the government, it seems to me, would have to be an intervention on behalf of the rebels and their political agenda.
This is a course of action that nobody actually wants to explicitly endorse. Perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps Darfuri independence is a cause we should get behind. I'm skeptical that re-drawing all the lines on the map is the solution to Africa's problems -- seems more like a Pandora's Box to me -- but maybe someone can make that case. This other idea that an intervention could somehow proceed without us taking sides seems a bit daft.
Blackburn on Truth
Just last week, I was saying to myself "how come TNR doesn't publish Simon Blackwell anymore?" And -- bam! -- here's a Simon Blackburn article reviewing Harry Frankfurter's On Truth and defending a somewhat postmodernist take against the now-fashionable slanders of Frankfurter and his ilk right there in The New Republic. Blackburn's Ruling Passions defending a kinda sorta "moral relativism" (not a good term, but most people would probably understand the view he supports as relativism) and Essays in Quasia-Realism are two of my major philosophical touchstones.
Lancet-go-round
Tim Lambert easily dispenses with criticism of the Hopkins/Lancet study of "excess deaths" in Iraq grounded in the divergence between their estimate of Iraq's pre-war death rate and the UN's estimate. The UN's estimate turns out to have just been a kind of guess with no real methodological grounding at all. Lambert's countercriticism of the "main street bias" line of attack doesn't seem quite as airtight to me (it's a little bit unclear based on the description exactly how this survey was done), but that was always a fairly speculative criticism (in that nobody really knew whether or not such a bias even existed, and other elements of the survey were biasing the death count in the other direction) so what the Hopkins team did still seems like by far the best estimate available. Better, certainly, than the "these numbers are very high so I choose to ignore them" method preferred by many.
Obviously, if the American and British governments -- or conservative think tanks and media outlets -- genuinely feel that the Hopkins team's methods were unsound, there's an obvious solution available to them: Design a method for a different comprehensive study of Iraqi mortality and fund its implementation. This is a sufficiently important question, and sufficiently difficult to pin down precisely, that it would make perfect sense for several different studies to be conducted.
The Easy Way Out
I guess I'm a little bit agnostic on the Drum versus Black dispute about the utility of canvassing one's support or lack thereof for past wars as a guide to foreign policy wisdom. It seems to me that this has some value, but I agree with Atrios that its value tends to be overstated. My biggest problem with this way of looking at the world, however, is that it winds up discounting people's views on wars that didn't happen. Since 2001, for example, various Weekly Standard articles I've read have advocated that the US send more troops to Afghanistan, that we send more troops to Iraq, that we go to war with Sudan over Darfur, that we go to war with Syria, that we go to war with Iran, and that we go to war with North Korea.
Continue reading "The Easy Way Out" »
What About the Good News?
Sara Mead notes UNICEF's curiously tone-deaf press release touting such successes in Iraq as "universal salt iodization (to prevent iodine deficiency disorders), reduction of iron-deficiency anaemia and fortification of locally produced wheat flour with iron and folic acid." Preschooling facilities, however, remain inadequate. That and the country is devolving into brutal ethnosectarian slaughter.
New Issue
Where oh where will I find my Spencer Ackerman articles, you ask? Well, look no further than the new issue of The American Prospect where he has a big article about the construction of permanent bases in Iraq:
But unbeknownst to the press, the public, and most of the Army itself, the clues to an American military occupation of Iraq -- that could last for years and even decades to come -- can be found inside Fort Monmouth. What is happening within that facility suggests that the White House continues to mislead the world about its ultimate intentions.
Seriously, you should subscribe -- there's even an article about The Wire.
Way Too Hot
Spencer determined to take things too far, is sitting around the house modeling his stylish Palestine High School windbreaker. In real life, though, I think he went to Bronx Science just like Marty Peretz.
In other news, our house is very cold since the heat is broken and the relevant repairpersons refused to come before tomorrow.
"The Economy" Versus Your Money
An astoundingly blinkered New York Times article on why Republican candidates aren't getting more of a boost from "glowing economic statistics" takes an astounding thirty paragraphs (admittedly, many of them short) to consider the possibility that "Rather than celebrate the stock market’s gains and the overall growth of the economy, many voters are worried about the wages of ordinary workers, which have just started to improve after several years of falling short or barely keeping up with inflation."
Yes, yes, shocking but true -- typical people's perceptions of the economy are driven more by the well-being of typical people than on aggregate macroeconomic indicators. Who'd a thunk it?
The New Plan
Having abandonned "stay the course" rhetoric, the question arises, exactly, of how the administration's new plan for Iraq differs from the old one. If it doesn't differ, of course, then we're just staying the course. Well, the new plan has substantive components and a procedural one. Substantively, it calls for the disarmament of Shiite militias and talks aimed at incorporating Sunni Arab groups into the political process. I have no idea how many times I've seen these exact same initiatives proposed before and touted as progress. Half a dozen? Twenty? Who knows?
Procedurally, there is a new wrinkle -- the dread timeline, or at least a "timetable for a series of milestones to be pursued in the coming year." Nevertheless, General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad "did not say what American officials planned to do if the timetable is not met." So there's no actual timetable for the implementation of the new policy, and there's no actual new policy.
Meanwhile, administration figures have correctly discerned that it would be easy to manage the situation in Iraq -- to at least keep some kind of lid on the bloodshed -- if Syria and Iran were cooperating with us. Unlike weak-kneed appeasers who want to try and achieve this through talks including the governments of the United States, Iraq, and Iraq's various neighbors, the administration has hit upon the awesome "new" "policy" of talking shit about Syria and Iran in hopes that empty rhetoric and a hostile attitude will lead to the rise of a new spirit of benevolence in Damascus and Teheran. The president is like a five year-old sitting in the sandbox hoping that if he cries and screams long enough his mom will drop by and sort out his disagreements with the other kids in the park.
Obama-rama
On the latest BloggingHeads.tv, I express some skepticism about Barak Obama that Noam Scheiber conveniently tried to debunk before Ross Douthat and I even recorded the segment (well, okay, Noam was arguing with someone else). My worry is this -- Obama has never really faced a major electoral battle. Sure, he seems like a charismatic guy and a good public speaker, but we don't really know anything about his performance as a candidate. I agree that "experience" can be easily overrated in presidential politics, but virtually nobody makes it to the kind of statewide office Obama now holds with such a paucity of electoral experience. Noam retorts:
It's not as though a group of party elders is just going to hand him the nomination and send him off to battle against John McCain or whomever with an affectionate pat on the behind. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination against the likes of Hillary, John Edwards, John Kerry, Evan Bayh, etc., he will by definition have been tested. If he can't take a hit, we'll know it by his failure to win the nomination.
For one thing, one shouldn't underrate the role of party elders. There are several second-term red or purple state governors any one of whom might make a good presidential nominee but none of whom seem to have a realistic shot precisely because party elders (the dread "Washington insiders") seem to lazy to offer any exposure to anyone who's not either a Senator or else the governor of Virginia. Second -- and perhaps more important -- Noam's argument could be applied to 2004-vintage John Kerry but as we saw there it's not really true. Weird shit happens, and a candidate who was eerily not-tested throughout a long and contentious primary campaign wound up shooting up the polls in Iowa and locking things up with shocking speed. And -- perhaps more to the point -- a primary campaign against other Democrats just isn't the same as facing off against the GOP.
There's perhaps no holder of comparable office who's had less experience tangling with the Republican Party than Barak Obama. This worries me. Now, on the other hand, it's true that he's a very appealing person in any number of other ways. What I'd like him to see is to find some way to get himself down in the muck -- put himself in a position where he's leading some kind of fight and the GOP feels compelled to try to take him down a notch or two. How well does he handle that? Maybe he'll handle it very well. But I'd like to know.
Class and Religion
Does this chart to the right, conveniently stolen from Kevin Drum really show that "class is still far more important than religion in America, despite the culture wars of the past couple of decades?" What it clearly does show is that class -- if, at least, by class you mean "income" rather than educational attainment or some other signifier -- has a real, large, independent influence on voting behavior. Across the board, as people get richer they get more Republican. This is true even of white evangelicals and of Jews, two religious groups oft said to simply leave their pocketbooks behind in the polling booth.
That said, the chart also seems to me to show that religious differences largely dominate income differentials. There are three religious groups -- Jews, the non-religious, and African-American Protestants -- such that the highest-income cohort of all three groups is less likely to vote Republican than are the lowest-income cohorts of the three other groups -- white evangelicals, white mainline protestants, and white catholics. And, again, rich white mainline protestants are less Republican than are lower-middle class evangelicals.
This, I think, is fundamentally what makes American politics tricky. It's often said that class doesn't matter -- or doesn't matter any more -- and our current politics is defined by culture. But that isn't true, and the chart clearly shows it. Movement up and down the economic ladder has a big impact on voting behavior. But religious affiliation also has a very large impact -- an impact so large it's doubtful to me that any sort of political strategy is really going to transcend it. Politicians and operatives just need to deal with a very complicated political landscape that's not amenable to the sort of simplifications that make for a good 800 word column.
The Price of War
If you enjoyed Kristof's column today, make sure to read yours truly making the exact same argument at much greater length back in July. God bless Joe Stiglitz.
Don't Count Your Models Before They've Hatched
Ezra Klein touts a new statistical model forecasting "an expected Democratic gain of 32 seats with Democratic control (a gain of 18 seats or more) a near certainty." Ezra remarks, "All the usual disclaimers apply, but things would have to go mighty awry for this election to slip through the left's fingers."
Well, let me offer some disclaimers. One is that there are two kinds of models based on historical data. One kind looks at the historical data, devises a model that fits the historical data well, and then offers a prediction based on the model. That's what these guys have done. In another kind of model, you do the same thing and then, having offered your prediction, you wait for the election outcome and it turns out that your prediction was good. Then, next time around, the same thing happens. That is to say that in the second sort of situation your model is not only based on historical data, but has an actual track record of success. I'd be a lot more confident in a model with a track record, since there are actually any number of formulae that might fit the historical data well.
More concretely, I still worry that we might see a new al-Qaeda video aimed at tipping things toward the GOP. I wish more liberals were out there putting this worry and Brad Plumer's argument about it, out there before it happens.
New Column
On Bush's addled concept of diplomacy:
So, probably, to get them to do what we want them to do, we're going to have to offer some kind of concessions or reassurances that they want. This is what used to be called "diplomacy." Alternatively, we could -- without warning and for no real reason -- just announce a new national space strategy designed to cope with far-fetched scenarios but that can only be viewed as a major affront to the interests and sensibilities of other major powers like Russia and China.
This is precisely the sort of thing the Bush administration doesn't seem to think about. And they don't think about it because they don't really understand what diplomacy is. To them, it's simple. Diplomacy means talking. The alternative to diplomacy is coercion. If you want a country to do something, you might try to get it to do that thing through threats -- either of military force or of economic sanctions. In situations where coercion is impossible or undesirable, they resort to their version of "diplomacy," talking -- saying what it is you want the other country to do, over and over again, in hopes that they will do it.
Read the whole thing! Or not.
Root Causes
A quarrel between friends as Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein kick around the paucity of female pundits. Both make good points. Both, however, also concede the relevance of the (very true) fact that you see a lot more male interest (as reflected in, say, New York Times op-ed submissions or American Prospect job applications) in the field. I actually think this is a bit of a red herring. After all, when you're talking about the highest levels of the professional the nature of the applicant pool doesn't matter at all.
Nobody's going to turn down a job as an op-ed columnist at the Times or the Washington Post and you're talking about a universe of maybe two dozen genuinely elite pundit jobs from which you have the entire universe of professional writers (and, as the case of Paul Krugman attests, actually a somewhat wider universe) to choose from -- Virginia Postrel instead of John Tierney, say. It's at least plausible that there's a real applicant-pool problem at lower levels, but not at the highest levels. And I'm certain that if women stopped being underrepresented at the highest levels, the applicant-pool would start evening out soon enough. After all, the paucity of women at the very top of the field -- the most prominent portion of it -- is naturally going to discourage people from thinking that they should seriously try to get their feet in the door.
McCain Watch
John Judis continues his efforts to convince me that John McCain may not be the psychotic neoconservative on national security issues that he appears to be, by noting that he has a long time proclivity for suggesting that someone like James Baker or Brent Scowcroft might make a good envoy to try to re-start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Later, McCain qualifies that to say he "would appoint someone to go to the region who was well regarded: Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, George Mitchell, Tony Zinni, Bill Kristol, Randy Scheunemann." Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Zinni would all be good choices. Scheunemann would be silly, and Kristol would be absurd. Judis remarks:
McCain clearly did acknowledge recommending Scowcroft and Baker as his negotiators. In grouping them subsequently with Bill Kristol (the editor of The Weekly Standard) and former campaign aide Randy Scheunemann--neither of whom have had significant diplomatic experience or enjoy high regard in Arab capitals--McCain appeared to be grasping desperately for a way to undermine the significance of his own statement. What really happened in Brussels will probably always be shrouded in doubt, but there is some reason to believe that McCain, faced with a foreign reporter, did temporarily let down his guard and reveal that, on U.S. policy toward Israel, he is closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush. And that's not a bad thing at all.
That's one interpretation. Another, of course, would be that McCain is seriously confused, doesn't understand this issue at all, and is just thrashing around saying things that don't make sense.
More Obama
Via Ezra Klein, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings makes the case for Obama on the merits as a good guy and a good senator.
To Be Sure!
This strikes me as a curious way to end a column about how Russia's ability to threaten cutting western Europe off from its gas supplies is making it extremely powerful:
German officials don’t really think Russia is about to turn off the gas if it doesn’t get its way on some issue. After all, it never did that during the old cold war, and Russia today is much more dependent on Western markets. But still, centuries of uneasy relations between Europe and Russia make German officials queasy about how dependent they’ve grown on the Kremlin to heat their homes and offices. Queasy or not, one thing they know for sure: Russia is back. The gas man cometh.
That Russia never did this during the Cold War seems like a good reason to think they won't do it in the future. And if Germans don't "really" think Russia will turn off the gas, then what's the significance of the gas man comething? Russia seems to be "back" primarily in the sense of not being as economically devastated as it was when I visited in the late Yeltsin years. And that I'd have to judge as a good thing; the human suffering involved in Russia's botched post-Communist transition was enormous.
Shorter Fred Kagan
We've screwed up so much, so badly in Iraq that we can ill-afford to stop screwing up.
Statistics for Dummies
Greg Easterbrook:
I suspect one reason the Iraq death toll elicits so little concern is that exaggerated estimates exist. Americans can say of the exaggerated estimates, "Oh, that's way too high" and skip over thinking about the more probable numbers. The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It's gibberish.
Well, no. That is not it at all. The authors used a statistical method that, as they perfectly well knew, doesn't generate especially precise results. That's why when they calculated the confidence interval for their estimate it turned out to be rather wide. The 654,965 number is the middle point of the confidence interval. The true number could very easily be thousands higher or lower than that, but the true number is extremely likely to fall somewhere within the band they laid out. This isn't hard stuff and it certainly isn't gibberish.
Politics of Evasion
In a strange convergence, William Greider in The Nation endorses (without calling it that) the Jonah Goldberg referendum plan for Iraq, doing us the kindness of specifying what question he wants to see. Namely, Iraqis should choose between these three options:
1. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within six months of the date of this referendum.
2. I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within one year of the date of this referendum.
3. I ask that the government of Iraq determine some time in the future when all coalition forces should be withdrawn.
Like any referendum-based plan for Iraq, this seems to me to founder on the details. Ask three questions and there'll probably be no majority. And suppose option three winds in a plurality grounded in overwhelming Kurdish support but clear majorities of Iraqi Arabs want us to leave in a six or twelve month timeframe. Then withdrawing loses legitimacy (we held a referendum!) but staying also loses the relevant sort of legitimacy in the Arab-populated areas where we're actually operating (we voted for y'all to leave and you're still here). Ultimately, this whole notion strikes me as a rather desperate casting-about, a desire to somehow evade the rather ugly policy choices facing the nation.
Call it the populist counterpoint to David Ignatius' call for "less partisan bickering" as the solution to Iraq.
Lewis: Muslims Act Like People
One of the weird ticks of our current political culture has been a tendency to embrace characterizations of Muslims or Arabs that, at the end of the day, are just truisms about human culture but then turn around and attribute these characteristics to Islam or Arab nationalism specifically. In his book, for example, Andrew Sullivan quotes Bernard Lewis:
What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society and the flouting or even abrogation of God's law.
Strip this of the portentious rhetoric and Islam-specificity and what you have here is the banal objection that people prefer to be members of political communities where their own faith is dominant. Here in the USA, Christians chafe at public policies they see as imbued with the spirit of secular humanism. More secularly oriented people, meanwhile, are happy to let Christians go about their merry way but greatly fear and loath public policies inspired by the spirit of evangelism or orthodox catholicism. Israelis want to live in a state of their own -- a Jewish state -- and not be a minority in some Muslim-dominated Middle Eastern polity. Just a bit north, Lebanon's Christians long fought -- and quite violently -- to maintain Christian domination of Lebanese politics.
In short, this is not some quirk of Islam, it's how the world works -- people don't like to be ruled over by Others, but tend not to mind the idea of ruling over Others. People are, in other words, self-interested and a little hypocrtical. Muslims, too! The fascinating question is why folks influenced by this view of the Islamic world thought it would be a good idea to conquer a patch of Muslim land and try to rule it. The common thread, I suppose, is an extreme level of condescension.
Random Link
I just found this, and it's great. "The Guns of 17th Street", a review of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy edited by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan published in the spring 2001 issue of The National Interest. The author is Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat and conservative foreign policy analyst who, as you'll see, was hating on neoconservatives before it was cool.
UPDATE: FYI, both The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute are located on 17th Street here in sunny Washington, DC. Clarke's book, co-written with Stefan Harper, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order is very good but a bit dated at this point.
Big News
Just in time for a big pre-election brou-ha-ha the New Jersey Supreme Court hands down a ruling:
The State Supreme Court in New Jersey said today that under equal protection guarantees of the state constitution, same-sex couples “must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.”
But it said that whether that status is called marriage or something else “is a matter left to the democratic process.”
That seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. At any rate, when this went down in Massachusetts it sparked both a lot of concern that the ruling would be bad for the Democrats' electoral fortunes, but also a lot of much stronger claims about litigation being somehow a bad path for the gay rights movement. The latter conclusion certainly would be convenient for Democratic Party political operatives, but I see very little evidence for it and the fact that we're seeing further expansions of gay rights seems to indicate that the obvious answer is the correct one -- social movements like to use the courts to advance their agenda because it's a method that works. The political process, fundamentally, doesn't like to address novel sorts of disputes because it unsettles established patterns and makes trouble for everyone -- it takes a lawsuit or two to set things in motion.
Single-Sex Schools
We're going to have more, apparently, or at least new federal regulations making it easier to have more. I was trying to think up an opinion on this subject, but so far no real luck beyond my vague sense that dudes I knew who attended Collegiate seemed kind of messed up. I infer from this post at Eduwonk that the "liberal caricature" thing to do would be opposed. I find that a little surprising, since, say, Wellesley more or less is a liberal caricature all on its own. Conor Clarke says the empirical evidence is murky.
In the Navy
Some may tire of Spack's determination to blog each and every DOD death notice from Iraq, but yours truly reads everything and notices that today's batch includes Seaman Charles O. Sare of Hemet, California, age 23. That's right, Seaman Charles O. Sare, meaning he's in the Navy, specifically the Naval Ambulatory Care Center in Port Hueneme. He managed, however, to get killed by "enemy action while conducting combat operations in the Al Anbar Province, Iraq."
Anbar, we'll note, is rather far from the ocean. What's happening here is that as part of the ongoing efforts to cope with Iraq-related manpower problems while denying that such problems exist, you're seeing more-or-more efforts to find Navy personnel who can be dispatched into the basically non-Navy context of the Iraq War. That's probably the smart play insofar as one wants to continue this war (which one really shouldn't want), but it's yet another reminder of the damage persisting in this futile policy is doing.
Cheney: We Waterboard
The Vice President loves torture. "It's a no brainer for me." Of course, he denies that it's actually "torture" which I'm certain American soldiers would love to hear were they to be subjected to such techniques in the Brave New Post-Geneva World the Bush administration is busy creating.
Waiting for Politkovskaya
Via Chris Bertram, Mark Ames at the exile publication eXile.ru does a brilliant job smacking down American journalists in general, Washington Post editorial page figures in particular, and Anne Applebaum in super-particular for their opportunistic, shallow, and egocentric deployments of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's murder:
What exactly was Anna Politkovskaya's bullet-riddled corpse worth to the West? No surprise here: A juicy opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia. . . .
The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country. The West has exploited her death with all of the crudity and cynicism of an Arab mob funeral...only at least the Arabs use their own people's corpses to demonize an enemy that actually kills them. Whereas in this case, the West stole another country's corpse, then paraded it at home in order to whip up hatred against the corpse's birthplace. It would be like the Palestinians slipping into Tel Aviv, grave-robbing Rabin's corpse after his murder, then parading it around Gaza City, ululating hate towards Israel for allowing the great peacemaker to get killed.
Read the whole thing. Where, he asks, are America's Politkovskayas -- the brave journalists who stand up to the depredations and illiberalism of our local political goons? It would go too far to say there are none, but Fred Hiatt and friends certainly don't qualify.
One of the Good Guys
As I said below, we certainly have had some good journalists in this country, especially for the past couple of years (2001, 2002, and 2003 were not nearly as good) and these days at least, Tom Ricks of Fiasco fame is certainly one of them. Today's article from Ricks rocks: "The text of President Bush's news conference yesterday ran to nearly 10,000 words, but what may have been more significant were the things he did not say."
That response left unclear how the benchmarks would be different from previous times when the United States has set out intentions, only to back down. For example, the original war plan envisioned the U.S. troop presence in Iraq being cut to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. Last year, some top U.S. commanders thought they would be able to significantly cut the U.S. troop level in Iraq this year -- a hope now officially abandoned. More recently, the U.S. military all but withdrew from Baghdad, only to have to have to reenter the capital as security evaporated from its streets and Iraqi forces proved unable to restore calm by themselves.
Right, exactly, the "plan" has always been to reduce troop levels as the Iraqi government hit awesome benchmarks. The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of a "plan" to (a) have the Iraqi government hit benchmarks, and then (b) reduce US troops levels dramatically, leaving behind a few tens of thousands of soldiers on permanent bases to lay the groundwork for the next round of the Mideast Transformation Project. The problem has always been that the "plan" has no relationship to reality. Churning out new "plans" doesn't change that.
VDH on the Brain
America's worst Thucydides scholar takes on twentieth century history:
I thought these who advocated such nonsense might at any second suggest that because Mussolini's fascists, Hitler's Nazis, and Tojo's militarists all had quite different agendas, separate racial ideologies, and particular aims in WWII, then, they could hardly be lumped together as the Axis that threatened Western republics and needed a generic anti-fascist response. All during the Vietnam War, we were lectured daily about the intricacies of Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese Communists — their rivalries, hatreds, and quite separate aims-as they combined to defeat the United States, and trumped their own tensions with an all-encompassing hatred of Western democratic capitalism.
Now then. Germany and Italy formed a formal military alliance and Germany and Japan had a looser, but similar arrangement. Nobody was "lumping" them together, they were actual allies. Meanwhile, this view of Vietnam is bizarre. The distinction-drawers were completely correct. Where Communist parties were seen as alien impositions of Moscow (Warsaw, Prague, Kabul, Budapest) you had one dynamic, but where they had authentic roots in local nationalism (as in, say, Vietnam) the situation was very different. Nixon seized advantage of the Sino-Soviet split to greatly enhance America's strategic situation. Does Hanson really deny this? How stupid is he?
Give Peace a Chance?
Lorelei Kelly writes: "The world public opinion poll that found seven in ten Americans favor Congressional candidates who will pursue major changes in US foreign policy, want less emphasis on use of military force to solve problems and want to work more cooperatively with the United Nations. Most favor direct talks with North Korea and Iran to boot!" See more here.
I do think the political prospects for candidates espousing "dovish" views is considerably worse than a simplistic read of the polling data would indicate. On the other had, I also think the political prospects of such views are considerably better than is commonly accepted inside Democratic campaigning circles, where the thinking seems to be that you always want to position yourself as hawkishly as you can manage. Here's John Hostettler (R-IN) touting his 2002 vote against the war -- "In October 2002, when America was clamoring to go to war in Iraq, I voted against sending America's sons and daughters into harm's way because the intelligence did not support the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction there." No doubt he took a lot of shit, politically, for his stand at the time. But there are probably a lot of perfectly cynical pols out there who think they'd be in better shape today if they could make Hostettler's claim honestly.
Bipartisanship!
George Will and I don't agree about much, but his views on college sports seem sound to me. Even better, if Will's column is accurate Bill Thomas and Charlie Rangel are crossing the partisan divide to do some work on this issue.
Saying Nay
I've been a semi-naysayer about the Democrats' electoral chances this year, but Eric Alterman's been saying it loud and clear. He offers some a couple of points of further skepticism. Here's some more from me. Yesterday, Kevin Drum linked to a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner election survey he characterized as "pretty positive for Democrats." And, indeed, it is. But if you look at the past couple of cycles, you'll see that GQR has a penchant for overoptimism (they're Democratic consultants) and if you look at the previous GQR survey, you'll see that the trend line they're monitoring is bad for Democrats.
Other points. TNR rounds up the "seven worst immigration campaign aids." They mean "worst" in an ethical sense here, most of the ads look pretty good as campaign ads to me. Similarly, I think Josh Marshall is making a mistake by violating his own dicta about paying attention to meta-messages and the undesirability of Democratic whining in the context of the anti-Ford ad campaign. Josh says "When it comes to GOP race-baiting, calling them out, revealing them for who they are and what is they do, is fighting back. It's that simple. The dynamics of the issues are fundamentally different."
I disagree. What I think you have here is the GOP launches a mildly racially tinged, highly negative ad against Ford. Instead of simply firing back with a tough anti-Corker ad, Democrats start complaining about race baiting. What voters in Tennessee hear is "Democrats think all y'all are a bunch of redneck racists" and are reminded of why they hate liberals in the first place. Not that there aren't some serious racists in Tennessee (at least I assume there are; they're everyplace else) but it's hardly as if Ford was going to be competing viably for the hard-core racist vote anyway. My feeling is that this kind of thing -- with plenty of money and a good GOTV operation to back it -- has a good chance of sharply limiting Democratic gains.
Houses Getting Cheaper
Much cheaper, it seems: "Housing developers are drastically cutting prices to move a backlog of unsold homes off the market, according to new statistics released today by the Commerce Department. The median sale price of a new home in September 2006 was $217,000, 9.7 percent lower than in September 2005, the report said — the steepest year-to-year drop in more than three decades."
Is that a nominal number or a real one? At any rate, sales went way up and inventories declined as a result of the reduced prices, so that doesn't sound to me quite like the tailspin of doom some were foreseeing but the Commerce Department still has a fairly large number of unsold homes (6+ months worth) lying around, so we haven't seen the end of things yet. But how big a proportion of the market are new homes anyway?
The Odds
John Hollinger likes the Spurs' chances: "Tim Duncan and Tony Parker both look great, so it says here the league's model franchise has to be the odds-on favorite to claim its fourth ring of the Duncan Era. Only potential snag is age on the wings with Bruce Bowen, Barry and Finley."
My inclination is to agree that San Antonio has the best team in the league, but "odds-on favorite" doesn't follow from this. The West is so much better than the East that even if you like the Spurs' odds in a Finals matchup, the ex ante odds of San Antonio getting to the Finals have to be judged considerably worse than Miami's. That, I think, makes the Heat the preseason favorite even though San Antonio's better. It's also worth keeping in mind that I see a Texas-sized x-factor in the Rockets. They probably won't stay healthy, but faced with Yao-Battier-McGrady-Wells-Alson on the floor, I wouldn't feel too comfortable offering "you don't have a real power forward" as my counterargument.
Honest Like a Moron
Via a gushing K-Lo ("he's a clear thinker on this war. And isn't his honesty about the stakes and his principles — even if you're someone who disagrees with him on this or that — reason enough to want him reelected"), Rick Santorum's bafflingly stupid speech on "the gathering storm" facing the United States:
Mr. Casey said that "the U.S. should not escalate the drive to place weapons in space and should seek an international ban on such weaponry." I hate to break the news to you, but Iran and North Korea are already escalating things. . . .
Let me tell you, Mr. Casey, people are concerned when Venezuela is harboring terrorists, many of whom will penetrate our border because of the amnesty bill you support, that puts amnesty before security.
And just think -- what if the Venezuelan terrorists get on the Iranian space station? What then Mr. Casey, huh? huh? Seriously, these people are morons. Dangerously dishonest or (I fear) dangerously confused about what's going on in the world. "Say what you will," remarks Lopez, "but this is leadership." Custer-quality leadership at that.
Kudos, incidentally, to Bob Casey for taking on the administration's bafflingly wrongheaded National Space Strategy. This is exactly the sort of ground where Democrats normally fear to tread.
They're Beating Us on Both Screens
It's outside his normal bailiwick, but I think Paul Krugman's analysis of our twin failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely right. We don't have nearly the requisite level of resources to succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not, however, yet as bad as Iraq and it's possible that if we left Iraq then we'd have enough manpower to succeed in Afghanistan -- especially when you consider that we're not ally-less in Afghanistan, and one can imagine that if we agree to do more there we might also be able to secure additional assistance. Insisting on maintaining anything resembling our current commitment to Iraq, however, is just going to guarantee failure in Afghanistan without producing anything useful in Iraq.
The Decider
When the going gets tough, George W. Bush digs deeper into the cocoon of ignoramous conservative journalism, hunkering down for a lengthy chat with die-hard administration loyalists from inside the print media universe. As Mike Crowley notes, you can't get this much raw transcript of Bush without a good dose of hilarity. You also can't get this much Bush without noticing that, like Rick Santorum, the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly fri |
