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October 29, 2006 - November 4, 2006 Archives
Iraq: Who Rules?
The opening stories of today's violence and conflict in Iraq are, naturally, sad and horrifying, but they're also sort of old news. A newer development is closer to the end of the article, as you see the Iraqi government increasingly chafing at being treated as subcontractors for an American colonial administration.
At the end of the day, I think this is a major problem for all so-called "plans" for Iraq. At this point, things have simply gone too far for the U.S. government to really impose its will on any of the major Iraqi actors, call them insurgents, militias, the Iraqi government, or whatever else you like.
All About Gilbert
Gilbert Arenas has been getting a lot more press attention recently, but this profile in The Washington Post was the first time I ever really saw the sad, but also touching, story of his relationship with his parents explained.
UPDATE: It has nothing to do with basketball, but I find this sort of thing -- "Under the alias Alexandra Delphing, Francis [i.e., Gilbert's mom] has a criminal record in the Miami Police Department database dating from 1989, according to a public information officer at the department" -- surprising. You would think that what with all the money we spend on prisons in the United States somebody would try and invest a little time and energy in ascertaining the real names of people who get arrested.
The Two Faces of Rick Santorum
Today's David Brooks column makes a good point. While Rick Santorum is one of the very most odious Senators on "culture war" issues, he's also -- for a Republican -- something of a creative thinker and semi-serious thinker on questions related to the wretched of the earth, both at home and in the third world. Mark Schmitt actually did a fantastic column on this a ways back reviewing Santorum's book and came to this conclusion:
These innovative solutions may have caused liberals some discomfort decades ago, but a dozen years after the passage of federal empowerment zones and Bill Clinton's legislation to support community banks, “empowerment” is now very much the core strategy of modern liberalism. One might be tempted to say, as Santorum does of Senator Clinton, that behind Santorum’s rhetoric is a “left agenda,” but that wouldn't be fair.
That’s because Santorum is prepared for this challenge. In his conclusion, he warns that “some will dismiss my ideas as an extended version of 'compassionate conservatism.'” But it is not, he insists, because of his insistence on “moral capital,” at least as defined by him. In other words, even if liberals advocate some of the same policy solutions, they are doomed simply because they are associated with the moral tolerance of liberals. And so, in the end, it is not as easy as I had hoped it would be to separate Santorum's interesting and laudable ideas on poverty and work-family balance from his mean-spirited and intolerant social views; they are wholly interdependent. Rather than compassionate conservatism, Santorum has fashioned something new: a mean-spirited, intolerant liberalism.
I think that's probably right. At any rate, Santorum will almost certainly lose his seat and that will almost certainly be a change for the better. I do think, however, that Santorum was gesturing in the direction of the future of the Republican Party. These days, most of the cool kids seem to be writing books (accurately) accusing Bush of abandonning much of what's traditionally been understood as "conservatism" and then arguing (much less persuasively) that this abandonmnet of small government orthodoxy has been the problem with Bush. Much more plausible, I think, is that Bush had the idea roughly correct -- the GOP needs something like "compassionate conservatism," an American Christian Democracy -- but ran a policy shop that was far too inept and corrupt to put much meat on the bones. Someday, though, someone will figure it out.
The Armey Line
For an interpretation of current GOP political problems that is, I think, completely wrong take a look at Dick Armey's argument that insufficient fealty to low-spending dogma is responsible for the situation. The thing you'll notice is that there's not much of an argument here as such. Instead, it's a simple correlation observation -- the Bush Republicans have spent a lot of money, and now they're poised to lose seats. But all of the key policy steps that Armey's citing actually came before the 2004 election, which went fine for the GOP. What's changed between now and then isn't domestic policy (indeed, the economy, though still soft in many respects, is almost unquestionably better than it was two years ago) but the war in Iraq.
Party Photos
What happens when pundits stop being polite and start getting dressed up for Julian Sanchez's "Party of Death?" Photographic evidence here. For Wonkette's sake, Adrienne and I restaged the shot from the 2005 edition he found so fascinating.
Labyrinth
I find this idea strangely hilarious -- it turns out that the US Naval Academy has a literary magazine, Labyrinth. Here's a poem about Jesus.
A Dark Lining in Every Silver Cloud
This is really just too much. As you'll recall, after the 2004 election we were greeted to an endless series of articles about the how the problem with the Democrats was that, stuck in the iron clutches of out-of-touch left-wing interest groups, they refused to nominate candidates who veered from the liberal orthodoxy on cultural issues, even in culturally conservative districts. This wasn't especially accurate, but never mind. Certainly, in the 2006 cycle, Democrats have tended to nominate candidates who are relatively culturally conservative in constituencies that are culturally conservative. That's how the game is played. But along comes The New York Times with the dire warning that "if candidates like Mr. Shuler do help the Democrats gain majority control of Congress, it could come at a political price, which may include tensions in the party between its new centrists and its more liberal political base."
Uh, okay.
A few things to note. One is that while this trend certainly is present -- ironically, much more pronouncedly so in Senate races than in the House ones that are the focus of the article -- a countertrend is also under way. Lots and lots of the endangered Republican seats involve center-left districts in the Northeast where voters are getting sick of the fraud caucus sham. Ask Chris Shays, or any umber of other endangered Republicans in Connecticut, New York, or Pennsylvania how they're feeling. The other point is that agenda control matters, especially in the House. A Hastert-run House gets to try and gin up votes on issues that are going to be awkward for marginal Democrats. A Pelosi-run House won't do that -- issues that are going to create problems for the Democrats just won't go to the floor. Instead, issues where Democrats are united but that put Republicans in awkward spots are going to be highlighted. That's a big part of the reason why control of the House matters.
Trade as Foreign Policy
Suzanne Nossel has a smart list up of "of 5 issues where progressives are well-positioned to build public support based on existing policies, and 5 areas where more work needs to be done" and wisely includes trade on the list of things where viable progressive consensus seems lacking. A big part of the problem here, I think, is that not only are liberals famously divided about trade issues, but these disagreements almost exclusively conceptualize trade issues as economic policy disputes rather than foreign policy ones. Obviously, though, trade agreements are diplomatic pacts formed with foreign countries and form -- along with formal and informal military alliances, economic sanctions, international legal institutions, etc. -- part of the wide range of non-military tools that can impact foreign governments' behavior.
For my part, I've become considerably more skeptical about the economic case for the multilateral trade regime as it currently exists than I was three or four or five years ago. At the same time, though, I've become more convinced of the central role efforts to construct a globalized marketplace have traditionally played -- and should continue to play -- in the liberal view of American foreign policy. What's more, I worry that the people who outline trade policy don't really consider the national security consequences of some of our ideas. People who are rightly leery of things that might provoke a new arms race with China strike me as all-too-eager to embrace policies that will play in Beijing or New Delhi as America-led efforts to strangle Chinese or Indian prosperity in the crib. Adopting such policies would be, I think, a major problem. At the same time, the existing multilateral process has pretty clearly run aground and is creating way too many problems for far too many people to stay viable. The world pretty desperately needs creative ways to get things back on track and redress the many valid concerns about the impact of these agreements in a way that actually facilitates the opening of markets.
Wire: The Return
Episode 44 aired last night after the tragic skip week. The show continues to be utterly uncompromising in its refusal to advance the pace of the crime narrative. Herc and Carver are circling in the vicinity of Randy's knowledge of where Marlo stashes his bodies, but can't think to ask the right question. Freamon was convinced to drop his inquiry into the case of the missing bodies just before Randy showed up on the cops' radar, so nobody's pushing it. It appeared, briefly, that Omar's arrest would drag McNulty back toward the center of action, but instead they gave us another entirely McNulty-free episode. Instead, the focus stays on season four's main plotlines -- the kids and city hall.
Continue reading "Wire: The Return" »
Feldman on Iranian Nukes
Noah Feldman's long article on the Iranian nuclear program manages to be equivocal on such minor issues as "why is Iran building this bomb?" and "what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program?" so I think that if I'd read it blind, I wouldn't have found it especially obnoxious, except insofar as it's weird to write such a long article on an important subject and not really say anything about it. But I didn't read it blind -- I got a panicked email from my dad asking if this was "some sort of soft campaign for March's surprise strike" and saw Martin Peretz call it a "really smart" article. So one starts to worry. And, indeed, there's much to complain about. So let's get to the carping.
Continue reading "Feldman on Iranian Nukes" »
Poll: 57 Percent Support Ponies for All
Jim Harper at the Cato blog is psyched by a poll showing that "54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought [the government] was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses." The good news for libertarianism as a political movement is that polls almost always show that. The bad news for libertarianism as a political movement is that, um, polls almost always show that. Meanwhile, polls don't show any serious support for cutting spending on anything in particular, which makes it very hard to cut spending.
Times Change
Let's just hope [Rove]'s not implying that Bush will follow FDR's lead and turn his attention to taking the country to war.
That's Peter Beinart, shrill Bush-hater and anti-war "doughface" for the record. It seems to me that if Democrats do take congress and create a hostile legislative environment, this really might increase the odds that Bush turns his attention to taking the country to war. Lame-duck status and congressional opposition have traditionally spurred presidents to take refuge in the greater autonomy offered by foreign policy adventures. The public might not stand for it, but Bush doesn't have a designated successor sitting in the naval observatory whose political fortunes he needs to defend.
Bias: It's Not in the Head
John Harris is doing a Slate exchange with Mark Halperin and says "I'm protective of you (and of myself), especially since most of the people who attack you and The Note do so with radically misguided assumptions about your actual opinions and professional values." To me, this is revealing. The presumption here is that the correct way to assess The Note is with regard to Halperin's "actual opinions." But, of course, there's no real way for readers of The Note to assess Halperin's "actual opinions." The only thing they have to go on is the writing that appears in The Note. As Derrida says, there's nothing outside the text.
This is relevant because one of the key things that makes The Note -- irregardless of Halperin's "actual opinions" about politics -- a rightwing publications is its insistence that the media is a liberal institution. And, again, The Note's basis for endless reiteration of this rightwing talking point is that the "actual opinions" of the bulk of the people producing political journalism are liberal. As best I can tell living and working in this town, this is, in fact, fairly accurate. It's also completely irrelevant. Journalists' "actual opinions" about things don't matter at all. What matters is what they write, what they say, what they broadcast. One of the great strengths of the blog-based media criticism, I think, is precisely that the people writing the blogs tend to know virtually nothing about the world of professional political journalism -- the only thing they have to go on is the work, not the "actual opinions" or even "professional values" of the people doing the work.
What matters is what you do and what the impact of what you do is. The impact of what The Note does is to help the Republican Party win elections. I don't really know why The Note is so deeply invested in doing that, but that's what they're doing and, at the end of the day, that's what matters.
Message Discipline
I'm behind the curve on Amy Sullivan on David Kuo, but I thought this was interesting:
"I think the good news here is that people working in the White House think that Pat Robertson is nuts," he said. "They should. Pat Robertson is nuts." It seemed a little off-message--after all, this was a politically embarrassing book for the Bushies, and here O'Donnell was praising them. True, Robertson does regularly spout off truly nutty and dangerous statements (his call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; his prayer for the death of liberal Supreme Court justices; his belief that UPC symbols are the Mark of the Beast as foretold in Revelation). But what rankled O'Donnell the most was Robertson's "insane" belief that Jews are going to burn in hell. "
While most of them would put it more delicately than Robertson, it is an article of faith for millions and millions of evangelicals that the only way into heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. (The good reverend has also said he believes Methodists will burn in hell, but that's not really the point.) By condemning and mocking that doctrine, O'Donnell managed an impressive feat. He took Robertson, a figure widely disliked and discredited throughout the evangelical community, and found a way to criticize him that would also insult and alienate evangelicals. Congratulations, Lawrence O'Donnell--you're the new poster-boy for secular liberal intolerance.
Now Amy's right. It would be useful, for the purposes of electoral politics, for liberals in the media to avoid expressing the view that the belief -- adhered to by millions of Americans -- that failure to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior will result in eternal damnation is daft. On the other hand, the evangelical view of this matter is, in fact, completely absurd. And not just absurd in a virgin birth, water-into-wine, I-believe-an-angel-watches-over-me kind of way. On this view, a person who led an entirely exemplary life in terms of his impact on the world (would an example help? Gandhi, maybe?) but who didn't accept Jesus as his personal savior would be subjected to a life of eternal torment after his death and we're supposed to understand that as a right and just outcome. That, I think, is seriously messed up.
But I shouldn't say so!
UPDATE: Since this post got Atrios'd, let me say that I don't especially think Amy merits a Two Minute Hate here and I agree with her point in the article that what Sam Rosenfeld called "theocracy hype" (for example) is both analytically wrong and tactically misguided. But I think there's a real dilemma here -- some things that are impolitic to say are also true.
Stand Up, Stand Down
The strategy, of course, is that as the Iraqi security forces stand up, American forces will be able to stand down, providing not for a precipitous withdrawal, but rather a slow-but-steady drawdown of the US military presence in Iraq as victory is achieved. Except, as Jim Henley notes, our troop strength in Iraq is somehow back up to 150,000, right in the neighborhood of the peak level. It's almost as if the administration's strategy for Iraq is a horrible failure, a plan for perpetual war. But that couldn't be right, could it?
Well, of course it could. After all, "the only defeat is leaving", according to Bush. Meaning that "winning" just means continuing to do what we're doing -- staying in Iraq -- for as long as it takes for us to . . . keep on staying in Iraq.
Street Rips
Major Daniels, as we've seen on The Wire has an idea that I think all good liberals are supposed to like -- the Baltimore Police Department could stop doing "street rips" aimed at nailing low-level offenders and start targeting their energies at building felony cases against high-end drug figures. I wonder, though, how much sense this makes. The guys who pass for high-value targets in Baltimore are, at the end of the day, mid-sized fish at best in the drug trade at large. Arrest as many of them as you like and you'll still have the wholesalers who bring the coke and heroin into Baltimore around. And you'll still have all these drug addicts who want to buy drugs. The combination of demand for drugs and supply of drugs is going to ensure an endless stream of middlemen, no matter how many people you arrest.
Street level dealers, by contrast, are a bona fide nuisance. You wouldn't want those dudes slinging on the corner where you live or right outside the shop where you buy stuff. And there's no law of nature that says people need to be selling drugs more-or-less openly out in high-traffic public places. Are you going to get the people to stop selling drugs? No. If someone wants to buy them, someone will sell them. But if the cops made it a sufficient hassle to operate an open-air drug market while winking at people who manage to stay discrete, you could envision a world in which the drug dealers start showing some discretion and quality of life for the neighborhood's taxpayers goes up.
It sort of sounds correct that the key to more effective crime control policy would be taking up Daniels' suggestion and doing more highly professional police work -- complicated investigations and the like -- but the important thing is really to focus on what things are and aren't achievable. A police department's ability to influence the fact that people use drugs and other people sell drugs to them is going to be pretty minimal. Their influence over where, when, and how drugs get sold, by contrast, could be pretty large as long as you went at it with some focus.
UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman responds with, in part, some recollections of living in Columbia Heights during the great MS-13 War of 2002-2003. I was in that neighborhood for the tail end of the conflict and, I dunno, I recall it as having been scary as shit notwithstanding the fact that I knew, rationally, that virtually everyone getting hurt was in the game and that my odds of being killed were, in fact, extremely low no matter how often one heard sirens by night and saw police tape by day.
Sherri Berman Seminar
Crooked Timber is hosting an online seminar on Sherri Berman's book, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century featuring, among other things, a contribution from yours truly. Check it all out.
Show Me The Money!
Jon Chait follows up his article on the gap between productivity and wages, with a published chat with Robert Rubin and Peter Orszag on the issue. The current issue of TAP, meanwhile, has a package of articles on policies to create high-wage jobs.
Let me just observe with regard to Rubin and Orszag that I feel like they're neglecting the possibility that tax rates influence pre-tax distribution. To take an extreme example for illustrative purposes, if you had a 90 percent tax bracket kick in for people making over $400,000 a year, it would make much more sense to try and hire two people each making $400,000 than to try and hire a "superstar" for $800,000. The additional $400,000 you'd be paying in salary to the superstar would only buy $40,000 worth of labor, which is a pretty crappy deal for the employer. Bush's cut in the top rate wasn't super-dramatic on that scale, but if you look at the long-term Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush trajectory, the top marginal income tax rate actually is way lower than it used to be.
The Problematics of Neocolonialism
I've been posting for a while now on the odd situation in which the US military has been waging war in Iraq against forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement also includes members of the cabinet of Iraq's allegedly sovereign government. Well, the inherent tension of that idea seems to have come to a head recently as the US constructed a series of roadblocks in order to blockade Sadr City only to have Prime Minister Maliki tell us today that we need to lift the seige.
And so it goes. The situation is an intractable conceptual and practical muddle. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and the most effective military forces in Iraq are the US military and the smaller British detatchment. But American troops are under the command of Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and ultimately answerable to the dictates of the American political system. The British troops answer to Tony Blair and the British political system. But the supreme political authority in Iraq is Maliki and his government, which has to respond to its own imperatives. It doesn't make sense to bend the disposition of the bulk of the United States Army to what Maliki feels he needs or wants to do, but it also doesn't make sense for Maliki's policies to be bent according to the dictates of US Central Command. Which is just to say that the continuation of a gigantic and open-ended American military presence in Iraq doesn't make sense.
I agree with Kevin Drum that the generals who are learning to love timetables and deadlines are tragically late to the party. Throughout 2004, Iraq was under a state of formal military occupation. 2005, meanwhile, was a year of political transition in Iraq -- elections held, constitutions written, assemblies, referenda, etc. The time for announcing a timetable was late '04 or early '05 with the actual timetable pegged to the political events of 2005 so that withdrawal was part-and-parcel of the emergence of a new political order in Iraq. That might have contributed to Iraqi stability, and if it didn't work out would have at least been a face-saving measure. Now, basically, it's just fucked and there's really nothing to do but get out of Iraq and start working on diplomacy and so forth aimed at containing the fallout from the subsequent mess.
The Conservative Soul
I review Andrew Sullivan's new book.
The Party of Ideas
New GOP initiatives of the day -- no sex for twentysomething single people and a mass hate of John Kerry (who, one notes, is not actually up for election this year) for having made . . . a sloppily-worded joke about how stupid people such as George W. Bush wind up blundering their countries into horribly misguided military adventures.
NBA Predictions
Well, the season starts tonight, so I think I ought to go on record with some predictions so we can look back at how laughably wrong I was a few months hence.
Continue reading "NBA Predictions" »
Beam Me Up
Lacking anything resembling an adequate number of Arabic-speaker, the military is apparently trying to build devices reminiscent of the old Universal Translator to fill the gap. It's rarely discussed, but you've got to think that the severe paucity of people who speak Arabic (to say nothing of Farsi, Pashto, etc.) is incredibly crippling to a whole range of military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement endeavors. Indeed, as best I can tell it's a fairly serious impediment to American journalism, and therefore to the general public understanding of what's even happening.
Clearly, it would take a long time for a massive investment in building skills in Middle Eastern languages to pay off, but all that goes to show is that we couldn't start such an effort soon enough. Indeed, had we really done it seriously in fall 2001, it might be paying off at least a little already.
The Search for Scapegoats
A Justin Logan op-ed in the DC Examiner notes that hawks, in their endless quest to blame anyone but themselves for the problems in Iraq, have hit upon the idea that Nuri al-Maliki is just inadequate for the job of prime minister. As Justin argues, however, the objective situation simply makes it impossible for him to achieve want the hawks want him to. Iraqi leaders are destined to be actual human beings and not wizards capable of producing magical ponies: "The real problem in Iraq is not Iran or Syria, it wasn’t Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and it isn’t Nuri al-Maliki. It isn’t the case that a few external actors are undermining an otherwise sound strategy. Bush’s ideology-as-strategy model is the problem."
The PowerPoint of Doom
Here's the slide somebody handed over to The New York Times's Michael Gordon, providing a graphical depiction of the US military's view that the situation in Iraq has gone to shit -- moving from a bad situation before the February shrine attack in Samarra toward a state of inc reasing chaos. In addition, "An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads 'urban areas experiencing "ethnic cleansing" campaigns to consolidate control' and 'violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.'"
Meanwhile, in yesterday's editorial making the case for the GOP, National Review argued it was vital to keep the Democrats out of power, because only a Republican majority can protect the American public from accurate information about Iraq: "their victory would undoubtedly strengthen the forces who want to declare Iraq a defeat and come home. Partisan oversight hearings will politicize every military miscalculation, every dime misspent, and every abuse by our allies (real or imagined). The effect will be to sap what public support remains for seeing the job done in Iraq. The doomsday clock on our commitment in Iraq will have lurched a few minutes closer to midnight."
Vote GOP: We'll maintain a cocoon of denial!
Uh Oh...
Someone forgot to send John Derbyshire the memo: "John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative's, but something is owed to honesty. There's a lot of fake outrage going round here."
K-Lo denies that the Corner's all-misrepresenting-Kerry-all-the-time strategy is "part of any kind of coordinated response." That's just silly. In the new information age, pretty much all responses are coordinated responses. Statements and press releases get emailed around lightning quick, and it's perfectly clear on any given day what it is the Powers That Be would like me to be writing about. That doesn't mean anyone needs to take the bait -- I haven't, for example, been plugging the Allen Assault Gambit story -- but people know what's on-message and what isn't. The fact that Kerry's "insult" to the troops is not only a trivial matter, but wasn't actually an insult is immaterial; this is the distraction the GOP wants today, and it's a distraction conservative pundits are happy to provide.
About Those Taxes
Jon Chait seems to have the goods on my pet theory that lower top income tax rates may actually explain changes in the pre-tax income distribution. Basically, the timing and magnitude of the shift in executive compensation look pretty wrong for my theory to have much explanatory power.
What's a Little Payoff Between Friends
My esteemed colleague Garance Franke-Ruta has some new exclusive goods on George Allen and his stock options:
On October 20, 2000 -- just 18 days before former Virginia Governor George Allen was elected to the U.S. Senate -- Xybernaut, a Virginia-based technology company, on whose board Allen served, held an early annual shareholder meeting and awarded Allen a tidy bonus of 50,000 stock options. Allen was granted the stock as part of his re-election to the board at a time when polls showed him to be the favorite in the impending senate election against Democrat Chuck Robb, and when it was clear that he would have to resign his board seat if and when he became a senator. Senate rules forbid members from serving on corporate boards.
The issuance of these options, whose existence is confirmed by the Form Five filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that The American Prospect is posting in conjunction with this piece, raises questions about why Xybernaut (which filed for bankruptcy in 2005) granted them to Allen so soon before his election to the Senate, and what, if anything, the company expected in return for them. Stock options, a controversial form of director compensation, "are designed to encourage future risk taking and align the interest of the director with the interests of the shareholder," says attorney Beth Young, a corporate governance expert now lecturing at Harvard Law School. Re-electing a director who might have to resign within weeks "is a little unusual," she says, and granting him additional options prior to his anticipated departure at an early annual meeting is "very unusual."
It looks, in other words, like Xybernaut (see more on them) found themselves a clever way to de facto keep paying Allen even while he took office as a US Senator.
Ho, Ho, Ngo Dinh Diem!
Ralph Peters says we must save Iraqi democracy and curb Iraqi death squads by engineering a military coup. Juntas, of course, being well-known for their habit of abjuring extra-judicial violence. More than the low quality of the policy advice, however, the notable thing here is that Peters, like a surprisingly large number of enthusiasts for the cause of Arab democracy, views events in the Middle East mostly through racism-tinged glasses: "As dearly as we believe in democracy, Iraq's Arabs are proving that they're incapable of the political, social and moral maturity necessary to run an elected government."
Sure, sure, they're immature. Like children. The only thing they understand is force. Sure.
Couldn't it possibly be the case that high levels of ethnic and sectarian pluralism are intrinsically difficult for polities to overcome? That the history of, say, Spain has been marked by a high degree of tension -- including violence and even civil war around questions of secularism and the relationship of Catalonia and the Basque Country to the central government.
"Operation Comeback"
Joshua Muravchik writes in Foreign Policy about how to save neoconservatism. The main priorities will be surprising -- it involves a lot of lying, and a lot of smearing of one's enemies. For example, "'Neocon' is now widely synonymous with 'ultraconservative' or, for some, 'dirty Jew.'" Yes, it's true. Neocon is in disrepute not because neoconservative ideas make very little sense and the policies they've advocated have proven disastrous -- it's because we hate the Jews. Similarly, here's step one:
Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently reconstructed Stalinists.
What crazy canards! This here is the Amazon page for Irving Kristol's 1995 book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. John J. Miller writes that in the book, "Kristol sketches his intellectual growth, which began while he was a young man attending neo-Trotskyite meetings in Brooklyn (where he met his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb) and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., where today he is a fixture at right-of-center political gatherings." Canard! Publisher's Weekly writes, "Particularly interesting is his previously unpublished opening memoir concerning influences such as Lionel Trilling, Leo Strauss and army life as well as the founding of his magazine and his work with the American Enterprise Institute to extend conservatism beyond free enterprise to reflect "on the roots of social and cultural stability." Canard!
In his essay "A Man Without Footnotes" included in The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer recounts that "Irving Kristol at one point wrote that the two chief influences on his thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss." Canard!
Why is Foreign Policy publishing this crap?
Basketblogging: Now Elsewhere
This season I'm going to be writing about the Wizards for DCist in an effort to prevent this site from becoming unduly hoops-centric. My first item is up today in anticipation of the season opener tonight in Cleveland. I'm a 'Zards-optimist relative to the CW (see also, I'm a Wizards fan) though not as much of an optimist as Bill Simmons who, I think, is overestimating both DC and New Jersey (incidentally, these squads get compared a lot because they're both led by a "big three" on the perimeter, but they're very different -- last year NJ was slow, defensively brilliant, and offensively inept; Washington was more-or-less the opposite).
Baghdad Dreaming
The David Brooks plan for Iraq: "Partitioning the country would be traumatic, so after the election it probably makes sense to make one last effort to hold the place together. Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad." I'm not sure how many times George W. Bush needs to repeat this, but he's not going to fire Don Rumsfeld. He thinks Rumsfeld and Cheney "are doing fantastic jobs." Rumsfeld will stay in office as long as Bush leaves office.
Iraq Polling
What do the people think of Iraq? According to the latest New York Times poll they're interested in ponies -- withdrawal is much more popular than "stay the course" but much less popular than some unspecified new strategy. At the same time, a "substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress next Tuesday and say Republicans will maintain or increase troop levels to try to win the war if they hold on to power on Capitol Hill" while the generic ballots show a clear lead for Democrats. This indicates to me that much as I find the Biden-Gelb Plan for Iraq a bit confused, it makes sense as something for Democrats to push since it puts a "new strategy" face on what amounts to a new strategy of withdrawing.
In the national data, Republicans are now so unpopular that Democrats are preferred by essentially every demographic sub-group except self-described Republicans and self-described conservatives. Of course, the election won't be determined by national polls, but that's a sense of the country's mood, and indicates that if, as expected, Democrats take the House, I don't think they need to shy away from taking an aggressive approach. People are pretty tired of this shit.
Mario Loyola
Does anyone know where this joker came from? I feel like he was added to the Corner's roster because the Bush administration had become so deplorable that even many existing contributors were too intellectually honest to keep defending the indefensible. Thus, the institution just needed to dig even deeper into the blinkered pile and find someone dumb enough to still be a 100 percent Bush fan. I mean, seriously: "Kerry drew the Dems into a blind alley by making respect for the troops the central issue of the Iraq war." Seriously? Seriously. And it goes on:
Every Democratic candidate should now be asked whether they think the troops are in Iraq because (a) they are committed to the mission and want to win or (b) because of their lack of economic and social opportunity back home. The latter is plainly Kerry's position — and that of the Democratic left — and it has now been revealed as a position for which one has to apologize. Therefore, most Democrats now will contradict Kerry, and answer (a) the troops are devoted to their mission.
This is the central issue in Iraq? No, sorry, that's idiotic. I'm not sure whether the thousands of dead American soldiers, the tens of thousands of maimed American soldiers, the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the wreckage of overall American national strength, or the catastrophic spillover consequences for our policy in Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan are the central issue in Iraq, but it's some mix of those things. Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that the central issue is that all of these factors show all signs of getting worse rather than better in the near future. The troops, obviously, are trying their best to do their duty and serve their country but this doesn't change the fact that they've been ordered into an impossible situation for the worst possible reasons.
Change the Course
Department of Defense launches new offensive -- against hostile press coverage.
Ends and Means
For a while now, I've been struggling to express exactly what's been bothering me about the new counterinsurgency focus within some quarters of the US Army and sectors of the press. This morning's Cato forum asking what we've learned about counterinsurgency from Iraq and Afghanistan was very helpful in that regard. On hand was Dr. Conrad Crane from the US Army War College Institute of Strategic Studies. Crane is, among other things, the lead author of the widely-hailed new counterinsurgency field manual. Listening to his presentation and reading portions of the manual, what I keep coming back to is this: If you accept the claims being made here, they amount to saying here's a strategy by which we could have established a stable Iraqi state with effective internal security forces.
The thing of it is that if what we wanted was a stable Iraqi state with effective internal security forces, we could have gotten through a much easier method than an expensive and arduous well-implemented counterinsurgency doctrine. All we needed to do was not invade. A stable Iraq simply wasn't ever the goal of the mission. The administration's goal was a stable Iraqi state with effective internal security forces that would play host to a permanent American military presence and serve as a loyal ally against Iran, Syria, and other regional foes. As an added bonus, they wanted a beacon of human rights and democracy. That isn't something a better counterinsurgency manual would have let us achieve.
And this, again, is the problem with incompetence dodgers' appeals to counterinsurgency theory to prove that liberal hawks weren't wrong, just betrayed by Bush's bungling. Like the Bush administration, their war aims were substantially more ambitious than anything counterinsurgency warfare theorists are prepared to promise. The liberal hawk crowd probably put more weight than the administration on the beacon of freedom and democracy aspect and a bit less on obtaining an ally in America's continuing quest for regional hegemony, but it was roughly the same mix. There was, simply put, never any reason to think the prospects of this outcome were good, and nothing about counterinsurgency doctrine should make you think otherwise.
More Peters
Ralph Peters continues his efforts to deploy racist sentiment to exculpate hawks like him from responsibility for their own incredibly poor judgment. Heather Hurlburt disposes of his argument.
Ted Haggard Is Gay
Or certainly seems to be. He's denying the allegations but also resigning his post, which tends to undercut the denials' credibility. At some point you've got to wonder if any of America's leading gay-bashers aren't closeted gay dudes.
Hard Choices
Say what you will about former AEI intern and Doug Feith protege Mario Loyola, but at the end of the day nobody can top Tim Graham for the title of Worst Corner Blogger. Here he complains about a Washington Post entertainment article making a joke about how Republican candidates are frightened. And, of course, Republican candidates are frightened, as you can read in the pages of National Review as well as . . . all other publications that cover American politics.
Funny, that, but this one is much more absurd. After demonstrating definitively that he doesn't know what "socialist" means Graham complains "that the networks seem to focus on the very same states where the Democrats are putting their big last-minute cash." Democrats, of course, are putting their big last-minute cash into the most competitive races. And the television networks are -- surprise! -- covering the most competitive races. "In-kind contributions of free media seem to match very nicely," Graham, who seems to lack a functioning brain, snarks.
More Haggard
Being liberals, we liberals often don't have exactly the best sense of where various rightwing Christian leaders stand vis-a-vis each other. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, for example, while still famous and certainly of considerable historical importance, aren't the forces within Evangelism that they once were. So, how much does Ted Haggard matter? Noam Scheiber suggests this graphic as a telling illustration of where he fits in, and I tend to agree. He also has a good joke.
Shadenfreude and hypocrisy aside, though, it's be nice -- unrealistic, perhaps, but nice -- if people took this as an opportunity to learn something. Obviously, the other men in that image with Haggard -- Tony Perkins, James Dobson, etc. -- know him, get along with him, and have worked with him as a colleague, like him, think he's a good man, and so forth. And Dobson and Perkins aren't alone. Lots of people have worked with or for Haggard over the years. He's a widely respected man in this country. Should all those people who know him, and have followed him really so sharply revise their views of Haggard, or should they revise their views of gay people? The latter, I think, though I'm not optimistic that's how it'll play.
Paying Attention
I find it odd how frequently NBA commentators don't seem to pay attention to what's actually happening, instead just relying on vague impressions and reputations. During last night's Spurs-Mavericks matchup, for example, we kept hearing about how San Antonio wants to slow down the pace whereas Dallas likes to play fast. Similarly, the morning after Marc Stein observes that "Dallas knows its game devolved into a fruitless succession of isolations that led to missed jumpers, enabling the Spurs to finally slow things down, albeit six months too late." But while last year's Spurs team was, as usual, slow 23rd in the league in pace, last years' Mavericks were also slow. Indeed, they were slower than San Antonio, 27th in the league in pace.
Insofar as the pace got slow, that was because the game featured two slow-paced teams facing off against each other, not San Antonio controlling the pace. Similarly, while it's true that Dallas ran a lot of isolation plays last night, and it's true that Dallas lost the game, it's highly implausible to say they lost because they ran so much isolation. Dallas had the most efficient offensive in the league in 2005-2006 and also had the fewest assists in the league. The New Dallas, in other words, just is a slow-paced, isolation-oriented team. The strategy didn't work last night, but that's the strategy (and it worked well across last season), it's not some kind of error or one-off occurence.
Coming Out
Oh, man, I was hanging out with a friend yesterday and we were talking about getting some food. She suggested local gay burger joint Dakota Cowgirl as an appealing venue, so I put my rampant homophobia aside and went. Everything seemed fine, but apparently my worst fears have come true and the burger turned me gay. Even worse, the fries were undercooked.
Ends and Means Again
Robert Farley disagrees with me about the new counterinsurgency push inside the US Army. Or at least he thinks he does. I'm not sure we actually do disagree. I don't think it's a bad idea at all for the Army to start thinking about this issue more clearly. My worry is that they're not actually getting this right. In his critique of US counterinsurgency policy of the typical American errors Jeffrey Record identifies is a proclivity for apolitical and astrategic thinking that ignores the linkages between military operations and policy objectives.
The new field manual pays lip-service to political-military linkages, but I don't feel like it really grasps them. In particular, I worry that this is implicitly promoting the view that Vietnam and Iraq were primarily operational failures that could have "worked" had the US government adopted sounder counterinsurgency tactics. In fact, I think a clear-eyed look at counterinsurgency theory would tell you the reverse. In Iraq, we almost certainly could have produced a less FUBAR situation with better counterinsurgency tactics, but adopting such tactics would have entailed abandonning the main policy goal of the war -- transformation of Iraq into an ally of America's quest for regional hegemony.
Obviously, it's not really the Army's job to set overall foreign policy for the United States. At the same time, however, the top brass ill-serves the country if it promotes the idea that it's prepared to achieve things that it is not, in fact, prepared to achieve. People need to be aware that there are real, objective limits on what military force can accomplish and that our military is composed of soldiers rather than magicians.
Mike Pence
Hm . . . looks like Mike Pence is already trying to gin up support for a leadership bid in the wake of a GOP electoral defeat. Pence is a hard-right type, and a proponent of the view that insufficient adherence to small-government orthodoxy is the source of the Republican Party's problems. As an analysis, I think that's pretty daft, and if the GOP really does react to defeat by moving the direction of Pence-ism, I think they'll find it doesn't help them much.
One of the oddities of the way congressional elections work in the USA is that when a party goes down to defeat in House elections, it tends to be the party's most moderate members who lose, precisely because they're likely to represent the rare swing districts. These relative moderates will be paying the price for their failure to in any meaningful way moderate the GOP's agenda. The upshot, however, will be to leave behind a caucus that's even more extreme and thus give the advantage to people like Pence who thinks the Republicans need to move right.
Feldman-bashing
Bob Wright and Henry Farrell eviscerate the Noah Feldman article on Iran that so upset me earlier. Thinking about this more, it's worth saying that Feldman's is far from the worst article that's appeared on this issue. What makes it so troubling is that even though it doesn't reach a Weekly Standard level of egregiousness, it appeared in The New York Times Magazine and seems to me to represent a kind of creepy hawk infiltration of mainstream opinion. As Farrell says, "he's trying to establish a case not by argument, but by innuendo" and he's doing it in a publication whose audience I imagine is mostly liberal and will probably regard the source as credible.
Incompetence Everywhere
Neocon war advocates including Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman concede the Iraq War is a disaster, blame Bush's incompetence. This is what it comes to. We're all supposed to believe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Steven Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, etc., etc., etc., are just random freaks of nature. Nothing they or their other subordinates have done in office or the fact that everything they've done has worked out terribly is in any way supposed to reflect on the wider conservative movement.
Suffice it to say I find this all very unconvincing. These guys aren't repentant hawks, they're in denial.
Resignatins
On Monday the Army Times will be publishing an editorial calling on Don Rumsfeld to resign. Of course, as we've seen, Rumsfeld has no intention of resigning and Bush has no intention of asking him to resign. The only way he's going out of office is if the Democrats win the midterms, are able to implemenet some oversight, and thereby manage to uncover further information that makes his job untenable. One could imagine, in other words, him getting dragged out of the Pentagon in handcuffs. Otherwise, it's not going to happen.
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