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November 5, 2006 - November 11, 2006 Archives
Saddam Verdict
Saddam Hussein's suspiciously timed trial came to an end today with a guilty verdict and a death sentence. Rand Beers, via email, observes: "Everyone agrees that today’s verdict is a good thing. It was important that Saddam be brought to justice and everyone is united in the hope that it doesn’t lead to an increase in violence. What is equally true, however, is that this changes nothing. America is no safer, Iraq is more dangerous and in chaos." Also in my inbox Harry Reid says "The Iraqis have traded a dictator for chaos. Neither option is acceptable, especially when it is our troops who are caught in the middle."
I'll happily agree with all of that. Ahmed Chalabi says everything would have been fine if Bush had just installed him in power and let him run the country. That seems much less true.
Drum Disposes
The widely-loathed and universally denounced Ann Coulter joins with the for-some-reason-considered-reputable Charles Krauthammer to argue that a 20-30 seat House swing in favor of the Democrats would be no big deal. They are, as Kevin Drum points out, totally full of shit.
FOIA, I Love You
Via Jim Henley, a FOIA request unearths a 1999 war game "Desert Crossing" about a military campaign aimed at deposing Saddam Hussein. Various interesting conclusions in here, but the most interesting one, from my perspective, is the conclusion that "we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground."
"Operation Desert Crossing"
GWU's invaluable National Security Archive rounds up documents related to the 1999 "Operation Desert Crossing" war game here. Casual fans will probably want to read this after action report briefing the full report fleshes out some details, but doesn't seem to me to introduce a ton of extra material and the miscellaneous emails are fun.
Scanning some of the reportage on these documents, one thing that I think often isn't being made clear is that the "Desert Crossing" scenarios were assuming the presence of some kind of crisis to prompt US military intervention -- either the collapse of Saddam's regime due to internal factors, an imminent Iraqi threat to a regional ally, or something else along those lines. This isn't a "how to" guide for an unprovoked American invasion, it's an effort to find the best possible way to cope with a difficult situation. Note that it's not very optimistic that the more far-reaching American goals are achievable. They say an Arab coalition will be necessary to have legitimacy in the area, but that such a coalition will make it hard and/or impossible to sustain a long-term American military presence or the establishment of a democracy. They also say it'll be vital to secure Iranian cooperation, perhaps through lifting sanctions, and certainly not that a post-Saddam Iraq could be used as a base for launching anti-Iranian initiatives.
Don't Look Too Hard at the Gander
I wasn't really focused on this issue because it seems obvious that, on the one hand, Saddam Hussein is a monster who the world will be well rid of and, on the other hand, that convicting and executing Saddam won't change anything that matters in Iraq or in the world. It is, however, actually worth noting a few things about this case. One, as Spencer notes in its zeal to avoid an international tribunal (Bush hates international law), we organized a total farce of a trial and wound up creating a kangaroo court to try a guilty man.
Continue reading "Don't Look Too Hard at the Gander" »
Better Constitution Needed
"President Bush isn’t on the ballot tomorrow," oberserves the ever-shrill Paul Krugman, "But this election is, nonetheless, all about him. The question is whether voters will pry his fingers loose from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he can inflict in his two remaining years in office."
One is hardly allowed to speak of such things in the United States, but the dynamic of this election is a reminder that it would really be better to have a parliamentary system. A head of government who's both a huge objective failure and has become wildly unpopular ought to be removed from office and replaced by someone else. In a proper democratic system Bush either would be on the ballot tomorrow or else the GOP would have dumped Bush as leader and ran under the banner of a different standard-bearer. As things stand, though, the best you can do is try to put into place a Democratic congress that'll do hearings and oversight and subpoenas and so forth. Even if the Democrats succeed, however, it's not as if we're going to simply get oversight. Instead, there'll be "a cataclysmic fight to the death" as the White House seeks to evade congressional oversight.
Then'll come to Broderish fainting spells about "partisan wrangling" and "ugly tone" and so forth. And it'll be true, the tone really will be ugly and people really will be spending time on wrangling rather than coping with the issues. But Democrats will have no choice -- this is a White House out of control and it needs to be restrained. Better institutions of government, however, would let us avoid the whole dynamic.
The Trouble With "Strength"
Shadi Hamid makes an obvious yet weirdly neglected point about Democratic efforts to look "tough":
The problem is that many Democrats fall into the trap of “overcompensation,” that, fearful of being painted as soft on security, we take public positions that appear contrived, because they are in fact contrived, a function of our obsession with polls and focus groups more than a function of deeply-held liberal values. [emphasis added]
This is not to be naïve and just say that any genuine position of conviction is going to be sellable. Nevertheless adopting positions that are obviously motivated by narrow political considerations doesn't do much to improve things. "Appearing to be principled" is an important part of politics as well. What's more, it's helpful to at least understand principles so that when you need to talk about Topic X in July you don't wind up saying things that will be inconsistent with what you say when Topic Topic Y suddently becomes hot in September.
All Alone
I've traditionally done my on-leave work from Mocha Hut on U between 13th and 14th, which is an excellent spot but whose WiFi service is a bit unreliable. They had an outage this morning, so I took the opportunity to check out 14U, which opened last week just south of the intersection of 14th and U. The sign outside advertises "great ambiance" and certainly the funky furniture is pretty cool and certainly a step up ambiance-wise from the rather steril Hut. On the other hand, the place has -- as of right now at least -- absolutely no customers besides me, which is a bit of a problem ambiance-wise.
Can't Take The Politics Out of Politics
A Tyler Cowen correspondent wants to know what would happen, politically, "if everyone knew as much about economics" as Tyler does. Questions abound! "Would libertarianism remain a defensible political position?" Even better, "Would a moderate left-leaning position such as Matt Yglesias's suddenly become much more tenable?" More tenable compared to what, I wonder?
My instinct is that enhanced voter knowledge of economics wouldn't actually change things very much. Political decisions aren't made throught the deliberations of benevolent actors aiming to achieve an agreed-upon conception of the common good. Normative questions are highly contestable and highly contested. People who "know economics" disagree about a great deal, including economics. Most of all, though, interests matter politically. Consider, say, the example of trade.
Continue reading "Can't Take The Politics Out of Politics" »
Wire 45
I'm afraid to say I agree with ChristyCash that episode 45 was, relative to The Wire's usual high standards, a relatively weak offering. I share some of her concerns about the scene in the teachers' lounge which struck me as unduly schematic and suffering from a "show me, don't tell me" kind of problem.
What I found really problematic, however, was the scene between Rawls and Carcetti which I'll happily admit was, on its own terms, a well-staged and compelling scene. The problem was that Rawls' actions didn't really make sense. Surely Rawls (who's always been portrayed as a smart guy and a canny political operator) understands that Carcetti is already inclined to want to fire Burrell, that Rawls himself is Burrell's logical successor, and that Rawls' whiteness is, under the circumstances, the main political impediment to giving him the job. Under the circumstances, why would Rawls decide that acting like a huge racist in front of Carcetti and Carcetti's black chief political advisor is a good idea? He needs to be trying to do the reverse and convince Team Carcetti that he can somehow minimize African-American political anger at his potential appointment.
Continue reading "Wire 45" »
The Slip
You may be worried about (some) polls showing the Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot slipping. Certainly, I'm at least a bit worried. Democracy Corps, however, tells me not to worry. They've been running a poll of the 50 most competitive congressional districts where they use the candidates' names. They say the with-names questions has consistently shown an aggregate Democratic lead in these races, but that it's been consistently smaller than the generic ballot lead. Their most recent named poll, meanwhile, shows no change in the Democratic lead in the with-names question. The Democratic lead in the generic question, meanwhile, has declined so as to converge with the Democratic lead in the with-names question.
This, according to DCorps, is all that's happening. As you go down to the wire the difference between the with-names and without-names version of the questions goes away. But the without-names questions was always worthless. The with-names number is the real number, and it continues to show the same lead it's been showing for a while -- one that's good enough for big Democratic pickups in the House. I don't really have the chops to assess this argument in an expert manner. In its favor, I'll say that it sounds convincing to me. Against it, I'll say that DCorps proved overoptimistic about the 2004 election.
There's The Outrage
Good Catholic and double-effecter Ross Douthat objects to my efforts to even loosely equate Dujail and Fallujah. There's some factual uncertainty as to exactly what went down at Fallujah (a point I'll return to) but one of the main things at issue here is intentions. Saddam was given to doing things like deliberately killing civilians as a counter-insurgency tactic. Bush, not being a monster, doesn't do things like that. Instead, he deliberately adopts counter-insurgency tactics that foreseeably kill civilians. There's definitely a large intuitive difference here. "Monster" seems to fit Saddam, whereas Bush much more seems the bufoon who just kind of blunders into policy errors. On the other hand, this buffoonery has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. So one starts to wonder. Obviously, there's a time-honored philosophical dispute here that a blog post is unlikely to resolve, but I still think it's useful to try to lay out my thinking a bit.
Continue reading "There's The Outrage" »
The Unwashed Masses
I found Bryan Caplan's essay worrying about voter ignorance a little bit puzzling. I agree with many of his analytical claims, but I can't be persuaded to share his worry that the ignorant masses are using democracy to implement poor policy against the wishes of wiser elites/experts. Strangely, he takes immigration as his main example. If I were trying to devise an example of a policy area in which an elite consensus had shown a consistent ability to override contrary sentiment, I would have picked, well, immigration where the public's consistent preference for dramatically more restrictionist policies have been consistently (and, in my view, rightly) frustrated.
Indeed, the striking thing about American democracy is how little impact public sentiment actually has on the course of things. The way democracy works, in essence, is that the voters get to choose between two teams of competing elites. Thus, public opinion serves as a tie-breaker on issues where the elite is seriously divided. Faced with an elite consensus, it becomes very hard to raise money, get favorable press coverage, hire talented staff, or do anything else. On some topics, the effect of this is (I think) beneficial, and on other topics it's rather pernicious. The curious question, in my mind, is how it is that exponents of elite consensus views manage to feel so embattled in a political arena that, looked at objectively, they completely dominate. Try suggesting that there's no single "right answer" to questions of monetary policy and that within a range of non-ruinous policies there's simply the competing interests of net creditors and net debtors and that recent Fed policy is unduly tilted in favor of the interests of net creditors and see how far you get with that.
UPDATE: Sorry, due to a typo that last sentence used to say "recent Fed policy is unduly tilted in favor of the interests of net debtors" when I meant to make the opposite charge as reflected in the current text.
Prediction
I haven't actually been following the midterms especially closely for someone in my line of work, largely because my track record of election prognostication is very poor so I figured I'd just try and figure out what happened ex post, but lemme lay down a marker with my predictions: Democrats +4 in the Senate and +19 in the House. This is relatively downbeat compared to what you'll hear from some other folks, but remember that if you heard this prediction 12 months ago it would have sounded wildly optimistic.
Listen to the Man
The American Conservative editorializes:
Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.
As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides—the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.
The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria. . . .
There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.
I agree. Go vote. Call a friend in Montana or Virginia.
Comforting the Comfortable
A frighteningly large number of my friends seem to think Anne Applebaum is something other than a pernicious force in American life, a rightwing hack who spends her days exploiting mass killings abroad as a bludgeon against domestic progressive forces in the west. So, I dunno. Maybe I should hail today's column with its thesis that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and that human rights groups who pointed out what a farce his trial was are churls. After all, what does the world need more in its moment of crisis than a pundit with the courage to speak the uncontroversial (Saddam bad!) in the service of bolstering popular support for a dismally failed war on the very morning of America's midterm elections.
She even manages to mention how awesome it is that Iraq has a prosecution in motion over Anfal without mentioning that the trial will never happen since it's going to be ruled moot by Saddam's pending execution and that this whole thing has been arranged to avoid political embarrassment for the Bush administration.
The Morning After
The conclusion to my awkwardly timed Election Day column:
Bush can stay the course right up through January 2009. He won't be on the ballot again, and unlike most recent presidents he's not angling to put his vice president into the White House. To be sure, if Bush persists no matter how unpopular his policies become, this will set Democrats up nicely for 2008. Republican presidential contenders will find themselves mired in infighting as many abandon the president in order to stay viable for the general election. Others will attempt to inspire the base by sticking with Bush, only to tar themselves in the eyes of moderates and independents. If I were Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or whomever else, I'd look at it as a very promising situation.
What this won't do, however, is improve the situation in Iraq. We seem doomed, one way or another, to at least two more years of futile fighting there. Two more years of wasted money, wasted lives, and perhaps most of all wasted time -- time that could have been used to start the hard work of putting America's foreign policy back together again. Time we can't really afford to spare. It's a horrible scenario. Indeed, it's a scenario that is poised to inspire Americans to vote in drove for the Democrats today. What it isn't is a scenario a Democratic win will help us avoid.
I think Suzanne Nossel has good morning-after advice to go along with my gloom-and-doom.
Peer-Producing The News
Jim Harper headlines his remarks on this story about Gannett trying some new tricks with its newpapers, "Gannett to Use Peer Production." "Peer Production," of course, is the jargon term for how they make open source software. It strikes me as worth noting that perfectly traditional journalism always has involved a very large peer production element. Only a tiny amount of journalism, after all, consists of journalists just writing down their first-hand observations of events. The other elements all come from talking to other people to gain their insights or perspective, from recycling factual information obtained from other people's previously published journalism, from academic and think tank research, etc.
And of all that subsidiary information only a tiny proportion is actually stuff the journalist pays for. Indeed, in America reputable journalists are ethically prohibited from paying their sources for their stories. Instead, you rely on the fact that a wide range of motives exists for people to assist journalists in their professional endeavors without being paid for their help.
The Allawi Era
When not obsessing about the election over the past 48 hours I have, for book purposes, been revisiting the Iyad Allawi Era in Iraq, from July 2004 to February 2005. This has gone down, I think, as something of a "lost period" in America's war effort for a couple of reasons. For one thing, during pretty much his entire term in office -- and certainly during his non-lame-duck months -- the American press was dominated by the 2004 presidential election. Part of the election dynamic was for the debate over Iraq to become very ossified with Kerry and Bush just trading the same barbs over and over again in a way that discouraged people from paying attention to changes on the ground. The other thing, however, is that attention to the Allawi Era simply doesn't do much to advance the political arguments of either of our main teams in Iraq.
Continue reading "The Allawi Era" »
Simple Answers to Silly Questions
Mickey Kaus: "What does it tell you about a political party if in a year of epic disaster for their opponents the best they can hope for is a 51-49 majority in the Senate?"
That there are only 15 Republican-held Senate seats on the ballot this November, that the composition of the Senate naturally favors the GOP, and that defeating incumbent legislators is difficult.
UPDATE: Also just a friendly Election Day reminder that it would be easier for Democrats to win a majority in the Senate if we DCers had representation in the Senate. Alternatively, on pure ressentiment grounds I'd be satisfied if they just revoked Wyoming's statehood on the grounds that it doesn't have enough residents.
Heights Bleg
Normally Google can answer all of one's research questions, but this one is exceeding my skills. Does anyone have any idea how many people in the world are, say, seven feet tall or more? Or, relatedly, know the standard deviation of human male height?
Early Exit Polls
Let the data-free speculation begin, and future speculation proceed based on . . . sketchy data! Early exit polls showing people's top issues seems to me to favor Team Blue in terms of which ways the issues cut. On the other hand, I can't tell how the question was framed so this information is potentially meaningless. Word on the street is that Allen-Webb is very close and there won't be a projected winner for a while.
Exit Polls
In a "stark" "contrast" with 2004, the leaked exit polls are showing very good news for the Democrats. I'll believe it when I see something more solid. Fool me once, and so forth.
Election Shocker
Dick Lugar re-elected without major party opponent in Indiana. Bad news for the Dems! In all seriousness, current count has 13 percent for Lugar's token Libertarian Party opponent, which seems like a high number to me. Also -- Vermont adopts socialism.
¡Sandinista!
I gather that we're supposed to understand this as a setback for democracy, though I don't really understand why. One would think that power alternating peacefully between the former parties to a violent civil war would be considered a triumph of democracy.
Fuck You, GG Parker
As of 9:33 PM, Allen is beating Webb by a narrow 7,600 vote margin. Meanwhile, 20,941 people are voting for Independent Green candidate G.G. Parker. Good work, guys!
Smells Like . . . Victory!
Democrats take House. My analysis: Awesome. Good work Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmannuel, and many fine candidates across the land.
Smells Like . . . Victory!
Democrats take House. My analysis: Awesome. Good work Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmannuel, and many fine candidates across the land.
Boring Facts
David Gregory won't stop saying the new Democratic House majority is going to be torn between its liberal leadership and the new "right of center" Democrats who've won races tonight and put them in the majority. Essentially every other MSM figure I've heard on television has said the same thing. But as Tom Schaller and Ben Adler have pointed out this is, um, just wrong.
It's true that a few races have seen culturally conservative Democrats winning conservative districts but beyond Health Shuler there really aren't very many clear-cut examples of this. The overwhelmingly predominant trend has been for moderate-to-liberal districts in the Northeast and Midwest to dump faux moderate Republicans in favor of fairly orthodox progressive Democrats. It's regional realignment backlash, not a new Democratic thrust into Dixie.
Spinballs
There's spin and then there's spin. Larry Kudlow is playing dirty pool: "Look at blue dog conservative Dem victories, and look at Northeast liberal GOP defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one."
This is blatantly self-contradictory. Who, after all, defeated the northeastern liberal Republicans? Not conservative blue dogs. And who did the relatively conservative Democrats beat? Not moderate northeastern Republicans. The exit polls clearly show a broad-based trend in favor of Democrats among essentially all demographic sub-groups. That played out in specific House races in roughly two ways. In some cases, relatively conservative Democrats booted extremely conservative Republicans who'd fallen into some sort of idiosyncratic political troubles. In a larger number of cases, basically standard progressive Democrats defeated Republicans who'd been holding moderate or liberal-leaning districts but done nothing to halt the GOP's determination to march the country off the cliff.
I'm not really a believer in "mandates" per se, but the overall impact is clearly to shift the composition of the House to the left without having any particularly dramatic impact on the balance within the Democratic caucus. That's a victory for liberalism and a victory for progressive politics. Given a measure of power, the task is now to wield it. People on the other side are naturally disposed to try to undermine Democratic self-confidence in the wake of a disaster for their team, but liberals would be fools to fall for it. In this past elections boldness has, as a rule, tended to pay off in a way the politics of timidity did not in 2002 and 2004.
UPDATE: Now I see John McCain on Larry King trying to argue that Iraq wasn't such a big deal in this election the real problem was "overspending." Sure. As Noam Scheiber points out he more-or-less needs to do that. A somewhat thoughtless CW has held that OP setbacks are good for McCain because he's a reformist. He is, but he's also a super-hawk and Iraq is obviously a huge drag on the GOP.
Sign of the Times
Veteran congressman Jim Leach (R-IA) went down to defeat in the massacre of 2006. I'm no apologist for "moderate Republicans" but it is worth saying that Leach was, in my estimation, fairly clearly the best House Republican. Nevertheless, one can only be thrilled with his defeat. That it happened just goes to show how fundamentally rotten the whole GOP scene had become. Leach was, in many ways, a person possessed of genuinely decent instincts and some fundamentally sound ideas about how the United States should conduct itself in the world.
Nevertheless, in practice he was useless. His presence in the congress did the world no good whatsoever. He'd be more valuable as a professional talking head or stashed away in some think tank somewhere. Whether his total inability to affect the direction of the country was due to a lack of personal courage and savvy, or simply a consequence of the structure of contemporary American conservative politics I couldn't really say. But useless is what he'd become, and a Democratic vote in the House will be useful. Chuck Hagel, who's very much the Jim Leach of the Senate, ought to take a good, hard look at this -- he, like Leach, has for years now been saying many good things and doing essentially no good at all. Unless he can find a way to actually impact the country, he'll deserve to land in the ash heap of history every bit as much as Leach did.
Majority Leader
I've gotten about seventeen different emails from Steny Hoyer about his bid for the Majority Leader's office. Meanwhile, I haven't seen or heard anything from John Murtha who was allegedly going to challenge him for the job. I'd prefer Murtha, but my understanding pre-election was that Hoyer more-or-less had this locked up in which case I'm not especially eager to see a pointless internecine fight.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, gets right out of the gate with some serious wank: "How many voters, we wonder, could name even one of the Democrats' vaunted "Six for '06" legislative proposals? As they prepare to wield power, Democrats don't have capital from voters; at most, they enjoy a line of credit." Right, well, whatever. For months WaPo types urged Democrats to unveil a positive agenda even though everyone knows that voters don't pay attention to opposition party white papers. So they unveiled the agenda, and nobody paid attention. And now, since nobody paid attention, the Post thinks Democrats have no right to implement their agenda. Boo-hoo. "Less clear is that Democrats deserved to win -- or that they would have done so absent Republican missteps." Of course Democrats wouldn't have won absent Republican missteps. Incumbent parties who don't make missteps don't lose elections.
Good Postmortems
Conor Clarke, super-no-longer-intern, looks at why black Republicans keep losing and reaches a startling conclusion: "The failed GOP outreach to blacks shouldn't be a surprise. Black Republicans lose because both Mehlman and Dean are wrong: On the economic issues that matter most, the Democratic Party hasn't let black voters down, and, opinion polls to the contrary, they still vote on that basis."
Quite so. Slight failure to recognize this is part of the pundit class's weird myopia about the role of race in American politics. Famously, lots of relatively economically downscale people frequently vote for conservative candidates because of their cultural conservatism. Less frequently noted is that it's only white people who behave this way.
Rick Perlstein, meanwhile, wisely rains on Rahm Emmannuel's parade somewhat, noting that DCCC-favored candidates didn't actually fare especially well compared to, say, Netroots favored ones.
Regroup! Recharge! Perpetual War!
Liberal hawkery has gone into abeyance these past few months, and the large wave of victories by Democrats riding anti-war sentiment might have pushed them all into permanent hiding, but no -- Jeffrey Herf comes along to explain that continuing the war is vital because it's all about oil:
In this fall's elections, many Democrats have run hard against the war in Iraq. Some have called for fixed timetables for withdrawal. It is important, therefore, for liberals to restate what is at stake in the war's outcome. Unlike the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq is being fought over a country that is vital, not peripheral, to U.S. interests. Unlike the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq is being fought over a country that is vital, not peripheral, to U.S. interests. The importance of oil to the world's economy, the potential for terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and the ideological goals of radical Islam mean that the consequences of failure in Iraq are much greater than they were in Vietnam. . . .
First, even with the greenest policies in place, the world economy will run on oil for some time to come. Preventing domination of the region by radical Islamists is therefore a vital interest of the United States and all oil dependent nations.
These oil concerns strike me as perpetually overblown. It's true that the American economy is fairly dependent on the continued flow of exports from the Middle East onto world markets. Middle Eastern economies, however, are much more dependent on the same. Deploying an "oil weapon" against the United States would be as if I cut off my left arm to start wielding it as a club. The real problem here, though, as it's been with liberal hawk commentary on Iraq for years now is that Herf can't grapple with the actual reason people want to withdraw from Iraq: We don't believe the mission has any prospects for success. He goes on and on about the bad things that may well flow from withdrawal. He doesn't say anything, however, about why continuing in Iraq might make things better. I heartily agree that it would be excellent to avoid a civil war in Iraq, to stabilize the country, to build a democracy, to do whatever. The problem is that we can't do it.
The most telling line in the article, however, is this: "A regional peace conference would necessarily involve countries, namely Iran and Syria, that are deeply antagonistic to the United States and have no interest in a balanced agreement among the factions in Iraq." Whether or not folks feel like saying so in a straightforward way, the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is not only that we can't withdraw from Iraq, but that we need to wade deeper into the mess and engage in a wider regional war. If it's really the case that we can't conduct diplomacy with Syria and Iran aimed at reconciliation of our interests, then there's no choice but to push the fight forward. That's daft, of course, but that's what continued domination of the political landscape by peopl with the Herf/Bush worldview will bring.
About That SecDef
It would go against everything I believe about the mind of George W. Bush for him to fire Don Rumsfeld, replace him with a pragmatist as part of a change-of-direction in the administration in favor of attempting a strategy of engagement with Iran, but there seems to be at least some chance things'll head in that direction. I caution, though, that we've seen personnel changes before. I recall when Wolfowitz and Feith both left DOD, and I recall when Robert Blackwill was brought in to take charge of Iraq. In all cases, Cheney remained a powerful locus for the administration's psychotic tendencies and when Bush got down to making decisions usually wound up siding with the Vice President.
UPDATE: On the presser generally, I agree with Josh. He started out looking awful, but by the end was doing a pretty good job of handling an objectively difficult situation. I do think, however, that Christian right types won't be thrilled with his answer to the question about whether he hadn't been failing to take their concerns seriously.
The Dilemma
The dilemma Democrats are going to face on Iraq is this. One element of the party is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes, that the war is a disaster, and that we should end it as soon as we can. Another group has gotten very good at saying that the war is a disaster, that the president is fucking things up, and then staying vague on what it is they actually want to do while simulaneously triangulating themselves away from the Democratic left. Now that Democrats have a measure of actual power, however, this moderate stance is going to be harder to maintain. Bush, after all, still holds all the real power over national security. What he'll try to do is sucker members of the second camp into, in effect, blessing his Iraq-related decision-making and threaten them with vicious smear attacks if they refuse to do so. Byron York shows us the way it's done:
Democrats are already circulating accounts of Robert Gates and Iran-contra. If there is a Chairman Levin, he will probably have a few questions. In fact, the Gates confirmation hearings will be an early test for Senate Democrats. They will undoubtedly realize that they need to suppress their desire to take an early scalp lest they face accusations of trying to undermine the troops and the war effort. But they'll be conflicted.
York also goes on to post a strong message of support Gates has already gotten from former senator Sam Nunn. And that's how it'll go. Moderate Gates-supporters will be used to smear further left Democrats who think it's unseemly to put (yet another!) Iran-Contra figure in an important national security post. Then they'll wake up a few months later and see that with Rumsfeld gone, they've lost their license to simply issue vague complaints -- they'll have personally endorsed the new leadership.
UPDATE: I forgot to say what I actually think Dems should do about Gates. My initial read -- subject to revision as we learn more -- is that they should take advantage of the presence of some hard-core wankers in their caucus. Blocking Gates is problematic. Giving Gates a seal of approval is also problematic. So, if Webb wins, let Gates come to the floor and let him be confirmed by 49 Republicans plus some combination of Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Dick Cheney. That way Bush gets to keep running Bush's war Bush's way on Bush's say-so and Bush gets to keep reaping the blame when things keep going poorly.
UPDATE II: Um...no, this is moot. I'm on a conference call with Senator Levin and he says Gates will be handled by the lame duck congress.
Democratic Iraq Policy
It's oft said Democrats have no plan for Iraq. There's certainly some truth to that (the situation is, after all, seriously screwed-up and leaves us with no good option), but there actually is an official Democratic Iraq policy endorsed by the House and Senate leadership along with the ranking members (soon to be chairpersons) of the House and Senate defense, foreign affairs, and intelligence committee along with the House and Senate defense appropriations committees. Read their September letter here. Key excerpt:
We propose a new direction, which would include:
- transitioning the U.S. mission in Iraq to counter-terrorism, training, logistics and force protection;
- beginning the phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq before the end of this year;
- working with Iraqi leaders to disarm the militias and to develop a broad-based and sustainable political settlement, including amending the Constitution to achieve a fair sharing of power and resources;
- convening an international conference and contact group to support a political settlement in Iraq, to preserve Iraq’s sovereignty, and to revitalize the stalled economic reconstruction and rebuilding effort.
So there you have it in case you're curious.
Bottom of the Ticket
Heartening as last night's big sweep was, the volume of change in House seats was actually rather modest compared to the swing in public opinion and underlying voting behavior. The cause, in no small part, was pro-Republican gerrymandering. As you'll recall, the CW a few months ago was that Democratic recapture of the House was impossible because of these gerrymanders. Nonsense, of course. No gerrymander makes you immune to public opinion, good candidates, and well-run campaigns. But where the lines are drawn matter -- they turn narrow wins into small defeats, or big wins into medium-sized ones.
That's why it's so heartening to see these state-level wins that will put Democrats in a position to draw some more favorable lines in the future. Even better, state legislators get to draw their own lines so as to entrench victory. This is part of the problem with all arguments of the form "really it would be better to lose in Year Y so as to be better-positioned for Year X." As long as you don't use your governing power so ineptly as to totally discredit your political party (see Bush, George W.; Delay, Tom; etc.) one of the main consequences of political power is that it gives you the power to set up a situation favorable to . . . maintaining power.
It's (Semi) Official
Webb wins.
It's worth pointing out that this election ought to demolish the Myth of Karl Rove. From the GOP perspective, while losing five senate seats is worse than losing four, losing six is much worse than losing five. Since the 2006 climate clearly wasn't favorable to the Republicans, the obvious thing to do would have been to concentrate resources on Republican incumbents running in red states -- Virginia, Montana, Missouri, and Tennessee. I feel like there's good reason to think the GOP could have won two out of those four had they focused. Instead, they tried an ambitious strategy of picking off Democratic seats in New Jersey and Maryland, two solidly blue states.
Interestingly, Rove made the exact same error in 2000, engaging in an absurd late-game effort to campaign in California. He then lost the election, only to wind up with Bush securing the White House through a series of incredibly unlikely events plus a partisan Supreme Court. Then in 2004, he did something similar with weird last minute gambits in Hawaii and New Jersey that put his candidates perilously close to losing Ohio (and with it the presidency) not withstanding a decent-sized popular majority. Learning nothing from his good fortune except an unhealthy sense of infallibility, he proceeded to do it again and then, finally, have things genuinely blow up in his face.
Weird
I'm here at a post-election forum at the PPI which features, among other things, John Harris mocking "Rove envy" on the left in the wake of the realization that Karl Rove ain't so smart after all. Isn't Harris' book all about how awesome and brilliant Rove is?
UPDATE: I'm told Harris didn't actually write the Rove parts of the book, which could explain this.
More Forum
Okay, in John Harris' defense, after his initial remarks the WiFi went out and he started saying something rather different that made a lot of sense to me. In particular, he said that the Bush/Rove critique of Clintonism was that Clinton achieved high approval ratings at the expense of achieving big, lasting accomplishments. Listening to the other panelists, one is reminded that there's some truth to this. Will Marshall, Bruce Reed, and Jeremy Rosner are all eager to proclaim Rovism "a failure." At the same time, Rovism did manage to govern the country for six years and do a whole bunch of stuff during that time. Are the Democrats really going to reverse it all over the next two? Seemingly not. So notwithstanding the Year Six election loss, it's not clear that this is really a failure. Bush's impact on, say, the federal courts, will last for decades.
Wishful Thinking on Iraq
I think Steve Teles' views on what Democrats should do in congress are largely sound, but I worry about this: "When Rumsfeld out, the most important architect of the Iraq disaster is already gone. The Baker-Hamilton commission is moving, and Democrats should basically get behind what they recommend, so long as it is reasonable."
This is a widespread sentiment, and I understand the instinct, but there's a serious problem -- most indications are that the commission isn't going to recommend any one "thing" that Democrats can "get behind." Instead, it's going to try and clarify two or more different policy options. Consequently, folks are still going to have to make some decisions of their own. Given how unpalatable all the choices in Iraq are, it would be very, very nice to be able to, in effect, hide behind Jim Baker's skirts on this, but by the same token the commission itself doesn't want to offer up a definitive answer. At the end of the day, then, the tough reality is that you can't outsource your decision-making on this to anyone else.
A related bit of wishful thinking I've heard from a bunch of people -- particularly strategists associated with the "hawkish" tendency in the party -- is that growing Republican concern with the politics of the war will, in effect, force the Republicans to end it all on their own. That could happen, but it's unwise to bank on it. You'll recall that these same people mostly thought Bush would declare victory and go home during the course of 2004. They also thought we'd see troop levels drawn down in 2005. And also that Bush would be looking to wind the war down in time for the midterms in 2006. This prediction keeps getting made, in other words, and it keeps not happening. That's not to say it might not happen yet, but you can't just assume it will.
Sweet, Sweet Data
One frustrating aspect of political analysis for wannabe math nerds like me is that the data available about who voted for whom is pretty poor. John Judis, for example, in putting together his smart post-election analysis is forced to rely on some very imperfect proxies:
The Democrats also made gains among a critical subgroup of independents--the white working-class voters known as Reagan Democrats. In the Midwest, Democrats won these voters (most clearly identifiable in the polls as voters with "some college") by 50 to 49 percent. . . .
For instance, professionals--best identified in exit polls as voters with postgraduate education--backed Democrats by 58 percent to 41 percent in congressional races.
I'm willing to believe that those are the best available proxies. They're not, however, very good proxies. By this metric, neither I nor scarcely any of my friends count as professionals, even though we're all professionals, and lots of people who aren't even white will count as members of the white working class.
Microtargeting
I'm experiencing CW whiplash today. About a week ago, everyone thought one big Republican advantage was their superior "microtargeting" abilities and GOTV operation. Then they lost the election. Now today I heard an influential Democratic advisor type arguing that this shows that "macrotargeting the middle class" is better than microtargeting, and Josh Marshall's hinting around that it was all mumbo-jumbo.
Well, maybe it was. Certainly, I haven't reported on this question at all. That said, I recall having read a lot of fairly detailed reporting on GOP GOTV in 2004. After all, nothing about losing one election debunks the idea that the Republicans have a better GOTV operation. It's just that even really good GOTV can't save you from massive unpopularity.
So I'm not really sure, but I wouldn't write microtargeting off just yet. It's very possible that the Republicans really have developed superior methods and that Democrats should try to imitate them. After all, if you compare the 2006 exit polls to the 2004 exit polls you'll see an electorate that actually got much more demographically pro-Republican. You have a larger proportion of men, a larger proportion of white people, a smaller proportion of young people, fewer people making less than $15k, more people making more than $200k, lots of things like that. Democrats managed to significant improve their performance with just about every demographic sub-group out there (except, interestingly, African-Americans who voted just the same) so you'd need to be a true turnout magician to prevent a Democratic win.
How Quickly We Forget
Marty Peretz, November 9, 2006: "I am not indifferent to the death of Palestinians, not at all."
Marty Peretz, November 7, 2006: "The Palestinians behave like lemmings."
No indifference there at all. It's just that their behavior is best explained by analogizing them to animals.
Incidentally, he's backing the Rahm/Hoyer wing of the leadership against the Pelosi/Murtha axis.
Election Diavlogging
Since you probably haven't seen enough post-election commentary yet you must be dying to see me and Dan Drezner offer some in diavlog format, right? Our take on Don Rumsfeld's resignation and the vote's implications for free trade. Also, I make the mistake of pitting my flip condemnations of the US constitution against a highly trained professional political scientist and get my ass kicked.
The Right's Rumsfeld Reacts
I'm not sure Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal will make any real difference on the ground, but it sure has led to some sweet bitching and moaning from the right. Fake war opponent Michael Ledeen, for example, is all kinds of sad:
And while I thought he should be replaced, I found the manner and the moment of his purge utterly disgusting. What was the rush? It was one of the worst moments of W's presidency. It was a double surrender by the president, throwing a severed head to the Democrats and to the terrorists. You can be quite sure that the terror masters saw the election as a great victory, and Rumsfeld's ritual sacrifice as a moment of glory. It will encourage them to redouble their efforts, both in Iraq/Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They believe they have Bush's number, that they have broken him, and all they must do now is keep the blood flowing to accelerate our retreat. My heart breaks for the Iraqis.
My heart breaks for the Iraqis, too. Even the Iraqi health ministry is now acknowledging that casualties have been far higher than convention press estimates have put it -- around 150,000 according to the minister. Why sympathy for the Iraqi people should lead to continued political support for the architects of the disaster that's befallen them I couldn't quite say. J-Pod has emerged as National Review's voice of reason. Crazy Cliff May has a good take, too, noting that "Bush gave the lefty blogs and CNN another wonderful opportunity to call him a 'liar' for saying last week that he expected Rumsfeld to stay with him when he was obviously contemplating change." The opportunity to call Bush a liar was, of course, present by Bush's admission that he'd been lying.
Overestimating the Blogs
Obviously, I love blogs. I started political blogging way back in January 2002, I owe everything to the new media, and I believe the netroots will only grow more important over time. That said, it's shocking to read a veteran political reporter like Tom Edsall write that one of the virtues of the rising Democrats of the interior west is that "their political philosophy transcends the party's major split--between the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the left-wing netroots." That is the party's major split? Since when?
DailyKos is a very impressive achievement, but the core of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party remains the major liberal interest groups, most notably the AFL-CIO and other unions along with labor-affiliated groups like the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America's Future. Which is not to slight the contributions of African-American groups, feminist and reproductive rights outfits, or the environmental movement (see also).
Counterintuitive!
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