Metaphor Foul!
I call "foul" on David Brooks -- political columnists can't use elephant metaphors where "elephant" doesn't stand for "the Republican Party." This stuff's too confusing for Sunday morning.
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December 3, 2006 - December 9, 2006 Archives
December 3, 2006
Appeasement Quiz
Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 96%
You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo!
Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz
I'm more pro-terrorist than even Jim Henley, probably because as a liberal rather than a libertarian I have positive views about the United Nations.
Recruiting
I went to see Fast Food Nation last night and before the film there was a long ad for for the Army National Guard, detailing not only the sort of benefits you can obtain through volunteering, but also the sort of exciting missions the Guard undertakes. Except, of course, they didn't mention anything about Iraq where tens of thousands of Guard soldiers are deployed. There was, instead, a vague mention of "overseas deployment." Nothing unusual about this, of course. If you watch a lot of male-oriented television programming you'll see lots of military recruitment ads of various sorts and they never mention that the modal outcome for a member of the US military these days is to be sent to fight in Iraq.
It is however, unusual in historical terms. If you look at recruting posters from World War I or World War II the situation was quite different.
It's not merely that these posters didn't obscure the fact that a war was going on. Rather, the fact of the war was the key selling point of the recruitment drives. Which makes sense. Leaving your home and family to go do an arduous job isn't an obviously appealing thing to do. You get money, to be sure, but patriotic appeals are a key part of getting people to volunteer. The war, in these terms, is a reason to sign up -- your country needs you to fight its enemies.
We have to assume that the Army's marketing people know what they're doing these days. And there professional judgment is that the Iraq War isn't like that. Their view is that "the war in Iraq is a vital and necessary cause that you should do your part for" won't be compelling to people. The best way to get them to sign up isn't quite to try and dupe them (everyone knows there's a war on) but certainly is to try and keep the war hidden and downplayed.
What's more, everyone takes this for granted. Nobody expects the Army to run ads saying "sign up and fight the Islamofascists in Iraq." I don't, however, think we've really thought the implications of this through. Lots of people are still opposed to a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. But does anyone think Iraq is a cause worth dying for at this point? Does anyone deny that a straightforward recruiting pitch wouldn't work? But staying in Iraq, obviously, means having people die for this mission. For a mission nobody really believes in anymore.
Show Me The Money!
Jon Chait's smart take on Paul Tough's education article from last week observes that the schools that have been most successful with poor inner-city kids "attract a small cadre of extremely bright and dedicated teachers, often willing to work 16-hour days." This is good for those schools and the kids who attend them, "but you can't find enough [people like that] to staff every school in the nation, or even just the poorest ones." In the past, "teaching was able to attract a lot of highly skilled women because they were excluded from most professions on the basis of their gender." These days, that gender segregation externality no longer operates on the teaching labor market, so "if you want highly skilled teachers who work investment banker hours, we have to pay them like -- well, if not quite like investment bankers, then a lot more generously than we pay them now."
In short, on a small scale you can find eccentric individuals willing to engage in Stakhanovite efforts to make things work. But such endeavors are not a systematic solution to anything. If you want to replicate these results on a wide scale, it would take, among other things, a very large sum of money.
Really?
The London Times reports that "the Saudi Arabian government is emerging as a key player in talks to broker a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement" and that "Olmert is believed to be considering a Saudi initiative, endorsed by the Arab League four years ago, as the basis for a peace settlement." This via Andrew Stuttaford who remarks "Good for the Saudis, good for Ehud Olmert."
I agree. My only question: Why isn't this in the American press? Seems like an important development. If Olmert's really "considering" this, the US government should encourage him to move forward.
The Question of Polk
Having spent years supporting the Bush administration's largest foreign policy disaster (Iraq), and it's largest hoped-for domestic policy disaster (dismantling Social Security), the Washington Post opinion section has been running a lot of articles lately on the question of exactly how bad a president Bush is in historical terms. Eric Foner says Bush is the worst ever, but also in some ways comparable to James K. Polk who "should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States." Michael Lind, by contrast, sees four presidents worse than Bush -- James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and dark-horse candidate James Madison. Polk isn't in the conversation.
Douglas Brinkley marks Bush down as the worst ever and observes of Polk that his war "was a success, even if the pretext was immoral. On virtually every presidential rating poll, Polk is deemed a 'near great' president." Similarly, "History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president." Robert Farley likewise agrees that "at least James K. Polk's deceptive and unprovoked war was successful." They Might Be Giants, famously, are Polk fans:
In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tarriffs fell
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term
At the end of the day, Polk's hard to evaluate just because it's so hard to imagine a world in which the United States doesn't extend from sea to shining sea.
December 4, 2006
In Praise of UNO
As befits a longtime Mac user, I have a somewhat superficial understanding of things computational and basically just want everything to look pretty. Which is why one aspect of the OS X GUI has bothered me forever -- the windows don't match. Some programs -- iTunes, Safari, iChat, etc. -- have that cool "brushed metal" look, but other applications, including Apple programs like Mail, do not. That really bothered me. I stopped using Net News Wire and started using Vienna instead because the latter is brushed metal. I wouldn't switch away from iChat and toward Adium until I found Adium settings that aped the brushed metal look. And, of course, I had to use Safari instead of Firefox as my web browser.
But no more! UNO the Sunken Unified GUI provides a simple method to make all your applications -- even Word or NeoOffice -- have the same basic appearance. Thus, life is good.
'Tis The Season
For non-celebrators of Christmas, one of the annoying things about the "Holiday season" is that it seems to constantly be getting longer with every passing year. Tim Harford wonders if this constant earlification of Christmas is economically efficient. Tyler Cowen thinks it's not: "Suppliers are inefficiently 'fishing' for early 'capture' of consumers as part of a common pool problem. If a given supplier doesn't grab that consumer's attention now, someone else will. Of course there can be no property rights in 'the attention of consumers,' so that attention is consumed inefficiently early."
Base and Superstructure
Sebastian Mallaby observes of conservative/libertarian splits that "It's not just the values of the South that pose a problem. It is the region's appetite for government." In particular, "The most solidly red states in the nation tend also to be the most reliant on federal handouts -- farm subsidies, water projects and sundry other earmarks. It's hard to be the party of small government when you represent the communities that benefit most from big government."
Based on this analysis, Mallaby proposes a kind of Democrat/libertarian combined arms action to "cut senseless spending such as the farm program and oil subsidies to make room for the inevitable expansion in areas such as health." I'd be all for that, though I seriously doubt it would garner tons of libertarian support from Democrats since it seems to me that those libertarians interested in economic issues care more about Social Security and Medicare than they do about farm subsidies (and why not? the retirement entitlements are much bigger) and regard people who support raising the minimum wage as worse than Lysenko and only slightly better than Mengele.
That said, if you're looking for government spending that the GOP will never touch because it goes to "red" regions and to corporations that back Republicans, you should be looking at the Defense Department's budget which, obviously, dwarfs the Department of Agriculture in size.
What Day Is It?
From the standpoint of pure viewing enjoyment, I think last night's edition of The Wire was the best season four has had to offer.
Local Funding
I think Al will be glad to see Kevin Carey correcting the view that "Schools are mostly funded locally." Instead, he points to a table demonstrating that schools get 40+ percent of their money from local sources, a slightly larger amount from state sources, and a small amount (around eight percent on average, but I think this varies quite a bit) from the federal government.
That's still a lot of local funding, and I wonder how much of the non-local stuff is for disabled kids or whatever rather than "regular" programming, but it's not "most."
Bolton: So Sad
About half the time, conservatives profess bafflement as to why liberals are so upset about John Bolton. The rest of the time, you read pearls of wisdom from Bolton fans like Andy McCarthy about how "we don't need an ambassador at the UN, we need a wrecking ball." The mustachioed one, it seems, was just the man for the job but "If John Bolton could not be confirmed after the job he did, there is no hope for a strong American presence there. More importantly, even with Bolton performing heroically, the UN was still a menace."
So, look, conservatives can agree with that or disagree as they like. But no fair being baffled -- this is the crux of the issue. Bolton and his biggest fans think the UN is a menace. Not that the UN is a flawed institution that sometimes can't or doesn't accomplish everything one might like. Rather, it's a menace. Not something that should be improved, but something that should be wrecked. Hit, in other words, with a wrecking ball. People who believe that a "strong American presence" in Turtle Bay means strident efforts to destroy the institution.
Claiming Victory
Phoenix Woman at Daily Kos wants everyone to calm down about Robert Rubin's invitation to speak to the House Democratic caucus on the subject of fiscal responsibility. Max Sawicky objects, making some goods points en passant about the netroots' weakness for what David Sirota has labeled "partisan war syndrome". That said, this from Sawicky -- "Let's hope from that quarter that we don't start hearing calls to shift troops from Iraq to Iran, or how we need to fix Social Security by cutting benefits (Rubin's special interest)" -- makes me wonder.
I'm not sure where one gets the idea that Rubin has a particular passion for cutting Social Security benefits. Read, for example, his November 9 speech to the Economic Club of Washington and you'll find no advocacy of Social Security cuts. Rather, the headline out of his speech was "Former US Treasury chief Rubin says tax rises needed" based on progressive-friendly claims like "I think if you were to increase taxes right now, you would have probably about zero negative effect on the economy."
This is not to deny that there's a real deficit-related disagreement between Rubin and Sawicky here. Max thinks there's no problem with running a budget deficit of around 2-3 percent of GDP, whereas Rubin believes that in light of projected entitlement-related spending increases in the future we should be trying to run a budget surplus in the present day. I don't, however, see a disagreement about Social Security benefits. Which is to agree with Ezra that I think there's a tendency on both sides of the intra-Democratic economic policy debate to overstate the degree of operational disagreement. I think there is a lot of disagreement about economic policy in the Kingdom of Ends and disagreement of that sort matters, but should also be kept in perspective. The policy status quo is well to the right and both sides ought to be able to row together for a while now. In particular, Social Security advocates should note that they've more or less won the argument at this point already.
Counterterrorism and Grievance-resolution
In the spirit of the post below, but closer to my own foreign policy bailiwick, it's nice to read this rather than liberal hawkery from the DLC:
A third principle of counterinsurgency theory is to rigorously support political and economic reforms that undermine insurgencies. In the short term, we should begin a diplomatic campaign aimed at defusing the various Muslim insurgencies that al-Qaeda has successfully co-opted. Working toward political solutions to conflicts in Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, the Caucasus, and the Philippines would help divide the global jihadist movement that Osama bin Laden has unified.
Let me note by way of criticism that a conflict involving a certain country on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea seems to have gone missing from this list. Nevertheless, the principle is sound and this is therefore progress. Indeed, it seems to me that one thing crippling post-9/11 center-left national security has been an unwillingness to articulate this principle precisely out of fear of drawing the obvious conclusions for America's Israel policy.
I recall that as of the panel discussion on "The Grievance Challenge" at the America's Purpose conference in September 2005 merely raising the grievance issue was a bold and radical move even in circles self-consciously opposed to the "liberal hawk" line of thought. And, indeed, at the New American Strategies for Peace and Security conference organized by many of the same people two years before that this stuff wasn't on the table at all. So to have the DLC moving in this direction is definitely a sign of progress, that the devastation in Iraq is leading people to develop some sounder views.
The alternative to confronting grievances is, of course, the underlying strategic error that brought us Iraq. Not operational military failures in that country, or even a mistake about Iraq as such. Rather, the fundamental error was simply to believe that attempting the wholesale externally-coerced transformation of Arab politics and society was the best way to combat the rise of al-Qaeda.
The Game Got More Fierce
Spencer Ackerman asks SCIRI's Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to respond to accusations "of the abduction, torture and execution of perhaps thousands of Sunnis." Follow the link to see his reply.
Scanners
Pitchfork thinks Violence is Golden is totally lame: "Everything about "Joy", the first song on their first album, reeks of being 10 years past its best-before date: Sarah Daly lays on the ultra-vixen shtick extra thick ("My love leaves a permanent stain/ I'm in love with my digital toy," she informs us with a curled-lip purr) while her band plods away in a PVC-sleek synth-grunge grind that could've easily scored them the opening slot on an Elastica/Garbage bill, provided Republika or Sleeper weren't available."
That sounded good to me so I downloaded the album off eMusic and . . . it's pretty good. The band is Scanners; MySpace here.
The Ignorant Way of War
MCCAIN ON IRAQ: "Well in war, my dear friends, there is no such thing as compromise; you either win or you lose."
People love straight talk, but the trouble with this analysis is that it's, um, wrong. Wars frequently have somewhat ambiguous outcomes. Think of, say, Korea which ended in a stalemate. Or Israel's war in Lebanon just this past summer. Or, for that matter, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This began as a fight between the United States' government and Saddam Hussein's Baath regime. The regime was toppled, but a Sunni Arab insurgency that was, in important ways, continuous with the Old Regime stayed in the field. At this point, though, it seems overwhelmingly likely that neither side of that conflict will achieve its main objectives.
From Tragedy to Farce and Back Again
With Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's visit to Washington, one really might have thought that the cognitive dissonance from the White House would have gotten too intense for the Beltway press corps to keep covering administration "policymaking" with a straight face. Based on Sheryl Gay Stolberg's article one's hopes would be disappointed.
Really, truly do we need to take the idea that Hakim is the solution in Iraq even remotely seriously. The hope, it seems, is that more Hakim means less Muqtada, but what's the point? Why would we want to trade an upstart Iranian-backed vicious Shiite Islamist would-be theocrat for a more establishment-oriented Iranian-backed vicious Shiite Islamist would-be theocrat? Maybe this sort of gambit can win you ten points in Calvinball but here on planet earth we're rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Or, perhaps, using the deck chairs to poke holes in the hull, hoping to avoid the iceberg by sinking the ship before the deadly collision occurs.
At any rate, now seems like a good time to revisit the political punditry of America's Worst Journalist, Charles Krauthammer, and his eerily prescient column of May 2, 2003:
Before the war even began, the critics were predicting that Iraq was going to be the Bay of Pigs (plus "Desert One, Beirut and Somalia," said the ever-hyperbolic Chris Matthews). A week into the war, we were told Iraq was Vietnam. Now, after the war, they're telling us that Iraq is Iran -- that Iraq's Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic.The critics were wrong every time. They are wrong again. Of course there are telegenic elements among the Shiites who would like fundamentalist rule by the clerics. But even the majority of Iranians oppose the rule of the mullahs and consider the Islamic revolution a disaster. The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.
There is no reason to believe that Iranian-inspired Shiite fundamentalists will be any more successful in Iraq.
Seriously, are there no firing offenses for columnists? Silly critics. Damian Penny hailed Krauthammer's genius
December 5, 2006
Risk and Reward
Jonah Goldberg had a post yesterday wondering if we shouldn't be doing more to prevent the possibility of an earth-destroying asteroid collision. I think we should. The odds of such an impact event in any given year are low, but not really all that low, and the downside consequences would be terrible. Then, as is all-too-often the case, he follows up by quoting an email from a dumb reader complaining about Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine:
The book knocked VP Cheney for saying that even a 1% chance of terrorists getting nuclear weapons merits serious US action to stop them. But multiplying the 1% by the severity of a nuclear terrorist attack in an American city makes Cheney's statement quite reasonable. Not how it played in much of the press, though.
First, a basic note on probabilities. It's quite right to say that faced with the possibility of a Very Bad Outcome we should take the VBO seriously even if the VBO is unlikely. Cheney's actual doctrine, however, was that faced with a one percent risk of a nuclear terrorist attack against an American city, we should respond as we would were such an attack a certainty. This is obviously daft. If there's a one percent probability of 1 million people dying, the expected value is that 10,000 people will die. If, conversely, there's a 100 percent probability of 1 million people dying, the expected value is that 1 million people will die. The idea that we should treat those values as if they were the same is crazy.
In the specific case of asteroids versus invading Iraq, though, the more salient difference is the downside risks of action. Cheney's doctrine, as he operationalized it, involved simply assuming that inaction courted risk whereas action did not. That, again, is crazy. The risk of spending more money tracking asteroids and starting a pilot research program to study how you might blow them up is that some money might get wasted if your research proves useless or if no asteroids come. The risk of invading Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of people will die, America will fail to achieve critical mission objectives in Iraq, America's international alliance system will end up in tatters, and, generally speaking, the United States will find itself retreating on all major foreign policy fronts. That's the trouble with starting speculative wars -- they're quite likely to go badly awry.
Senator Webb
Webb, an early opponent of the war in Iraq, might make his mark in the Senate in foreign and military affairs," says a Washington Post Metro reporter with an interest in this turning out to be true. "Current and former politicians said they expect him to become the face of the Democratic Party's antiwar movement."
Some skepticism about the accuracy of that speculation aside, I'd like to see it become true; Webb has the right cultural and personal characteristics to sell an anti-war message. Post-9/11, I think an awful lot of Democrats have tried to compensate for having bad personal/characterological attributes for the politics of national security by adopting substantively bad policy positions -- John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden come to mind -- and this doesn't work very well. Webb's roughly the reverse, and feels no need to act defensive about being a patriot and supporting the troops and it worked well for him in the campaign despite the fact that he's not a very natural campaigner.
Wire Season Four Wrapup
My crew cheated a bit and watched the final episode of season four last night, letting me sum things up below the fold.
Pre-emptive Strikes
The Baker-Hamilton Commission's come in for its share of criticism from the right, but in my latest column the left speaks up: "Bipartisan adoption of the ISG's recommendations, in other words, may not solve America's Iraq problem, but it just might solve the Iraq problem facing the bipartisan American national security elite that got the country into this mess."
By my read of the working group’s personnel roster it is the case that the May-style neoconservative intellectuals who largely formulated the Bush Iraq policy and took the lead role in pushing for its implementation have been sidelined. Also scantily represented on the commission, however, is another important category of people -- those who saw the direction things were heading and took a strong stand against the march to war. I don't want to say that none of the experts here were against the war, which is almost certainly false. But while many of them wrote in support of invasion or worked for institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that backed it, virtually none of them -- none at all that I recognize -- engaged in public opposition to the war before it happened.This, however, is just the very mix of silence, collaboration, and complicity on the part of "respectable," "credible," "mainstream" analysts that produced the war in the first place. The more courageous and farsighted voices who got things right were treated as marginal at the time and, shockingly, are still treated as marginal -- excluded from all the coolest bipartisan commissions.
Read it all at The American Prospect Online.
Liberaltarianism?
Eh? Color me somewhat unimpressed by this intellectual project, though see Julian Sanchez for a good rundown of ideas in the air and Will Wilkinson for some high theoretical backdrop. In large part, I just don't think the idea of forging an "alliance" between "liberals" and "libertarians" makes a ton of conceptual sense -- I'm not sure who's supposed to be doing the allying or what, really, an alliance would mean in this context. There are sound libertarian or libertarianish policy ideas and lines of argument out there in the realm of economics and it's always a good thing to try to keep these in mind and co-opt what it seems reasonable to co-opt. Certainly I would hope on the merits to see Democrats continue to evolve in a more libertarian direction on gun control and the efficacy of certain types of economic regulation, especially at the state and local level where I think a lot of zoning and licensing policies have gone badly awry.
Surprise!
Barak Obama: "One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me. And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect."
This rejoinder (well, okay, it's not a rejoinder) from Markos himself certainly surprised me: "Standard caveats aside (it's early, we don't have a set field, blah blah blah), it's hard to see how Barack Obama loses the nomination barring scandal or the mother-of-all gaffes."
Really? I dunno. I would have zero confidence in my prognostication abilities at this point. Meanwhile, this from Obama in the same article as the dKos-bashing seems sound: "I remember back in 2004, one of the candidates had made a proposal about universal health care, and some DLC-type commentator said, ‘We can’t propose this kind of big-government costly program, because it’ll send a signal we’re tax-and-spend liberals.’ But that’s not a good reason to not do something. You don’t give up on the goal of universal health care because you don’t want to be tagged as a liberal. People need universal health care."
To a good first approximation, Obama seems to be the sort of nominee you're looking for -- someone who's actually more liberal than his public image would suggest -- rather than, say, an unnamed senator from New York who's less liberal than her reputation (now that I think about it, this applies to both NY Senators, but whatever).
The Good Thing About Blogging...
... is that though adversaries can "fact-check your ass" you can still write whatever kind of crazy made-up stuff you like. Similarly, if you mainly publish articles in a magazine you happen to own, you can write things like "Assad has been sending Sunni warriors from all over the Muslim world across Syria's border with Iraq, where they massacre Shia on arrival" and nobody can ask you to produce, you know, evidence for that assertion.
In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night
No Evil Shall Escape My Sight
To review:
All Green Lanterns wield a power ring that can generate a variety of effects and energy constructs, sustained purely by the ring wearer's strength of will. The greater the user's willpower, the more effective the ring. The limits of the power ring's abilities are not clearly defined and it has been referred to as "the most powerful weapon in the universe" on more than one occasion. Across the years, the ring has been shown capable of accomplishing anything within the imagination of the ring bearer. Often the rings are used to form solid-light constructs, the power and size of which are limited only by the ring-bearer's willpower.
Or, as Mark Steyn puts it: "It's not the planes, the tanks, the men, the body armor. It's the political will." Leading to the following sober-minded policy proposal:
Three years ago, when it was obvious Syria and Iran were violating Iraq's borders with impunity, we should have done what the British did in the so-called ''Confrontation'' with Indonesia 40 years ago when they were faced with Jakarta doing to the newly independent state of Malaysia exactly what Damascus and Tehran are doing to Iraq. British, Aussie and Malaysian forces sent troops on low-key, lethally effective raids into Indonesia, keeping the enemy on the defensive and winning the war with barely a word making the papers. If the strategic purpose in invading Iraq was to create a regional domino effect, then playing defense in the Sunni Triangle for three years makes no sense. We should never have wound up hunkered down in the Green Zone. If there has to be a Green Zone, it should be on the Syrian side of the border.
Indeed, and when that doesn't work, we can spread the war to, say, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan.
Historical Footnote
"The top Marine officer in Iraq says the victory in Fallujah has broken the back of the insurgents."
--November 19, 2004.
December 6, 2006
What About All the Bad News?
Not to get unduly resentment-oriented, but unless I'm crazy the American media is really downplaying the deteriorating situation in Lebanon relative to the huge play they gave to big street protests during the "Cedar Revolution." I'm not really all that certain that events in Lebanon are all that crucially important to the United States of America, but certainly when anti-Syrian and somewhat pro-Western forces appeared to be on the rise this was treated as a major development. Insofar as that's the case, then surely the reverse turn of events as pro-Syrian mass movements flex their muscle is also important. This situation also at least appears to have the potential to turn into massive bloodshed at some point, so it's kind of worth keeping track of.
Costs of War
Via Jim Henley, Kevin Hall and David Montgomery tally up the price of war in ways you might neglect. To make a long story short, for all the billions that have been appropriated for Iraq, those appropriations don't actually cover the bills. That means cutbacks elsewhere. Specifically, services (janitorial, mail, bill payment) at military bases, it means that equipment isn't being procured for training purposes, it means that not all the equipment damaged in Iraq is getting repaired, etc. What's more, the thousands of dead soldiers are the least of the human toll: "More than 73,000 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . . . Internet blogs written by soldiers or their wives tell of suicide attempts by soldiers haunted by the horror of combat, civilian careers of reservists who’ve been harmed by deployment and redeployment, and marriages broken by distance and the trauma of war."
All the Senators seemed very pleased with Robert Gates yesterday. And as John Judis says, Gates really does seem less eager to buy into geopolitical madness than many of his Republican predecessors. Still, Gates seems to be part of the "mainstream" elite consensus which holds that Iraq is almost certainly doomed, but that we should sort of keep on prosecuting the war for years and years just because it would be embarrassing to give up and, hell, who knows maybe a pony will come along. That sort of thing works, I think, if and only if you regard the war as a total abstraction, rather than actual events happening to actual people.
The Length of War
I've only read the ISG excerpts not the whole thing, and even in the excerpts there's a lot to read and digest. I found myself, however, choking over this one:
The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq. At that time, U.S. combat forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with Iraqi forces, in rapid-reaction and special operations teams and in training, equipping, advising, force protection and search and rescue. Intelligence and support efforts would continue. A vital mission of those rapid reaction and special operations forces would be to undertake strikes against al-Qaida in Iraq.
Emphasis added, because there's the rub. It's worth saying that from the beginning the Bush administration has always had a plan to withdraw the bulk of US combat forces from Iraq in 12-18 months. It's just that the "plan" has always gone something like "we'll do this super-awesome stuff, then the situation will improve, and then most of the combat troops will leave." The problem, of course, keeps being that the situation "unexpectedly" fails to improve. The policy's failure therefore becomes the justification for continuing the very policy that's failing.
Our Post-Profit Future
I was reading Wired's package of articles about the rise of Web video, and, well, they're a bit odd. Bob Garfield's article seeks to puzzle out why Google would pay so much money to acquire YouTube. The reason, he says, is basically that YouTube is awesome and lots of people like it. Over time, it seems, more and more people will be visiting this site. So, therefore, the site would be a good thing to own. Then closer to the end of the article, he notes that there may be some problems with this. To actually turn all those viewers into money, you need to sell ads. But it's hard to sell ads on YouTube. For one thing, lots of YouTube streams don't even come through the YouTube site. For another thing, there are lots of other sites that also do video hosting, so if YouTube gets all ad-heavy, people may switch away to other services.
Then we read about LonelyGirl15 and how these dudes had this idea and nobody believed in them. But they did it anyway. And it turned out to be pretty awesome. And lots of people watched the show. So -- ha! -- where are the haters now? Except, again, at the end it turns out that even if LonelyGirl15 is awesome and popular, its creators have had a hard time actually making money off of it.
To me, at least, this is the real moral of the story. Peer-production of digital media probably will produce a fair quantity of awesome popular stuff lurking amidst the vast pool of dreck. And well-designed services will let the awesome stuff rise to the top and the dreck fade to the background, rendering those services awesome and popular. But -- and here's the rub -- having something awesome and popular just may not prove to be especially lucrative. In the past, a popular television show or a popular album or a popular film or a popular distribution channel guaranteed you vast sums of money. In the future, that just may not be the case. The very most popular things will generate some income, enough to live off of and continue financing new projects, but not the sort of gigantic windfalls associated with 20th century media hits. And lots of other things -- including reasonably popular ones -- will only generate trivial levels of income. And they'll continue to be made. Made by people who think its fun, or who derive some benefit from their work other than direct monetary income.
'Round and 'Round We Go
Lee Smith’s piece, "The Shia Problem," is important. Smith organizes a big-picture look at the Middle East around an emerging, region-wide Sunni-Shia civil war. (A prospect alluded to at the Gates hearing.) Our real interests in that civil war are on the Sunni side, which is a big reason why a deal with Iran is probably a bad idea.
This sounds great to me. No deal with Iran! Can we cut a deal with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to form a grand Sunni Islamist / American / Arab nationalist alignment against the rising tide of Shiism. Maybe now that Don Rumsfeld doesn't have a day job he'd like to orchestrate another sit-down with Saddam. Dunno who we can send as our envoy to OBL, but no doubt if Bush could call Musharraf and Musharraf can call someone in the ISI who knows how to get in touch with Osama.
Whoa...
... I've seen columnists (those not named "Krauthammer") correct clear-cut errors of fact in the past, but I can't really recall anyone doing what David Ignatius does today, acting all bloggy and conceding to errors of judgment and interpretation in response to reader complaints:
In a column last week, I praised Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for his prescient early warnings about the risks of U.S. involvement in Iraq. Some readers complained that for all his prescience, Hagel still voted to support the war, and that I was ignoring the many Democrats who were similarly wary of Iraq -- and who voted against war funding. These readers are right. Hagel took political risks expressing his concerns back in 2003, but so did Democrats who voted against the Iraq mission despite a vitriolic barrage from the administration.
A new day dawns...
A Study in Buffoonery
An emailer wonders how this hilarous David Broder parody made it into today's Post. The special unintentional comedy prize goes to former Senator Alan Simpson for his observation that "No one wanted to see us embarrassed by being unable to come to consensus."
And there's the rub. The purpose of the commission is for a bipartisan political elite to try to avoid embarrassment.
Lost in the Pony Fields
Now that I've read the whole thing, the good news about the Iraq Study Group report is that it's filled with accurate observations about the situation in Iraq. As Kevin Drum writes it's "more reality-based than the Bush administration, which represents at least a little bit of progress." On the level of concepts on logic, however, it's more-or-less a sick joke. As the report outlines, the fundamental problem in Iraq is the absence of broad-based national reconciliation. Absent such reconciliation, it's impossible for the US military to provide security to the country, impossible to create effective Iraqi institutions, and impossible to isolate hard-core extremists on either side of the sectarian divide.
More ISG
Don't miss further incisive commentary from Spencer Ackerman and Greg Sargent. Plus more Ackerman where he reports Lee Hamilton's statement that "We have one last chance at making Iraq work, and, more importantly, one last chance to unite this country on this war."
Yes, avoiding political dispute about the war is more important than adopting a good war policy. No doubt Hamilton would deny that's actually what he believes, but I think we can put this in the Freudian slip file.
December 7, 2006
The Hits Keep on Coming
"The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers," according to Michael Gordon. No worries, though, Sandra Day O'Connor was on the commission (and Ed Meese!) so you can be sure these are good ideas.
Parity
Silly Kevin. When Republicans took over the White House, their complaints about Democratic handling of the transition were lies about Democrats and concerned trivial matters like the location of keyboard; Democrats complaining about GOP handling of the congressional transition are accurately grousing about Republicans and worse of all the complaints have policy significance. Obviously, you can't expect the press to give the latter situation any more than 2 percent of the coverage they gave to the former. Otherwise, the world might just explode.
A Commission We Could Use
I think it's clear that the Iraq Study Group has basically been a failure, and as a general matter I'm a skeptic about bipartisan commissions -- it's usually better to let the constitutional political process work. I can, however, think of at least one exception suitable to present conditions -- a commission to examine gasoline taxes. My strong sense is that you could assemble a genuinely wide-ranging commission including far-right lunatics, lefty populist types, as well as economists of the center-right and center-left who could agree on something along the lines of an increase in the gas tax offset by a flat payroll tax rebate (or something -- you'd genuinely need the commission to work out the details of an offset) in a way that would be revenue neutral and lack major distributive implications but also serve to encourage the broadest possible range of conservation methods. It would be an implicit subsidy to producers of alternative fuels, to producers and consumers of energy-efficient cars, and to those who find ways to simply drive less.
This is the kind of thing no politician with a functioning brain is going to want to touch, less because the ultimate outcome would be strikingly unpopular (after all, exactly half the population -- those who consumer a less-than-average amount of gasoline -- would benefit financially) than simply because the downside risk of exposing yourself to political attacks would be large and there's no particular political upside. A commission could give politicians of both parties the cover to collectively hold hands, close their eyes, and take the plunge. That's not the be-all and end-all of energy policy or of American politics, but I think it would be good policy and since whatever's left of the permanent governing class in this country seems desperate for some consensus-oriented warm fuzzies they'd be better off looking in a policy area featuring genuine consensus.
Stats to the Limit
Via True Hoop, Jonathan Weiler has an informative run-down of the state of play in terms of NBA quantitative analysis. The point he makes about interaction effects keeps coming up in critiques of The Wages of Wins and I thought one potentially better way to make the point would just be to observe that the linear analysis WoW employs just produces results that are obviously mistaken even on its own terms. You can see this if you look at any Wow evaluations and then imagine an outlandish situation. As they note in the book, their methods, if employed literally, suggest that a team of sufficiently good players would win more than 82 games.
Since there are only 82 games to win, it's obviously not the case that the right personnel will give you 90 wins. Similarly, WoW implies that a sufficiently bad team could wrack up a negative win total, which is also false. If we lives on Karl Popper's dream planet we could just see that this model implies things which are false, and then reject the theory out of hand. The growth of knowledge in the real world, however, doesn't work like that. It's clear from those examples -- examples you can find in the book -- that the linearity assumption isn't actually correct. The trouble is that if you relax that assumption, the math becomes much more difficult and it's still totally unclear how you can improve the model. This, in turn, stems from the fact that though thought-experiments about extreme situations can show us that team wins have to add up to 82 or fewer wins, we have very little actual data about extreme situations.
Looking at WoW I think something almost all basketball fans have trouble with is the seeming implication that if you put five high-efficiency, low-volume shooters who were good at rebounding and avoiding turnovers on the floor simultaneously that you'd have a really effective team. This seems wrong to most of us; it seems as if in that situation the team would either see turnovers skyrocket (shot clock violations) or else shooting efficiency decline. And it would be good to have a formula that took that sort of thing into account. To construct a formula like that, though, you'd either need to just guess what would happen, or else you'd need much more data out of which to try and build an empirically grounded non-linear analysis. But since as best I can tell no coaches actually field lineups like that (they, like most people, are just assuming it wouldn't work) there isn't much to be done.
Alternatives to Driving
Duncan Black responds on the gas tax issue, saying the crucial thing to do is provide more viable alternatives to the car-intensive lifestyle, citing in particular land use policies. I agree that this is crucial. Unfortunately, as best I understand it this isn't a subject federal-level policymakers have substantial control over. It would, however, be very nice to see local political leaders demonstrate some leadership on this subject which I don't think the public understands very well and where I think a little education would go a long way. In some ways, though, I think a commission could be helpful here . . . zoning rules aren't set at the federal level, but the nationwide pattern of land-use policy has national implications, which is something a commission could, at a minimum, point out and draw some attention to.
The ISG's Raj
Fred Kaplan details the conceptual morass of the Iraq Study Group. One point is this: "Will Bush drop his avowed desire for "regime change" in Tehran in exchange for Tehran's help in stabilizing Iraq? That's the big question. Every time it's come up so far, Bush has firmly said no. Will he make a fundamental shift now? Doubtful. And what is Tehran's view of a stable Iraq? Is it the same as Washington's view? Again, doubtful—which is one reason Bush probably won't make a shift."
More to the point, though, the ISG is at war with itself over this. The headline call to withdraw all-or-most US combat brigades from Iraq by 2008 is actually pretty misleading. This is supposed to be combined with embedding something like 20,000 American soldiers directly inside the Iraqi Army. We're also supposed to go forward with the plan to build this giant embassy with thousands of people working in it. They also want us to increase the quasi-civilian presence in Iraq by sending FBI, DOJ, and other people to build up Iraqi law enforcement capabilities. And to increase the level of intelligence assets in Iraq. What's more, special operations forces, air power, etc. are all supposed to remain available, though perhaps based just over the border.
The upshot of this if you could really pull it off would be to create something akin to the British Indian Army, where the United States would have effective control over the institutions of the Iraqi state. America's embedded officers -- down to the company level -- would be in de facto command of a large body of Iraqi cannon fodder, with US civilians similarly embedded throughout many of Iraq's civilian agencies. Whatever you think of this idea (and I don't think much of it) the government of Iran certainly isn't going to think much of it. One could imagine them helping us do something in Iraq, but creating a stable, effective government controlled from Washington, DC isn't on that list.
Economics: It's Complicated
This interview with labor economist David Card makes for interesting reading. The predominant theme, I suppose, is that after Economics 101 comes . . . a whole bunch of additional stuff. Which is to say that things -- in Card's case, labor markets -- turn out to be complicated, and it's at least not obviously true, in practice, that policy shifts have the consequences that very simple models of the situation would indicate. One needs to do the work. Not, obviously, that Card's views on any of these questions are the last word either, but simply that a lot of the economic policy issues that get discussed these days don't have answers that can be read off a really basic supply and demand curve.
Will Wilkinson's post lauding John Rawls and Friedrick Hayek got me thinking along somewhat similar lines. The thing about Hayek that's always worth keeping in mind was that things were quite different in his day. In particular, lots and lots of people thought that the Great Depression had totally discredited capitalism, since the more command-oriented economies of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Fascist Italy were thought to have weathered it better. At a minimum, there was a widespread belief in a sharp trade-off between freedom (capitalism) and efficiency (planned economies). Consequently, it you hard parties of the moderate, democratic left nationalizing industry and trying to implement large-scale economic planning.
Legal Authority
This from the ISG Report (page 9) discussion of the Iraqi police is really puzzling (emphasis added):
The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi Police Service currently numbers roughly 135,000 and is responsible for local policing. It has neither the training nor legal authority to conduct criminal investigations, nor the firepower to take on organized crime, insurgents, or militias.
I assume they wouldn't have made a factual error about something like that, but how in the world did this happen? The Police Service lacks the legal authority to conduct criminal investigations? And nobody's reported this yet? That just seems crazy.
December 8, 2006
Opportunity and Inequality
Will Wilkinson reads Robert Schiller describing the level of inequality in the contemporary United States as a "serious problem" then pronounces the view that "greater inequality per se is a problem" to be "utterly mysterious." I tend to agree that for a sufficiently strong sense of per se this can get to be a bit mysterious, but in the real world there's relatively little mystery about it. Will, for example, is willing to allow that one might worry about inequality insofar as it is caused, for example, by "the system of monopoly public provision of education that systematically disadvantages certain classes of citizens on the basis of morally arbitrary characteristics, like the property tax rate in their neighborhoods."
Clever, clever; if you really cared about inequality you'd embrace . . . libertarianism. Without getting dragged into an argument about school vouchers, though, let me merely observe that you can attribute whatever powers you like to the introduction of a freer market in schooling and you still won't get anywhere near the conclusion that parental wealth no longer impacts schooling quality. The best teachers will command the highest salaries, meaning schools employing them will tend to have the highest prices, and those prices will be paid by the wealthiest parents. You would have a system of competitive private provision of education that systematically disadvantages certain classes of citizens on the basis of morally arbitrary characteristics, like the income level of their parents.
Insofar as we can take it to be a basic fact about human psychology that people on the whole care a great deal about their children and will tend to invest in their future well-being, there's simply no way vouchers or any similar education reform is going to prevent inequality in parental wealth from replicating itself to some extent as unequal opportunities for children.
This, I think, gives us two kinds of reasons to worry about inequality of condition. One is that inequality of condition undermines equality of opportunity, which is an important value. Another is that inequality of condition in part reflects previous unequal opportunities, which is unjust. Of course, you don't want to do too much to advance equality of condition, since taken to extremes that would undermine everyone's prosperity. Nor do you want to go too far in efforts at generating equal opportunities or you'll fatally undermine liberty. But you do want to do some of both. Both are important values, they're mutually re-enforcing, but neither one can be realized at the limit without undermining yet other important values.