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Smith off the Bus
Gordon Smith, staring electoral defeat in 2008 in the face, starts making sense on Iraq. It goes to show that you can't really count on "sensible Republicans" to save the country. Instead, when progressive forces look strong enough to seriously threaten GOP politicians they'll start acting more sensibly. Which is certainly a good thing, but simply shows the need to keep pressing the attack as hard as possible. Meanwhile, it'd be nice if more Democrats could bring themselves to at least meet the minimal Gordon Smith standard of political and substantive wisdom.
The Case of Jimmy Carter
This week's Two Minute Hate seems destined to be directed at ex-president Jimmy Carter who's written a book called Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. I don't like the title, either, and, frankly, don't plan to read the book. Still, Leon Hadar (Via Jim Henley) seems to me to have the best overall take on this: "I'm not sure whether Carter doesn't like Israelis or hates Jews but from my perspective, he would go down in history as someone who made a huge contribution to Israel's security through his successful mediation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty."
Quite so. Compare this to the strategic "thinking" of Carter-hater Martin Peretz: "Baker has already informed us of what a successful negotiation between Israel and Syria would mean: a return of the Golan Heights to Damascus. Why would this satisfy the Syrians? They launched their war against Israel when they possessed the Heights. It was theirs." By this "logic" of course, not only were Carter's efforts on behalf of peace between Israel and Egypt misguided, but the Camp David Accords must have been impossible. After all, Egypt went to war with Israel when it already had the Sinai Peninsula, so how could Egypt possibly agree to peace in exchange for getting the Sinai back? Indeed, by Peretz's line of reasoning it should be impossible, in general, for countries to stop fighting wars with each other -- France and Germany would just be doomed to an endless series of armed conflicts.
Could Have Happened to a Nicer Guy
Augusto Pinochet, coup-leader and human rights abuser, is dead. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, also dead, was a big fan.
It Could Be Worse...
One point Kevin Drum has taken to making recently is that we shouldn't complacently accept the idea that things are so terrible in Iraq right now that they currently really get worse and therefore we can afford to just keep drifting around, hoping things will miraculously improve and leaving the opportunity to cut our losses in the future. How could things get worse? Well, give Bing West a read. "When I spoked with Chiarelli, he was insistent that the armed Shiite militia must be dealt with," he writes, "Prime Minister Maliki protests that he must take a political course to resolve the matter, especially with the radical Moktada Sadr and his Mahdi army. But the issue of Sadr is going to come to a head. Our military is not going to back off."
But with more advisers to provide confidence and to approve key positions, the army—Shiite and Sunni—may hold the country together. General John P. Abizaid, who has commanded the Central Command throughout the insurgency, has assured the Congress that Prime Minister Maliki will move against the Shiite militias by February, and will emerge as a real leader, backing his army. Currently, the army has more allegiance to their advisers than to their government. The advisers are the ones who drive to Baghdad and wrest pay and food provisions from recalcitrant government ministries.
So where are we headed? Down two tracks: the one is the development under American advisers of the Iraqi security forces; the other is the emergence of a responsible Iraqi government. It may be that Abizaid is correct that Maliki is on the verge of a character-altering epiphany. But if Maliki is incapable of moving against the militias or offering reasonable terms for reconciliation, President Bush will face the choice of sticking with a failed democracy the U.S. created, or tolerating a behind-the-scenes power play by a fed-up Iraqi military.
West, demonstrating a rather blinkered perspective, thinks this is all to the good. The no-goodnik Maliki will be sidelined by a behind-the-scenes power play coup, and the awesome New Iraqi Army with its awesome American embeds and backed by the might of the American military will take care of business. I am, shall we say, less optimistic that that replacing Maliki is going to accomplish anything. But his point about divergent perspectives and the possibility of a coup is a sound one. After all, there's something intrinsically odd about the idea of trying to bolster a fragile democracy by building incredibly effective domestic security forces. Historically, such forces are the main risk to democracy. Of course, in light of the insurgency a heavy emphasis on the domestic security service is understandable. But the combination of that focus with persistent policy disputes implies that a coup is likely.
And what of our general political position in Iraq then? Well, we'd have completely descended into playing a neo-colonial role with no fig leaf whatsoever. And we'd be fighting armed Shiite and Sunni groups simultaneously, along with a very thin layer of allies in the Iraqi Army. It would be, I think, a recipe for even more total disaster than what we have now. And this is what the elements of the US Army who haven't given up are hoping will happen.
Democratic Hegemonists
Ali Eteraz throws down the gauntlet between "Truman Democrats" and the "Isolationist Left," offering up most of the classic tropes of the genre. In particular, there's the always odd "woe-is-me" tone in which the soi disant Trumanites are cast in the role of oppressed minority though they continue to control such institutions as the House and Senate foreign affairs committees and had much more influence several years ago before their worldview became unpopular because they advocated a ruinous war in Iraq. Let's focus, though, on the characterization of the disagreement here and the nature of the alleged isolationist menace:
Here are the six foreign policy "principles" that define a Truman Democrat: American exceptionalism, the use of force, American hegemony, the world community, liberal-mindedness, and helping the least well off. Today's Isolationist Left rejects the first three of those without a thought (because they are presumed to be solely belonging to the Neo-Cons) The other three are accepted as long as they do not require having to affirm any of the first three principles.
The implication that non-Trumanites are all blanket pacifists (name one: Al Gore? Carl Levin?) is unworthy of serious debate. I'm not sure what American exceptionalism is supposed to mean in this context. The contention then, amounts to the idea that US foreign policy faces a stark excluded-middle choice between the pursuit of American hegemony and a policy of isolationism. Obviously, it's true that the pursuit of hegemony is not "solely belonging to the Neo-Cons," as Eteraz makes clear this is the common platform of neoconservative Republicans and self-described Trumanites. But is it true that the only alternative policy is isolationism?
I would say "no." The alternative to hegemonism and isolationism is, well, liberalism a policy of global engagement based on the attempt to create and sustain a liberal world order. To take a specific example, for the United States to join the International Criminal Court would be neither an isolationist policy nor a hegemonic one, but rather a liberal policy in which we submit to an egalitarian framework of rules and cooperate with others in the effort the enforce those rules. Generally speaking, the concept of cooperation is what's missing from the "Trumanite" world-view. It requires a strange paucity of imagination to fail to see alternatives to either coercively dominating foreigners or ignoring their existence. The alternative, broadly construed, is to recognize that politics between nations is not a zero-sum enterprise and that we should generally attempt to locate potential positive-sum interactions and realize them in a cooperative manner.
I note that "Trumanite" hegemonism has relatively little relationship with the policies of Harry Truman. Faced with a Soviet Union aiming at world domination, Truman naturally chose to resist those efforts. Within the broad swathe of the world not already subjected to Soviet domination, however, Truman did not seek to simply implement American domination. Rather, he constructed an alternative vision of a liberal community of nations featuring complex forms of cooperation between states within the framework of liberal institutions like NATO and the EU. The collapse of the Soviet Union creates, in essence, a fork in the road. The United States can either seek to fill the void with unipolar hegemony, or else it can seek to expand the scope of the miniature liberal order created during the Cold War. The latter path would, I think, be more in the spirit of Truman's policies and more suitable to the objective situation. Even if you disagree with that, however, the liberal alternative certainly isn't isolationism, it's liberalism and it would be nice if our co-partisans on the other side of the debate could at least do liberals the favor of not deliberately mischaracterizing our policies.
Distracted Much?
Well. the good news about Iraq is that it's not as if while we weren't paying attention we allowed the Taliban to establish a mini-state in northern Pakistan or anything. Oops!
The sad factor of the matter is that if we haven't already passed the tipping point in the Afghanistan/Pakistan area, we will have very soon. In practice, by the time Bush is out of office and our troops our out of Iraq, I'm pretty sure it's going to be too late and we're going to need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Taliban successor groups will have substantially re-entrenched themselves and there won't be very much we can do about it except just kind of hope they don't once again start playing host to terrorists plotting to attack America.
Obama-rama
Barak Obama continues to impress: "I am suspicious of hype. The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife." Good jokes -- important campaign quality. This was at a speech in New Hampshire, and I'm still a bit unclear from the coverage what, exactly, Obama said. Bloomberg indicates he "outlined an agenda that includes universal health care, a new energy strategy that takes advantage of alternative sources of fuel, fiscal responsibility and a national security policy that is 'tough and smart,'" which sounds good to me. As The New York Times has it, "in two speeches and a news conference, Mr. Obama called for universal health care — the issue with which Mrs. Clinton, the New York Democrat, was once closely identified — a battle on global warming and a timed redeployment of troops from Iraq."
More Pinochet
The good thing about a dictator like Augusto Pinochet is that even if he, sure, killed, maimed, and tortured a few people along the way, at least he implemented sound economic policies, right? Well, "multiple probes in recent years revealed financial corruption, including the discovery of millions of dollars in state funds held in numerous secret overseas accounts, among them several at the former Riggs Bank in Washington. As recently as October, Chilean investigators announced the discovery of 10 tons of gold, worth an estimated $160 million, in Pinochet's name in a Hong Kong bank."
Shocking! A dictator and his inner-circle using their power to enrich themselves? Maybe he killed all those people for personal gain rather than out of the goodness of his heart. See here and here on LGM for the contemporary right's continuing praise of Pinochet. I think this is the context in which you have to understand American conservatism's generally blasé attitude toward the Bush administration's more modest ventures into the fields of arbitrary detention, corruption, and torture. Years of apologizing for the deployment of such tactics by America's proxies abroad naturally desensitizes the political culture to the re-importation of these methods to the center.
UPDATE: Curious Jonah Goldberg post appears to me to apologize for Pinochet apologetics on the grounds that when Fidel Castro dies "certain quarters of the left" will engage in apologetics for him. So, okay, I'll stipulate that Castro's regime is a bad one and that, were it the case that pre-Castro Cuba had a democratically elected government it would have been very poor policy for the US government to help Castro mount a coup and aid him in entrenching his dictatorship.
The Pundit Purge of 2007
Great post from Ezra. I even looked up "irenic" -- it's not a misspelling of "ironic" it means "tending to promote peace; conciliatory" from the Greek "eirene," meaning "peace."
Meritocracy and The Wire
Craig Jerald observes of the fact that Namond, who seemed like the Wire kid least "deserving" of rescue turns out to be the only one who makes it through the minefield:
If America were a true meritocracy, one that rewarded talent—and developed talent for the common good—Duquan would attend an excellent school with a great math teacher, not a rookie who has no idea how to help him, let alone teach him. If it were a true meritocracy, budding and innovative capitalist Randy would be treated like the next Michael Dell, or at least someone who might actually own a store of his own someday. And in a true meritocracy (heck, even just in a halfway rational society) a kid with Michael’s practical smarts and immense leadership skills would be treated as a future business or civic leader—even a future mayor of Baltimore—and educated accordingly.
But for children in West Baltimore, making it has far more to do with luck than with merit. If The Wire is right, it has nothing to do with merit at all. How can we live with that?
It's a good question. But consider this. Suppose the United States had a school system that wasn't just non-dysfunctional, but actually almost magical in its properties. Kids who came into this school system with talent and ability lurking under the surface would be catapulted to success, notwithstanding their socioeconomic background or other problems. Randy, Dukie, and Michael all in their different ways become important successful people. And what happens to the others? What happens to people of merely average ability? Worse -- what happens to people of less than average ability? What if you're just dumb? Not anymore crooked or dishonest than anyone else, but less able. Do people like that just sink into the ghetto, into lives of poverty and despair? Is that really justice? Is the problem of the underclass in contemporary America really just that we've assigned the wrong people to live that way, and need a better system of sorting the able from the non-able?
That seems badly wrong to me. Yes, one problem with the condition of the underclass is that it prevents talented underclass children from being able to take full advantage of their talents. Another, deeper problem, however, is that in a prosperous society people simply deserve better living conditions than that. It's unjust that living conditions of the sort portrayed in the show exist. Unjust that people live in neighborhoods that unsafe and that deprived of basic civic service. Unjust that people -- even people without noteworthy talents and abilities -- lack the opportunity to obtain a reasonable standard of living through legal means.
Does The Truth Need an Answer?
Let me just go on record as a little bit unsure why the Celtics seem so eager to trade for Allen Iverson. It's not like you look at this team and say "if only they had a top-notch perimeter scorer they'd be pretty good" it's more like "if only they had something in addition to their top-notch perimeter scorer they'd be pretty good." That said, if they can get Iverson for Theo Ratliff's contract plus some "promising" youngsters, the team would pretty clearly improve. But if Philadelphia wants Wally Szczerbiak, rather than Ratliff, in addition to picks/youngsters I'm not sure how much better the Celtics really get. Szczerbiak produces less than Iverson, obviously, but he does what he does considerably more efficiently. If you imagine Iverson taking roughly the same volume of shots he does for the Sixers and those shots replacing both Szczerbiak's and those of the Celtics' backcourt laggards you'll see an overall improvement, but it would be a small one all things considered and for a team at Boston's level to I'm not sure why you'd want to mortgage the future for a marginal improvement.
UPDATE: IC also writes in to remark on the seeming irrationality of Philadelphia not wanting to offer the Answer to an in-conference or (worse) in-division rival. As he points out, this is not the best thing to worry about if your team sucks and is all-but-guaranteed to get worse as a result of the trade you're about to make. The post-Iverson Sixers need to be thinking about the long term, not who wins the sorry 2006-2006 Atlantic Division.
Hakim to the Rescue
I've noted this before, but the notion that the big problem in Iraq is Muqtada al-Sadr's influence over the government and that we can solve this problem by giving Abdul Aziz al-Hakim more influence over the government instead is absurd. Recall that Muqtada came to this level of influence in the first place because we'd decided that the problem with Ibrahim Jafari's government was its overly large dependence on . . . Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his party. Maliki was the compromise solution to the Hakim problem. Now Hakim is the solution to the Sadr problem! And around and around we go.
From the get-go, our Iraq policy has been hobbled by an undue personalization of issues there. First killing Saddam's sons was going to change things. Then we needed to capture Saddam. Then we were going to kill Muqtada. Then we weren't going to kill Muqtada. Then Jafari was the problem. Now Maliki is the problem. Somewhere in between killing Zarqawi was the solution. And somehow it never occurs to anyone that there might be something about the structure of the situation that makes it impossible for the United States to achieve its goals. It's always one more bad guy to kill, capture, or sideline.
The Low Price of Power
Pamela Constable offers a pretty solid retrospective on Augusto Pinochet. This, however, jumped out at me:
Pinochet, who died Sunday at age 91, was a man with a mission. He genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, carrying out a grim duty in order to save his country from evil. In every speech and interview, the strongman of Santiago returned to the same theme: his sacred, patriotic calling to rid Chile of communism, whatever the cost.
This is a cliché that people don't tend to think about, but it's important to qualify that claim. Pinochet believed it was his calling to rid Chile of Communism, whatever the cost to other people. He wasn't eager to pay a price personally, or to have members of his circle do so. Indeed, though Pinochet's corruption was hardly on a Mobutu-style scale, it's clear that he and his retainers profited personally from his dictatorship. And when he left office, he didn't throw himself on the mercy of the people, pleading justification but willing to accept whatever verdict -- pay any price -- they might render. Instead, he had himself made a senator for life to obtain immunity from prosecution. Once that stopped working, he adopted a number of other methods to try -- successfully, in the end -- to avoid bearing the cost of what he'd done.
This line of thought is, of course, entirely typical of the authoritarian mindset. You hear it in contemporary political disputes about torture and about the use of brutal force abroad. We must do what it takes to succeed whatever the cost. Always suppressed is the proviso -- whatever the cost to other people.
WaPo Loves Dictators
Ah, Fred Hiatt, we hardly knew ye. . . .
Seriously, a love letter to Augusto Pinochet and Jeanne Kirkpatrick on The Washington Post editorial page? Even worse, the quality of argumentation is terrible.
It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired.
Seriously? The justification of Pinochet's 1973 coup and subsequent seventeen-year dictatorship is Chile's strong economic growth record after Pinochet left office? Then we learn that Pinochet was a good guy because Fidel Castro is a bad guy, which I think is the moral philosophy of six year-olds. And then Kirkpatrick: "Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right."
I don't really see what's obvious about this. Communist regimes in Central Europe were replaced by liberal democracies, much as Pinochet's right-authoritarianism was replaced by liberal democracy in Chile. But Communist regimes elsewhere have often been replaced by non-Communist authoritarianisms. But then again, right-wing authoritarianism in, say, Venezuela doesn't seem to have paved the road for liberal democracy. And, of course, Communism arose in Russia in the wake of the Czar's right-wing authoritarianism and, indeed, Communism arose in Cuba as the aftermath of right-wing authoritarianism under Battista.
UPDATE: Sorry, Venezuala's a bad example; I thought the military was in charge there in the 80s. Consider, say, Haiti where the Duvaliers hardly seem to have paved the road for a smooth transition to liberalism.
Keep it Clean
Tom Edsall writes about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:
Clinton’s position at the head of the pack — a 20-point lead over her competitors — forces her campaign to shoot down a barrage of hostile challenges: Will voters trust a woman at a time of terrorist threat? Will the military accept a woman as commander in chief?
Look, I've been very critical of Senator Clinton in the past and almost certainly will be again in the future if she, as expected, mounts a presidential bid, but I'd like to think we could keep the discourse a little bit more elevated than that. There are much better questions to ask about Clinton's views on national security policy than whether she's too girly to handle it. Indeed, there's at least some indication that fear of this sort of misogynistic attack is part of what's motivated her to take such a hawkish line which winds up being doubly or triply unfortunate. The fact that this sort of thing even gets discussed, though, points not only to the deep anti-feminist strains that remain in our culture, but also to the weirdly metaphorical nature of national security debates. The underlying presumption seems to be something like you want a president capable of physically wrestling a terrorist to the ground and so a woman, or a man who's too effete, might not be able to get the job done.
Liberty and Public Health
I don't know anything about so-called "trans fats" so I'm afraid I don't have a real view on whether or not they should be banned. It does occur to me, however, to say something about the general structure of these arguments. Namely, that in the realm of food-consumption, there are oftentimes tradeoffs between deliciousness and health. But it's not a symmetrical relationship. We can quantify the unhealthiness of, say, Swedish fish much more precisely than we can quantify the tastiness of said candies.
One result of this is oftentimes to unduly bias policy in favor of health and away from fun. You can see this especially in the discussion of, say, marijuana. Personally, I don't care for the stuff. Obviously, though, many people do enjoy it. Under the circumstances, reducing marijuana consumption is both a cost and a benefit of marijuana prohibition -- making people healthier, but also leading people to have less fun. But while scientists can tell us something about the ill health consequences of pot smoking, it's hard to say exactly what the "fun cost" of making it harder for people to get high is. Which is where liberty tends to enter the picture -- people are left to muddle-through on their own terms trying to decide how much fun is worth how much ill-health and, as you can see from the large amount of food-and-exercise-related guilt we see among high-SES Americans, often not muddling-through in a way they find completely satisfactory.
Boringly Sound Views
Jerold Kayden offers up a profoundly dull thesis about urban policy in response to Joel Kotkin -- to be successful, cities need "cool" urban amenities and good basic infrastructure. Even more boringly, virtually all big city politicians know this perfectly well. Some mayors succeed whereas other fail largely because of different objective circumstances that make it difficult for older rust belt cities to adopt to contemporary tastes, the contemporary economy, and a federal policy environment that isn't very favorable to their pre-existing urban designs.
Statement of Denial
New column on the Iraq Study Group:
I never had what you would call high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, but the report, now that it's in, is an almost physically sickening exercise in denial and evasion. The document itself comes in essentially two parts -- one is a review of the situation, the second a set of recommendations for moving forward. The first part is quite good. The second is a mess, a farrago of illogic that bears no real relationship to the analysis on which it was allegedly grounded.
Read the rest!
The Plan
Josh Marshall observes:
Another point, and one I'm not sure is widely appreciated. The folks who brought you the Iraq War have always been weak in the knees for a really whacked-out vision of a Shi'a-US alliance in the Middle East. I used to talk to a lot of these folks before I became persona non grata. So here's basically how the theory went and, I don't doubt, still goes ... We hate the Saudis and the Egyptians and all the rest of the standing Arab governments. But the Iraqi Shi'a were oppressed by Saddam. So they'll like us. So we'll set them up in control of Iraq. You might think that would empower the Iranians. But not really. The mullahs aren't very powerful. And once the Iraqi Shi'a have a good thing going with us. The Iranians are going to want to get in on that too. So you'll see a new government in Tehran. Plus, big parts of northern Saudi Arabia are Shi'a too. And that's where a lot of the oil is. So they'll probably want to break off and set up their own pro-US Shi'a state with tons of oil. So before you know it, we'll have Iraq, Iran, and a big chunk of Saudi Arabia that is friendly to the US and has a ton of oil. And once that happens we can tell the Saudis to f$#% themselves once and for all.
Now, you might think this involves a fair amount of wishful and delusional thinking. But this was the thinking of a lot of neocons going into the war.
Of course, it goes beyond this. With a new regime in Teheran, Hezbollah was suddenly going to become impotent in Lebanon, leading to the setup of a pro-American, anti-Syrian government there. Then with its grip on Lebanon lost, Syria would be the next domino to fall. At which point, everything would be awesome.
Now that's crazy, but pay attention to the really crazy part. Even if all of that happened what would it accomplish? This was all supposed to be part of the master plan to beat al-Qaeda, but even if the plan worked it . . . wouldn't have done anything to damage al-Qaeda. Thank God for the grownups.
What Scott Skiles Doesn't Want to Hear
By most accounts, they're not interested, but isn't the obvious destination for Allen Iverson on the merits the Chicago Bulls? Here's a team that could put an attractive package together and that's genuinely suited to what makes Iverson valuable -- if you surround him with a bunch of offensively limited players with other skills, he can carry a huge portion of the scoring load single-handedly.
Holocaust Denial
As Iran's conference of Holocaust revisionists and denialists gets under way, I'm left, like Spencer confused as to why people who don't like the Jews are so enthusiastic about this sort of enterprise. Shouldn't Adolf Hitler be a hero to these people, and his mass-murders be celebrated as the best anyone's ever done at wiping the Jews off the planet? I suppose you can't really expect deranged people to make a ton of sense, but I'm still left baffled.
On a policy front, note that even while wallowing in repugnance at this conference Ahmadenijad's anti-Israel bluster does not extent to threats of nuclear first strikes with ISNA reporting he told the gathered scumbags that "The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared."
New Bloggingheads
It's the happiest moment of the roughly biweekly time period as I release a new Bloggingheads.tv episode with Ross Douthat. Watch him try to explain why I'm all wrong about Apocalypto. Or perhaps you're hungry for even more ISG-bashing.
The War of the Maybes
As Richard Cohen says "the truth is that no one knows what will happen to Iraq if U.S. troops pull out" -- everyone's just guesstimating: "Maybe the Kurdish region will go its own way, taking its oil with it. Maybe the Shiites in the south will embrace Iranian hegemony -- or maybe they will remember they're not Persians who speak Farsi but Arabs who speak Arabic, and resume the old enmity. Maybe Osama bin Laden will buy a condo in Baghdad. Maybe, maybe, maybe." And then the thud -- "Maybes are not sufficient reason for Americans to continue to die."
As with Vietnam, the ending is inevitable. We will get out, and the only question that remains is whether we get out with 3,000 dead or 4,000 or 5,000. At some point the American people will not countenance, and Congress will not support, a war that cannot be won. Just how many lives will be wasted in what we all know is a wasted effort is about the only question still left on the table. Realism dictates as few as possible.
Seems right to me. But of course as our soldiers stay in theater for years and keep on killing and dying, wounded and being wounded, they won't really be dying for maybes. They'll be dying for honor and dignity. Not the honor and dignity of the US Army and Marine Corps, or of the United States of America and its citizens, but for that of the not-especially honorable or dignified men and women whose poor judgment and crass immorality put the troops there in the first place.
A quotation: "Do you think we could go on forever / When the architects of the war / Are handing out the swords?"
Cuba and Chile: A Tale of Two Policies
Since the right seems unwilling to discuss Augusto Pinochet's legacy through any frame other than comparisons with Fidel Castro let's just say that, yes, Castro's regime over its many decades in office has tallied up a more destructive record. That said, America's policies toward Pinochet and Castro represent a single disastrous conservative approach to Latin American issues. Cuba, as of the 1950s, was under the dictatorial rule of Fulgencio Batista without apparent objection from the United States which had no particular concern with Cuban democracy. A revolt broke out, came to be led by Fidel Castro, and took control of the country in 1959 at which point many former regime figures were killed. The United States government, fearing that the new regime would implement a pro-Soviet foreign policy and a socialist economy policy that would be detrimental to US strategic interests and the financial interests of American business enterprises began an effort to isolate the new regime in the hopes of precipitating its collapse. This didn't work, but did ensure that the risk of a pro-Soviet foreign policy was destined to become a reality. At this point, the US government engaged in various efforts to overthrow or kill Castro, including the Bay of Pigs invasion in which the US sponsored an invasion of the country by Cuban exiles associated with the old regime.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US ceased active efforts to overthrow Castro. It continued, however, to wage economic warfare against Cuba, subjecting the country to broad unilateral sanctions in the hopes that shackling the country economically would somehow lead to the collapse of the regime. At the same time, America's borders were opened unconditionally to Cubans wishing to emigrate to the United States.
Some decades later, Salvador Allende came to power through the democratic process in Chile. Here, again, the US government feared the implementation of pro-Soviet foreign policy and socialist economic policy, again damaging America's strategic interests and the financial interests of American business. The US began working with anti-Allende elements in Chile to destabilize the country politically and economically. Eventually, we supported Augusto Pinochet's efforts to mount a coup against Allende. The justification for this coup was that events in Chile were leading in the direction of a Communist dictatorship, and the cure was to implement an anti-Communist dictatorship. Having removed Allende from office, the coup leaders did not, say, organize a swift transition back to democracy. Instead, they remained in power for almost two decades, during which time their political opponents -- including opponents who were democrats in good standing -- were subjected to various forms of persecution including murder, torture, etc.
In contrast to Cuba, the US did nothing to assist the anti-Pinochet opposition, did lot welcome refugees from Chile and, indeed, turned a blind eye to the murder of opposition figures and their allies on US soil. Meanwhile, the campaign to isolate and impoverish Cuba has succeeded in making Cuba even poorer than it otherwise would have been had it merely been subjected to Castro's poor economic policies. It has not, however, made any noteworthy progress in bringing about the end of the Castro regime which, in fact, has now significantly outlasted the Soviet Union and its other main allies. Meanwhile, our insistence on sanctioning Cuba and efforts to implement secondary sanctions on that country has from time to time strained America's relationship with various European and Latin American countries.
Lean, Sinewy
I thought I might take on the truly unimportant issues raised by Jacob Weisberg's profile of Barack Obama in Men's Vogue. First, since when does Men's Vogue exist? I've never heard of this. The magazine industry is supposed to be dying, people, this is no time to be starting up new glossies. Second, seriously, how many magazine profiles of Obama does the world really need -- 10? 57? Will he be on the cover of the next TV Guide? What I'm really wondering about, however, is this: "His build is so lean and sinewy that he seems much shorter than his 6'2" stature."
It always seems to me that people who are tall and lean appear taller than they actually are, since the leanness emphasizes their sheer verticality. Discussion about two weeks ago with friends, however, revealed disagreement on this point and some support for the Weisberg line. What says the distributed intelligence of the internet?
Degree of Difficulty
Without making the extravagant claims of the Iverson-bashers (that he's frequently been a below-average player, for example) I do think there are a lot of folks out there who overrate the Answer. Bill Simmons, for example, thinks he's "one of the best 30 players of all-time" which I'm really not buying. He does, however, offer up an interesting riposte to Iverson's detractors:
Well, ask yourself one question: How could a coach-killer who allegedly monopolizes the ball, hates to practice and can't sublimate his game double as one of the most revered, respected players in the league? Why did the ex-players on "NBA Coast To Coast" (Anthony, Legler and Barry) trade Iverson war stories last night like they were trading stories about Keyser Söze? Why are Philly fans overwhelmingly heartbroken that he's leaving town?
I think part of what's going on with Iverson is simply that there's a difference between being one of the most impressive basketball players of all time and actually being one of the best. Iverson's small for an NBA player and isn't an especially impressive spot-up shooter. Consequently, to score he needs to do things that you wouldn't think were possible. And he does score. A lot. By doing things that are seemingly impossible. As Simmons writes, "He takes implausible angles on his drives -- angles that can't be seen as they're unfolding, even if you've been watching him for 10 years -- and drains an obscene number of layups and floaters in traffic." Above and beyond the sheer brilliance of the spectacle, there's something wonderful about watching a human-sized individual in the NBA. These are the qualities that make him one of -- if not the -- most enjoyable players in the league to watch and perhaps the post-Jordan Associations more enduringly popular player. They don't, however, make him one of the top-thirty players of all-time.
Uh-Oh
I'm now wishing I'd paid more attention to that whole "Islamists take control in Somalia" story back from a few months ago. Apparently, we're looking at war: "The inevitability of war hangs over Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-pocked seaside capital. But unlike the internal anarchy that has consumed the country for 15 years, the looming battle is now with Ethiopia, threatening to further destabilize the troubled Horn of Africa."
I have, obviously, a very weak grasp of the specifics here. In a broad sense, though, giving Ethiopia "tacit approval" to begin "slipping soldiers across the border" seems like a mistake unless the idea was to deliberately try and start a Christians versus Muslims war in East Africa. Our track record of intervening in the region is not so hot:
Memories are still fresh of the botched American-led relief operation in the early 1990s, and more recently of the covert American effort to bolster Mogadishu’s warlords in an 11th-hour bid to prevent an Islamist takeover. That strategy backfired, driving more people into the arms of the Islamists.
“I’ll be honest,” said Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, the deputy security chief for the Islamists. “America is the best friend of Islam. It wakes up the sleeping Muslim.”
The concern in this case is that the Somali Islamists are too pro-terrorist, so we should help the Ethiopians intervene on behalf of Somalia's powerless de jure government but the potential for backfire seems obvious. Anyone know of any good East Africa websites to read?
Some Somalia Background
From Jonathan Edelstein. The Council on Foreign Relations released this briefing sheet this morning.
Shifting Focus
Another new strategy:
Under the plan developed by Chiarelli's staff, the military would shift about half of its 15 combat brigades away from battling insurgents and sectarian violence and into training Iraqi security forces as soon as the spring of 2007, military and defense officials said. In northern and western Iraq, U.S. commanders are already moving troops out of combat missions to place them as advisers with lower-level Iraqi army units, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the military in Iraq, said yesterday at a briefing in Baghdad.
I wonder what this even means. It doesn't seem to me that our typical rank-and-file soldiers are especially trained or qualified to act as trainers of Iraqi security forces. They don't for example, speak Arabic, and I would imagine that being embedded with a group of heavily armed men whose language you can't speak would be sort of unpleasant.
But more to the point, what's the problem that additional training is supposed to address? Hearing proposals like these you would believe that there are two sides in Iraq, the Good Guys and the Bad Guys and that the main problem is that the Bad Guys have a top-notch military academy at their disposal whereas the Good Guys do not. But that's not the situation at all. Various armed groups seem to be able to fight reasonably effectively without the benefit of American training. At the same time, giving the Iraqi Army more intensive drill-instruction isn't going to change the basic lack of legitimate national institutions for people to be loyal to.
More Blood
Michael Ledeen says the real problem in Iraq is we're not killing enough people:
Anybody who's spent time with Iraq veterans has heard complaints about the short leash attached to our military. Every now and then a story surfaces that gives a bit of detail, in which our soldiers mutter that they're forced to put their lives at even greater risk because they often are forbidden to initiate action.
Ledeen is right, of course, that rules of engagement are crucial. And he's right, too, that many Iraq vets are upset that the current ROE fail to maximize the safety of US forces. Which is a natural response. If I were being deployed to a war zone, I would want my ROE to maximize my safety, too. On the other hand, if I wanted to bring stability to a foreign country, I would want foreign occupation/peacekeeping troops to act with great restraint in their use of firepower. In practice, one winds up compromising. You get ROE that are far less restrictive than what you'd see for a civilian police force, but still substantialy more restrictive than troops are going to be happy with. So soldiers, not-unreasonably fearing for their lives, break the rules now and again. But it only takes a handful of incidents to completely poison relations (think of the NYPD's problems with African-American New York then add language and religious barriers, automatic weapons, mortars, and heavily armored vehicles) and you're in the shitter.
In principle, one could get this balance right and things like the new Counterinsurgency Manual have a lot of operational advice in this regard. The larger point, however, is that you're putting troops in an intrinsically difficult situation. If you send 130,000 people someplace dangerous for years, incidents where someone errs on the side of personal safety and winds up killing local civilians in a way that doesn't seem justifiable to the local community are all-but-inevitable. They're also lethal to the mission.
Pop Quiz
In the wake of Stein-gate, I've been trying to think of other questions we should ask politicians. Peter Beinart has suggestions:
Whenever government officials show up on television, interviewers should throw in a Stein question or two. For instance, who is the supreme leader of Iran? Who was Mohammed Mossadeq? What is Bashar Assad's religion? Which European country colonized Lebanon? Can you name an Iraqi ethnic group besides Arabs and Kurds? For most politicos, passing up an appearance on "Meet the Press" or "Larry King" is inconceivable, and so they'll do what Reyes is hopefully doing now: study.
These are probably way too hard. I would think the "Hezbollah is Shiite, al-Qaeda is Sunni" fact could be grasped by reading newspapers now and again, and still seemingly nobody's got it. At any rate, in case any congressional staff out there want to brief their boss, the supreme leader of Iran is Mohammed Khatami (bonus fact -- he's Azeri not Persian), Mohammed Mossadeq was a populist Prime Minister of Iran in the early 1950s overthrown by US and British intelligence essentially at the behest of western oil companies, Bashar Assad is an Alawite, Lebanon was colonized by France, there are Turkomen in Iraq.
UPDATE: I've been gone all day, but as I'm sure you'll read in comments, I myself made a mistake here. Iran's Supreme Leader is Ali Khamenei.
More Troops!
It seems that George W. Bush is going to take Fred Kagan's advice and send more troops to Iraq. The bad news, as Justin Logan points out is that Kagan's strategy seems to mostly be based on cooking the books. The good news, however, is that this will probably damage John McCain presidential aspirations in the long term.
A Unified Security Budget
It's old, but I've been remiss in not linking to it before. Take a look at the proposed Unified Security Budget for the United States, 2007. The point is to try and look at defense spending in the context of a broader pool of security spending and call into question whether it wouldn't make more sense to shift some emphasis away from the military box and into other ones.
Michael Crichton is a Bad Man
This is really ridiculous. Indeed, it sounds positively made up, but truth is stranger than fiction.
Nene
I always claim the Nuggets as my Western Conference sentimental favorite, but in practice I rarely see them on television and hadn't seen them live until last night's schooling at the hands of the Wizards. Thus, a question: How come Nene isn't starting? They gave the man a contract many regarded as implausibly generous in the offseason and K-Mart got injured. Nene's listed as an F-C. So how come he's just Camby's backup? Doesn't seem to make sense?
Apocalypto Followup
Tyler Cowen spells out his reading of Apocalypto in some more detail, seeing it as a series of deliberate parallels to the story of Christ designed to say something about Christianity versus Islam. It's an interesting reading, and makes me want to go see the film again.
Woulda Coulda Shoulda
Condoleezza Rice explains that there'll be no new diplomatic initiatives with Iran and Syria because "neither country should need incentives to foster stability in Iraq." What's more, she "also said there would be no retreat from the administration's push to promote democracy in the Middle East."
Seriously, people, it's time to grow up. Sitting around in the Situation Room and deciding that other countries just should do what we want them to do so there's no need for diplomacy is insane. The way the world works is that if you want some countries to do some things, you need to discuss this fact with them, ascertain what their actual views on the matter are, see what they would want you to do in exchange, and then make a decision. Rice rejected this option "saying the 'compensation' required by any deal might be too high." Get that again. She won't talk to Syria and Iran to explore options because the price might -- might -- be too high. Why not find out?
The interaction of this "they should do it anyway" view with the democracy view is especially toxic. Promoting democracy, in this context, means putting an anti-Iranian government in Baghdad, putting an anti-Syrian government in Lebanon, and overthrowing the regimes in Damascus and Teheran. Let that be as desirable as you like, but it's obvious that neither Syria or Iran is going to help us bring stability to anything as long as that remains the medium-term objective of our policy. Most insanely of all, given the circumstances insisting on "the administration's push to promote democracy in the Middle East" isn't going to actually promote democracy in the Middle East. It's just going to ensure that Iraq slips ever-deeper into chaos and that we more-and-more lose our grip on the situation.
Answer-bashing
In an effort to further alienate my readers, let's note the current All-Star balloting for Eastern Conference guards where Gilbert Arenas "ranks fourth among Eastern Conference guards with 225,923 votes, putting him behind Iverson (595,200), Wade (586,679) and Vince Carter (433,363)." And, of course, it's no surprise to see Agent Zero lagging behind one of the top-30 players of all time. Except for the fact that, this season, Gilbert is doing better at virtually every aspect of the game. TS% 56.7 versus 52.9, so Arenas is more likely to put the ball in the hoop when he shoots. Assist ratio 18 versus 17.7, so he's more likely to make the pass to the open man. Turnover ratio of 10.5 to 10.7, so he protects the ball better. Rebound rate of 5.6 versus 3.8 so he's better at helping his team get possession.
Iverson gets some better aggregate numbers because of his elevated usage rate 34.2 versus 31.4 and because he plays about four additional minutes per game. Even as a pure scorer, Iverson's 29.2 points per 40 minutes is worse than Gilbert's 29.3 p/40. Obviously, the All-Star Game's a popularity contest and the fans should get to see the Wade-Iverson backcourt they want rather than the Wade-Arenas backcourt they deserve but still . . . the injustice!
How The Game Is Played
John Hood:
Denver is competing with New York City to host the 2008 Democratic convention. Many party leaders want to spotlight Colorado as an example of blue momentum in the mountain west, since Democrats have gained the state legislature, seats in Congress, and the governorship in the past two election cycles. But a resurgent Democratic constituency, organized labor, had been balking. Labor leaders said that Denver had few unionized hotels. Their complaints are getting results, as city government is working on the "problem." City bonds helped finance a downtown hotel, so city officials have used their corresponding influence to help pave the way for a union to organize the workers. Union leaders who favor Denver's bid want to use the convention business as leverage to organize additional hotels.
This is how the game is played, kids.
Hood seems to regard this as shady but, in fact, this is how the game is played and I say, "keep on playing." Denver would be a good location for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. I think the party would like to see a Denver convention. And I think Denver would like to host a Convention. The problem is that there aren't enough unionized hotels in Denver. So local politicians and labor unions are trying to use the possibility of a convention and other forms of leverage they have to organize local hotel workers. Sounds smart to me -- I wish them luck.
Talking to Syria
There's good and there's bad in David Ignatius column on diplomacy with Syria but the genuinely absurd part of the column is not-at-all something Ignatius can be blamed for. And it's right here at the beginning:
DAMASCUS, Syria -- What positions would Syria take if it entered a dialogue with the United States about Iraq and other Middle East issues? I put that question Thursday to Walid Moallem, Syria's foreign minister, and he offered surprisingly strong support for the recommendations made last week in the Baker-Hamilton report.
Note the dateline: Damascus. Note the interviewee: Syria's foreign minister. It's not that hard. I don't have the budget for a trip to Damascus, and I bet I lack the clout for an interview with the foreign minister. But the State Department can surely swing the trip. Exploring the possibility of diplomacy requires, quite simply, nothing more than for Rice or Robert Zoellick or David Welch to, you know, go to Syria and ask what's up. It's lazy, insane, or just insane laziness not to do it. But no. Top officials will meet with the Syrian opposition but not the Syrian government. Because, I guess, if we close our eyes and wish hard enough, the Syrian government will just go away and the opposition will take over?
At any rate, here's Ignatius' complete interview with the Foreign Minister, and good for him for making the trip.
Clinton/Obama, Moderate/Liberal
It's been my view that Hillary Clinton is a politician whose public image is more liberal than the reality, whereas Barak Obama is more liberal than his image and that this is a good reason to favor Obama. GFR characterizes this as a "developing myth" citing yomder Washington Post article:
Among Democrats, Clinton leads the field with 39 percent, followed by Obama at 17 percent, Edwards at 12 percent, former vice president Al Gore at 10 percent and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the party's 2004 nominee, at 7 percent. No other Democrat received more than 2 percent.
When those surveyed were asked their second choice, Clinton's advantage became even more evident. She is the first or second choice of 60 percent of those surveyed, with Obama second at 33 percent.
Clinton receives significantly higher support among women than men (49 percent to 29 percent) and is favored by more moderates than liberals. Obama has almost equal support among men and women but has twice as much support among liberals as among moderates.
I'm not actually sure what this proves. The poll is measuring Clinton's support among moderates relative to her support from liberals and, again, Obama's support among moderates relative to his support among liberals. What's more, it's measuring their support in a race against each other for the Democratic nomination. The relevant question, however, is which candidate is likely to do better among moderate voters in a general election and the poll didn't ask that question. The full poll does give nationwide approve/disapprove numbers with no ideological breakdowns. Clinton is 56/40 approve/disapprove which is a lot better than where I would have guessed. Obama is 44/23 which I'd say is better (a 1.4:1 approve:disapprove ratio is worse than a 1.93:1 ratio) but certainly both are well-enough liked at this point that you could see either winning an election.
Other polling note is that Nancy Pelosi is pretty well-liked at 43/33. That's not great, but it's way better than Bush at 36/62 so there's absolutely no reason Democrats should feel some need to distance themselves from her, worry that the GOP can succeed by running against Pelosi, or think that Pelosi herself should avoid from feisty give-and-take with the president.
The Economics of Robots
Ezra Klein worries that the dawn of robots will lead to mass unemployment at some point in the future. This theory has a long and distinguished history in our literature. Indeed, this is precisely what occurs in Karel Capek's R.U.R., the play that gives us the word "robot." Tim Lee retorts that this is demagoguery: "The more wealth there is in the world, the easier it will be for you to get some of it. Robots would only accelerate the accumulation of wealth, thereby increasing the amount of money a worker is likely to be able to get for a given unit of his labor. True, his wages might shrink relative to the overall economy, but he'll only get more productive as technology improves, so in absolute terms his wages will only go up."
I think it's a little more complicated than that. As in Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel the key issue in the case of a vast robot-driven increase in the labor supply is the availability and distribution of limited capital resources like land. On the Spacer worlds where you have a relatively egalitarian distribution of capital, you get a kind of utopian existence. On Earth, resource constraints have led to the creation of a kind of socialist economy based on the world government's control of the food supply and the inordinate cost of housing. That seems unlikely for various reasons, so I'm not too worried.
The real risk here is that if you saw very rapid advances in robotics, the dislocations thereby caused could be extremely destabilizing, leading to anti-robot rioting and all manner of trouble that would ultimately stifle growth.
"Our Enemies"
K-Drum writes: "Conservatives often accuse liberals of elevating negotiation into an end in itself. It's a fatuous charge, but its mirror image isn't: as a matter of principle, contemporary conservatives really do seem to have broadly rejected even the idea of negotiating with our enemies."
True, and yet I'd press further. Conservatives combine this with an oddly expansive view of who "our enemies" are. Iran is plausibly characterized as an enemy who liberals think we should negotiate with. Our lack of diplomatic relations dates back to the hostage crisis in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and the Revolution was loaded with anti-American rhetoric and ideology from the get-go. It's a bona fide enemy, and we should negotiate with them.
But in what sense is Syria "our enemy" except in the sense that the Bush administration won't conduct diplomacy with the Syrian government? Syria isn't pushing for regime change in the United States. Syria isn't trying to conquer Mexico as part of a first step to restructure the politics of North America. Syria was part of our coalition during the first Gulf War. Throughout the Clinton administration there were frequent US-Syrian diplomatic talks running parallel to US-Israeli diplomatic talks aimed (unsuccessfully) at resolving the dispute over the Golan Heights and normalizing relations between Syria and Israel. After Operation Grapes of Wrath the US and Syria worked together on the Israel-Lebanon Monitoring Agreement. After 9/11, Syria offered intelligence cooperation against al-Qaeda.
Syria's not an ally of the United States. But it's not our enemy in any meaningful sense. It's just a country the administration more-or-less severed diplomacy with unilaterally for no real reason.
Inequality: Is It Real?
Yikes! I agree with Will Wilkinson about something related to wealth and income inequality. Namely, contra Reihan it depends a great deal as to what to make of Alan Reynolds' argument that we've been mis-measuring inequality by using flawed tax return data. I'm sort of actually not sure why Will (or, for that matter, Reynolds) thinks it matters whether or not our data is flawed, since I think they're both libertarians who don't think inequality is, normatively speaking, a problem. But those of us who do |
