Knicks-Nuggets degenerates into a big brawl between the players though unlike in the Palace none of the fans got involved. I wasn't watching the game live and, logically, it's a bit hard to figure out. Why would Collins foul like that in that situation? And egregious as that was, Carmelo Anthony is a highly paid professional basketball player who really ought to know better than throwing that punch. I sympathize, I guess, with the impulse to stick up for your teammate, but nobody in the Nuggets' organization, Smith included, is going to benefit from that. Isaiah Thomas, in a rare moment of total clarity, correctly remarks "This isn't even a rivalry."
It'll be interesting to see how the suspensions play out . . . the West being as tight as it is, Denver can ill-afford to drop games because their starters were fighting with the Knicks. And why were those dudes on the floor at that point in the game in the first place?
I will say, though, that as with the Palace brawl I find some of the pious sportswriter reaction to this hard to take. Chris Mannix, for example, "You want to know why parents don't bring their kids to games? See how that brawl spilled into the first row? Maybe because parents think there is a danger of an errant fist winding up in their kids face." Please. The danger of NBA game attending-related injury is obviously incredibly small. Every Wizards game I attend features many parents with their kids. You would see more kids at the games if (a) the tickets were cheaper, or (b) the league scheduled more of those weekend afternoon games. It's bad to see something like this happen, but there's no call for everyone to start acting like naive little children who are shocked, shocked to see athletes fighting.
I think you've got to give credit to Time magazine. The Person of the Year concept is basically unsound, is obviously basically unsound, is poorly executed each year, is expected to be poorly executed each year, and nevertheless no matter what kind of silly choice they make it gets buzz and sells magazines. Meaning, at the end of the day, that it's actually a really good idea that's always executed well. Other publications would die for a formula that tried and true.
I could swear Ted Kennedy said this morning on Fox News Sunday that some 36 million Americans go to bed hungry every night and 12 million of them are children (I'm quoting from memory). He insisted that the numbers were on his side. I'm sorry, but does anyone think that's even remotely true? That systemic hunger is a chief symptom and problem of poverty in America? Come on.
It'd be good to know what Kennedy actually said. I assume he was referring to "food insecurity" as in, "In 2004, 38.2 million people lived in households experiencing food insecurity, compared to 33.6 million in 2001 and 31 million in 1999." The Agriculture Department puts people into three category, "food secure," "food insecure," and "food insecure with hunger" based on answers to the questions you can find here. The essence of the "food insecurity" condition without hunger is more-or-less that a food insecure household finds its income to be a substantial constraint on food consumption. You find that your kid wants to eat more, but you can't let him because you can't afford more food. Members of your household need to skip meals sometimes to save money. You need to cut people's portion sizes to make the food you have last as long as you need it to. You lose weight because of an inability to afford as much food as you're inclined to eat.
That sort of thing rather than conditions of hunger or starvation provoked by the actual absence of food.
I've been recommended these two (one, two) Mark Thoma posts on Alan Reynolds' views about inequality. Thoma makes several points including the important one that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey uses $999,999 as the maximum income that can be coded so that a person making $1 million, a person making $10 million, and a person making $100 million will all register as earning $999,999. This is a serious flaw in the data's utility as a measure of inequality. He also notes that Piketty and Saez argue, in a manner that most economists seem to me to regard as perfectly credible, that "fiscal manipulation" in response to changes in the tax code could be responsible for short-term errors in the IRS data but not for problems with the long-term trend.
The basic nuttiness of NBA contracts is well known in a general sense, but scrolling through Sports Illustrated's list of the fifty highest players is still an amusing exercise. It's pretty incredibly how frequently people on this list aren't the best players on their team. I'm not exactly crying for Agent Zero and his $11 million, but Antawn Jamison (and, for that matter, Rafe LaFrentz) makes more. Eddie Jones gets more than Pau Gasol.
Indeed, these salaries are so clearly out of line with player quality that I think it undermines the argument that the lack of payroll-wins correlation counts as evidence that conventional player evaluations are badly wrong. Simply put, nobody thinks Shaq is the third-best player in the league and certainly nobody thinks Michael Finley is fourth-best. All kinds of factors go into determining salaries beyond straightforward evaluation of player-quality.
UPDATE: Let me spell some thoughts out below the fold.
Jon Chait's reply to the "liberaltarian" proposal is both amusing and sound, including such crucial points as "wooing a small bloc with unpopular views is not a sound political strategy." He notes that "the politically fertile terrain seems to lie in the anti-libertarian direction" and that the Democrats' non-libertarian nature notwithstanding, there's a non-crazy case to be made that libertarians should vote for Democrats rather than Republicans anyway. In sum:
I think the spirit of my proposed arrangement was best expressed by Michael Corleone, who said, "You can have my answer now if you like. My offer is this: nothing." I don't blame libertarians for wanting more than the lesser of two evils. But, when your beliefs are wildly unpopular, supporting the lesser of two evils is about the best you can expect.
With that as a new baseline, I'm prepared to make some minor concessions. There are a variety of ways in which the status quo has the heavy hand of the state being deployed to further entrench existing wealth and privilege, notably certain aspects of intellectual property policy. Liberals have our own reasons for opposing such measures but, in practice, liberal politicians are often nowhere to be seen on these issues. What's more, there's a foreign policy aspect to these questions and I think I'm more eager than Chait to see the Democrats oppose senseless militarism. At the end of the day, though, I agree with this conclusion:
The most impressive Democratic performances in 2006 came from candidates like Bob Casey, James Webb, and Heath Shuler, who combined economic populism with social traditionalism. The ideological counterpart to this strategy would be to flesh out a kind of liberal-populist fusionism, rooted in fighting the ways that massive inequality and income fluctuation have undermined traditional family life.
That's where the real possibilities lie -- trying to outline a vision where progressive economic policy is seen as a better means of shoring up family life than is legal discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for The Washington Post, has a reasonably perceptive column up following his meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice, he notes, is quite persuasive in terms of pointing out shortcomings of the old approach to Middle East policy. Her preferred replacement strategy, however, is shot-through with logical and factual problems and, in essence, stands no chance of working.
All fair enough. But so why has Hiatt spent the past five years supporting the Bush/Rice foreign policy and lashing out at liberals for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the blinkered pseudo-push for pseudo-democracy?
Normally, I don't advise blowing leads in the fourth quarter, but it let Agent Zero score sixty points. Can we get the man some All-Star votes now? I note for consistency's sake that 60 points on 32 FGA and 27 FTA is not just scoring, it's efficient scoring.
Sometime after returning home from Ezra's party Saturday night, I seem to have logged into eMusic and downloaded a copy of Rancid's Let's Go which I bought way back when but somehow lost my copy of. Since then I've been listening to it. Over and over. Is it wrong that I think I like it better than anything I was considering listing as one of the top ten albums of 2006?
In case any other members of congress are interested, The New York Times offers up a short background briefing on Sunnis versus Shiites. Someone ironically, they don't actually address the question that tripped Silvestre Reyes up, so in case you don't know al-Qaeda appeals to a strain of Sunni Islam group while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization. It also bears mentioning that the religions are organized different. Shia Islam is semi-hierarchical, a bit like Anglican or Orthodox Christianity, while Sunni Islam is organized more like Protestant Christianity where, in practice, some preachers have more status than others but there's no formal institutional hierarchy among them or linking them together.
For a while now I've been seeing sporadic publications by someone named Josef Joffe. His views always seem kind of crazy. But only kind of. And since he lacks clear-cut affiliations with crazy institutions, I tend to think maybe he's not as crazy as he seems. But then I see another article and I think "how crazy is this guy?" But, here he is, the editor of Die Zeit in Germany and, frankly, I don't think of Continental newspaper editors as likely candidates for padded cells. This virtually uncritical review of Mark Steyn's book in The New York Sun is, however, the last straw. The man's 'round the bend -- as much if not more so than Steyn himself:
If the Europeans have thrown in the generative towel, Mr. Steyn plows ahead, the Muslims have not. They are lean, mean, and super-fertile, and they are thrust forward by a mighty sense of moral superiority as they look down on the decadent, libertine, and slothful West. Again, Mr. Steyn has a point. There is a lassitude about Europe that stands in stark, possibly tragic contrast to its glorious past — when its adventurers roamed the four corners of the globe as conquerors, when it produced everything, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, that makes up Western civilization.
Honestly, what is one to say? There's a long and, frankly, not especially distinguished tradition of this sort of thing. You may recall that as far back as The Great Gatsby sensible people were satirizing this as blowhard Tom Buchanan recommends Rise of the Colored Empire by "this man Goddard," a reference to Lothrop Stoddard's forgotten non-masterwork The Rising Tide of Color. Actual arguments about economics and international relations tend to go missing here as we try and blend together anxiety about the changing social role of women with anxiety about the changing ethnic composition of society and serve it up as a tale of foreign menace and western decline. The next step, which Steyn already seems prepared to take, is to start castigating the broad population for its weak-kneed unwillingness to see the necessity of drastic measures from whence it's a short step to the need to abrogate democracy, etc., etc., etc.
Iran's local elections seem to have gone poorly for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his slate facing a variety of setbacks in local council elections. Someone who knows more about Iran than I do indicated that there was more significance in the results for something called the Experts' Council, where Ahmadinejad's allies also fared poorly. As Sam points out, however, despite all the attention he's gotten in the West, Ahmadinejad doesn't control Iran's foreign policy nor neither his ascendancy nor its reversal should have any potential implications. One doubts that such minor things as "recent events" or "accurate analysis of the Iranian government" will deter America's Iran hawks, however.
Not that this wasn't unexpected, but I think David Stern's really gone overboard with the post-brawl suspensions. For one thing, from a basic PR standpoint I think overreacting to the fight in the post-Palace era actually does more to re-enforce the idea that the NBA has a discipline problem than it does to enhance the league's image. The qualitative difference between players scuffling with each other in response to a dirty on-court play and players going into the stands to mix it up with misbehaving fans strikes me as enormous and something that should have been kept front-and-center. You've got to penalize guys who were throwing punches, but there's no need for it to be this drastic.
What's more, this just seems fundamentally unfair to the Nuggets to me. On balance, this incident was the Knicks' fault. Collins' foul was over-the-line and came in a situation where there was no call for hard fouls of any sort. Then, as best I can tell, it was Nate Robinson who transformed a post-flagrant dispute into a fight. But the balance of punishment that's being doled out is overwhelmingly against the Nuggets. The suspensions to Robinson, Jeffries, and Collins won't hurt the team very much and New York had little to lose anyway. Ten games without JR Smith and fifteen without Carmelo Anthony will probably be the difference-maker in keeping Denver out of the playoffs. It doesn't sit right with me, though Wolves, Warriors, and Clippers fans will presumably hail Stern's brand of harsh justice.
On an unrelated note, I'd like to associate myself with Bethlehem Shoals' take on Allen Iverson.
I'm against it, naturally. So is Rod Dreher. He seems concerned, however, that American Muslims may be for it:
Trying to get at the heart of the matter, I asked if they thought sharia should be the law of the land in our secular pluralistic democracy. Another round of long-winded answers, amounting to, "It would never happen here." That's not what I'm asking, I said; should it happen here. Someone explained that Muslim community would never be big enough in this country to make that happen. Which is, of course, entirely beside the point, but we moved on. I had my answer.
Evasive! Well, obviously, I oppose efforts to impose sharia law on the United States in the strongest possible terms. I wonder if Dreher will join me in trying to get mail delivered on liquor stores open on Sundays. As bad as a sharia-style total ban on alcohol sales? Clearly not. And yet, I find this stuff annoying.
To expand a bit on Atrios' latest ISG remarks, the gigantic gaping black hole of error into which the ISG seems to have stumbled is the belief that George W. Bush and his key aides had some kind of secret desire to implement a reasonable Middle East policy and were merely backed into a corner by some unfortunately misguided past statements. I couldn't really say why they thought that, but they obviously did and belief in such things is weirdly widespread. Earlier today I heard someone float the notion that the White House had spiked an op-ed calling for a grand bargain with Iran because they were busy conducting "quiet diplomacy" aimed at . . . a grand bargain with Iran. Well, if you believe that I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.
It's hard for some folks to believe, but Bush in his own goofy way clearly believes roughly what he says about Iraq. That to lose the war would be a disaster and that to leave Iraq is to lose the war. That, somehow, a perpetual US military presence there will create a democracy. That we must never negotiate with evil. He's been president a long time now and these ideas are guiding his thinking and will continue to do so unless he's forced to make changes. He doesn't need "political cover" to do something knew, he needs to be made to do it.
If you were thinking to yourself, "you know what the world needs? more nuclear proliferation" then you've got to like this nuclear deal the Bush administration signed with India. If you think the USA really ought to clarify that the NPT is a dead letter, and that foreign countries shouldn't bother supporting our position on Iran since we pursue these things with no sense of principles or seriousness of purpose, the you ought to really love the deal.
You can read more here from Daryl Kimball and Joseph Cirincione, or just watch the video of Joe laying out the case above. One thing to note here is the rise of USINPAC as an influential actor in congress.
"The rethinking of U.S. Iraq policy represented by the Baker-Hamilton report is an important and welcome start but insufficiently radical if Iraq’s collapse and an unprecedented regional war are to be avoided," writes the International Crisis Group by way of introducing their report on the situation. I concur. The White House, meanwhile, believes that Baker-Hamilton goes too far. They believe that things are basically fine in Iraq. The improvement that needs to be made, says the White House, is that we should send the new rotation of troops into Iraq on schedule. Those troops are supposed to relieve troops who are already there. Which is where the White House plan comes in . . . if the troops who are supposed to get relieved just . . . stay in Iraq for a while, then -- like magic! -- we have more troops in Iraq.
This is the "surge" option that, apparently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff oppose on the grounds that the White House has no particular mission in mind for the surged troops and is just looking for a policy that sounds good while remaining committed to an open-ended occupation of Iraq.
John Holbo tags me with a meme. And, frankly, it's a meme that's a bit lacking in the gimmick department. Five things most people don’t know about me. Literally, I suppose, the majority of people know nothing at all about be. But here we go:
I'm an unironic and only somewhat apologetic Sheryl Crow fan.
When I was young and irresponsible, I thought it would be a good idea to replace Social Security with a system of private accounts.
I voted for Mitt Romney in 2002.
I've been to Paris four times but was always too lazy to climb the Eiffel Tower.
Chatham House report concludes that "The root failure (of Blair's foreign policy) has been the inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice -- military, political and financial -- that the United Kingdom has made" and that "Tony Blair has learned the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little."
Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett calls this "ridiculously wrong" but, obviously, it's perfectly true. It's particularly sad because, as I've said before, Blair was really near the top of the pyramid in terms of people whose combination of objective authority and apparent credibility were key to persuading people to back the war. Obviously, neither Blair nor Colin Powell could have actually prevented the war, were Bush sufficiently determined to launch it, but without their backing it would have been a much more politically problematic enterprise.
Allen Iverson will head to Denver in exchange for Andre Miller, Joe Smith (and his expiring contract), and the Nuggets' two first-round draft picks in 2007, though if I'm reading this right they're not likely to be especially high draft picks. Obviously, this deal has one kind of meaning for the duration of 'Melo's suspension, when Iverson will be something like his replacement, and another meaning when they're playing alongside each other.
Obviously, I checked, and Iverson's a somewhat more efficient shooter than Miller (though a significantly worse rebounder) so there you have it. On a slightly skeptical note, the obvious flaw in the pre-trade Denver offense was a lack of three point shooting, which Iverson doesn't really address. From the standpoint of someone who likes the Nuggets' unorthodox approach to the game, however, this would seem to make Denver more Denver than after -- fast-paced, slashing, etc. One query is whether Karl will have the stones to try an ultra-small Iverson-Boykins back court at all. I dunno. Have at it. Does this make Denver a contender?
UPDATE: I guess I forgot to remark on Philly getting so little in exchange. Presumably Denver will make the playoffs with this post-trade roster and the other pick Philly's getting is from Dallas if I understand correctly, so it's not as if the Sixers have positioned themselves to put Greg Oden, Joakim Noah, and Kevin Durant alongside Miller next year. Then again, they were sort of backed into a corner.
Dave Weigel has a neat op-ed in The LA Times on the American right's new dystopian literature:
Two years from now, terrorists under the banner of the "Progressive Restoration" will take over Manhattan in a larger attempt to overthrow the government. Thirteen years later, President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore will haul out the good White House china for Osama bin Laden's state visit. By fiddling with your radio, you may be able to catch an underground broadcast by Sean Hannity. If you own a radio, that is; folks living in states that are under Sharia law won't even be that lucky.
These aren't my fantasies or nightmares. All of these vignettes are ripped from science fiction thrillers that have hit shelves in just the last 18 months. Sharia comes to the United States in Robert Ferrigno's potboiler, "Prayers for the Assassin." In Joel C. Rosenberg's "Last Jihad" trilogy, a steel-spined U.S. president nukes Baghdad, then combats a Russo-Iranian axis, all in fulfillment of Scripture (or so we're told in the nail-biting third book, "The Ezekiel Option"). Hannity and his stone-jawed sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, battle the Clinton restoration in Mike Mackey and Donny Lin's comic book, "Liberality for All." The Second American Civil War is breaking out in Orson Scott Card's "Empire" (book out now, video game on the way).
Dave regards this as sillly and implausible. Glenn Reynolds sticks up for silly implausibility and explains that "Dystopias -- like utopias -- are there to make a point, not a prediction." I actually have a ton to say about this but the post keeps getting too long.
I have long believed that any American general or senior diplomat who wants to work in Iraq should have to pass a test. It would be a very simple test. It would consist of only one question: "Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?"
If you answered "Yes," you would not be allowed to work in Iraq. You could go to Korea, Japan or Germany - but not Iraq. Only those who understand that in the Middle East the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line should be allowed to carry out U.S. policy there. . . .
A sophisticated U.S. approach that uses both sticks and carrots with Syria, Iran and America's Arab allies could still shape a decent election in Iraq, but we have to get in gear right now, and be smart. Does this administration have anyone who knows how to play this game? Attention: Iraq is having an election. Elections are rare in this part of the world, so when they happen, everyone in the neighborhood tries to vote. We need to make sure our friends do as well.
For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq. . . .
Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany — not Iraq.
Query: What does this mean? In neither column do I understand what point Friedman is trying to make with this straight line business. Two years ago the Friedman Theory of Short Distances supported optimism about Iraq, today it supports pessimism. But what is the theory? I can't even tell what metaphorical claim Friedman is trying to make here. Is it that a straight line is never the shortest distance between two points (in some sense) and this fact has a special significance in the Arab world that it lacks in Japan, Korea, or Germany? Or is that in Japan, Korea, and Germany (and, presumably, here in the USA) a straight line is the shortest distance between two points but this is not the case in the Middle East? And either way what idea is he trying to express? And why is he trying to express it this way?
This was speculated about a bit in comments, but Dave Berri is, indeed, following the formula and saying that trading Allen Iverson for Andre Miller will make the 76ers better. He even ventures a prediction for Philadelphia going forward, saying he expects them to win about 30.4 of their remaining games, assuming his guesstimates about playing time prove roughly correct. John Hollinger, by contrast, says Denver is now "a legitimate threat to win the whole enchilada."
I'm going to just cop to genuine uncertainty about a lot of this . . . the West has a lot of good teams this year, and the road through the playoffs will wind up having a lot to do with matchups, coaching, home court advantage (which Denver almost certainly won't have), fatigueetc., etc., as a number of legitimately good teams face off against each other.
The President says he wants to increase the end-strength size of the Army. What to think? One point to note is that this is a longstanding Democratic Party idea, something backed by John Kerry. Is it actually a good idea? The answer is that it depends.
In a world without tradeoffs, a larger Army would certainly be useful. Life, however, is all about tradeoffs. A bigger Army is a more expensive one: "Army officials have estimated that for each addition of 10,000 soldiers to the force, it would cost about $1.2 billion." One can easily imagine worse things to spend $5 billion on than adding 40,000 troops to the Army, but one can also imagine better things. The Kerry campaign's proposal was to pay for the troop increase by scaling back spending on national missile defense. That would be a good idea. Similarly, any additions in troops that can from scaling back or canceling weapons systems like the V-22 Osprey, the Virginia Class Submarine, the DD(X) Destroyer, the F-22 Raptor, or the size of the American nuclear arsenal would be a good idea. Reasonably independently of specific ideas about foreign policy it makes sense to shift military spending away from hardware and toward quantity and quality of personnel. Likewise along these lines, if we end our deployment in Iraq in 2007 rather than in 2009 or 2012 we'll save hundreds of billions of dollars that would be better spent on enhancing the Army's manpower.
Conversely, simply borrowing additional money to further increase the Defense Department budget or reducing the budgets of other agencies to increase the Defense Department budget is not an appealing option. We should be changing America's security-spending priorities to better-suited the contemporary world, not increasing the overall scale of our spending at a time when America's objective security from foreign threats has rarely been higher.
The best thing about December is the year-end top whatever lists. Pitchfork's Top Fifty Albums of 2006 list makes me realize that the time has come to stop complaining about the site and just recognize that Pitchfork and I have very different tastes and musical priorities. It's gotten to the point (as with Scanners) where I can sometimes tell I'll like a band just by reading Pitchfork slam them. At any rate, I hesitate to make transcendent aesthetic claims about music since tastes differ and so forth, but my ten favorite albums of an "indie rock" nature in 2006 were, in no particular order:
The Pipettes, "We Are The Pipettes"
The Decemberists, "The Crane Wife"
Belle and Sebastian, "The Life Pursuit"
Pretty Girls Make Graves, "Elan Vital"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Show Your Bones"
Rainer Maria, "Catastrophe Keeps Us Together"
The Futureheads, "News and Tributes"
Arctic Monkeys, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not"
The Shins, "Wincing the Night Away"
One noteworthy trend in my listing habits is, as Tom Lee notes, the relative decline of Canada. Our neighbors to the north dominated in 2005 with releases by Broken Social Scene, The New Pornographers, Metric, Feist, and Wolf Parade. For '06 I'm Canada-free with Malajube, Emily Haines, and Pony Up! all releasing albums I liked but didn't top-ten like. We can also see that I'm getting old and set in my ways as only two of the albums I listen for '06 are from new bands. Last, I'm becoming increasingly un-cool, since as best I can tell the most widely-praised album of the sort of music I like was The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America which I found okay, but not incredibly impressive.
National Review editor Rich Lowry must be drinking the Beltway kool-aid or angling for a gig on The New York Times op-ed page because here he is selling out to the traitors in the MSM:
Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war.
Say it ain't so! And most of all what about the good news from Iraq? Lowry says "the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war." Damnit, Lowry, don't you know that only four of Iraq's eighteen provinces are violent? "True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country’s future is being waged." It's madness. A veritable stab in the back, I say. Lowry, though, says "many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it."
Fortunately, Stanley Kurtz is on hand to explain that . . . the media is to blame for conservatives' failure to believe accurate media reports about conditions in Iraq. Fire Lowry! Kurtz for National Review Editor! Can't we bring this Lowry back:
It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone’s whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.
Bill Simmons gets a good question. If the problem is that Allen Iverson's never had adequate teammates, then "which four players in your opinion would be a perfect match (and perfect teammates) for Allen Iverson?" The proviso is that it needs to be semi-realistic, "be aware of the salary cap limitations -- i.e., no five superstars could be on one NBA team so forget about Jordans, Magics, Birds, Hakeems, etc." Simmons replies:
You'd need a shot-blocking center who could protect him on the defensive end, handle the boards, set picks and not care if he doesn't get a ton of shots (like Emeka Okafor). You'd need a big point guard who could bring the ball up (allowing Iverson to play like a 2-guard), make open 3-pointers and defend 2-guards on the other end (like Shaun Livingston, only if he had a reliable outside shot). You'd need a small forward who couldn't be left alone from 3-point range (like Rashard Lewis). And you'd need a power forward who could protect the rim, score on the low post, set picks and run the floor (like Elton Brand).
I completely agree: A team like that would be really good. I would only point out that, by the same token, there are several high-scoring guards who, playing alongside Okafor, Brand, Lewis, and super-Livingston would make for a really good team. Dywane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Gilbert Arenas, Vince Carter, Joe Johnson, or Ray Allen all come to mind. Those are all very good players, but they can't all be top-30 all-time guys. It's important to realize that if Livingston had a reliable outside shot he'd be a fantastic basketball player -- the 6'7" point guard with a reliable outside shot is the genuinely rare commodity on that team, followed by the "power forward who [can] protect the rim, score on the low post, set picks and run the floor" high-volume perimeter scorers are relatively common compared to those assets.
"We began the year with optimism after watching nearly 12 million Iraqis go to the polls to vote for a unity government and a free future. The enemies of liberty responded fiercely to this advance of freedom."
We're in Iraq to build a democracy.
"And I want the enemy to understand that this is a tough task, but they can't run us out of the Middle East; that they can't intimidate America."
No, we're in Iraq to find a permanent base for US military forces in the Middle East or, at a minimum, to demonstrate resolve detached from specific policy goals.
"What is going to happen is we're going to develop a strategy that helps the Iraqis achieve the objective that the 12 million people want them to achieve, which is a government that can -- a country that can sustain itself, govern itself, defend itself."
No, we're in Iraq to build a internally stable government.
"A free country that will serve as an ally in this war against extremists and radicals."
No, we're in Iraq to create a government that will take America's side in regional disputes.
Needless to say these are different and, in some ways, contradictory goals. This is why we're not winning in Iraq and never will. We don't have coherent objectives we're pursuing. And there is no set of objectives such that the objectives are both achievable and worth the cost of achieving them. The sane thing to do at this point is to set a goal of removing American troops from the killing zone quickly and then to start thinking and arguing about how, exactly, this can be done in a way that minimizes risks to the troops and the rest of the region.
The Los Angeles Times runs down the options to replace John Abizaid as head of US Central Command, the outfit overseeing the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The article outlines two competing schools of thought. One would be a strategy of continuity in which George Casey, currently commanding American forces in Iraq, is promoted to Tampa. Another would be a reform strategy involving either David Petraeus (commanded the 101 Airborne in Iraq, is now running the military schools, was the lead author of the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual) or Peter Chiarelli who was Casey's deputy until last week.
I guess my take on this is that if Petraeus knows what's good for him, he'll do everything possible to stay away from either Casey's job or Abizaid's. At this point in time, he's essentially the only person whose reputation has been enhanced by working for the American government in Iraq. If he stays away from Iraq policy, his reputation will only be further enhanced as he'll likely become the central figure in the inevitable revisionist account of the war whereby it could have been awesome had it only been done right.
If he goes to CENTCOM or back to Baghdad, however, he'll join Zalmay Khalilzad in the ranks of people whose formerly glowing reputations have been tarnished by association with inevitable failure and the need to engage in spin on behalf of the Bush administration. The last thing you want to do is become a spin artist on behalf of a lame duck administration fighting a failed war. That means staying as far away as possible from the chain running from the White House to the Pentagon to Tampa to Baghdad. Under the circumstances, the US Army Combined Arms Center is an excellent place to be.
The former Soviet world's most wild and crazy strongman is dead. Good obituary fodder: "Niyazov, 66, who crushed all dissent in his reclusive state and basked in a unique and bizarre personality cult while ruling a country with huge natural gas reserves, died overnight of cardiac arrest, state television said." Next up, political instability:
"I expect there will be a massive fight for power now in Turkmenistan and it's likely to take place between pro-U.S. and pro-Russian forces," said a Russian gas industry source, who declined to be named. "Gas will become the main coin of exchange and the key asset to get hold of." . . .
"Our first task is to return to Turkmenistan within hours ... In Turkmenistan there is no opposition, they all sit in prisons or under home arrest. But outside the country opposition exists and it is coming back,"one activist, Parakhad Yklymov, told Reuters by telephone from Sweden.
Russia said it hoped Turkmenistan would stick to Niyazov's course. "We count on the new Turkmenistan leaders continuing their course and further developing bilateral ties," top Kremlin aide Sergei Prikhodko told Itar-Tass news agency.
I think trying to compete with Russia for influence in Russia's "near abroad" is something of a mistake. The situation in Turkmenistan is always going to be more important to politicians sitting in Moscow than it will be to politicians sitting in Washington, and we're just going to end up losing any struggles for influence that we engage in.
Hot on the heels of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's supporters suffering various setbacks in Iran's semi-democratic elections, the dormant-for-a-while Iranian student movement seems to be revving back up again in its protests against the system. People have gotten their hopes up about this sort of thing before, obviously, and been disappointed. People have also sought to leverage the bravery of these people into a lot of unseemly chest-thumping -- "if I blog about this a lot, then I'll be a hero of the revolution!"
At any rate, you may recall my blog dustup with Ali Eteraz a couple of weeks ago. I guess you could say he and I have our differences, but his site turns out to have lots of content related to domestic developments in Iran and other Islamic countries, much of it quite interesting and will presumably have something on these developments.
With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use it as a lever to continue grossly failed foreign and domestic policies. That said, it's a long way from Election Day and, seriously, a new Inspector General report says he "removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency's internal watchdog said Wednesday." Hid them under a a trash collector!
One assumes this will make it difficult for Berger to obtain any high-level executive branch appointments in the future.
Yesterday, Josh Marshall noted that the Brookings Institution, an erstwhile left-of-center think tank, will be hosting an event featuring Frederick "Surge" Kagan and remarks "I don't know off-hand what other Iraq confabs Brookings is holding on Iraq this month. But highlighting the one truly nutball idea about what to do in Iraq -- and none of the more sane ones -- seems an odd stance for Brookings." If you read the transcript from Kagan's unveiling of his plan at AEI you'll see that Ken Pollack, who takes the lead on Brookings' Iraq stuff, was on hand and very positive about Kagan ("We put together a 150-page report in February of this year which looks remarkably like the plan that Fred’s team put together") and overwhelmingly devoted his critical remarks to tackling the straw man of "people who oppose continued involvement in Iraq particularly but not limited to many in my own party, basically assuming, asserting that there would not be any consequences from withdrawal in Iraq."
Whether the Kagan-Pollack meeting of the minds enhances Kagan's credibility or detracts from Pollack's I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. Certainly my general approach to life is to listen to well-respected experts, then where their advice turns out to be terrible keep on listening to them rather than turning to different voices, so I don't see why one would have any doubts about this.
Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann call the Kagan plan "unrealistic and dangerous" before noting: "The neoconservative architects of the war claim that those who oppose increasing the number of troops do not understand the implications of failure in Iraq. But they have it backwards. Those who opposed the war from the outset understood the difficulty and scope of the task at hand, while the war's architects are the ones only now coming to grips with the catastrophic implications of a possible civil and regional war."
I wonder what it would be like to be a right-wing pundit. No sense of shame. No accountability. I could just write things like "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust really occurred."
Max Boot, the author of those sentences, isn't a fool. He isn't ignorant. He knows Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iran's foreign policy and that, therefore, proposals for negotiations with Iran have nothing to do with heart-to-hearts with Ahmadinejad. He just doesn't care. He opposes negotiation with Iran. So he wants to make negotiation with Iran look bad. So he states -- falsely and knowingly -- that the ISG proposed negotiations with Ahmadinejad which sounds worse than an accurate presentation of the ISG proposal would sound. He knows that his colleagues in the conservative punditocracy won't think less of him for deliberately misleading his readers, and he knows that his editors at The Los Angeles Times would never consider saying "sorry, Max, we don't like to print columnists who deliberately mislead our readers" for to not give free rein to whatever kind of wingnuttery some conservative wants to publish would merely confirm that the media is liberal.
Chad Ford says: "I think Philly made a good deal. They weren't getting anything more than what they got ... roughly $8 million in cap relief, two late first round picks and a very good starting point guard. I think Andre Miller is underrated and a good fit in Philly. They add Greg Oden or Kevin Durant to that team next year and they're right back in the playoffs."
Agreed that Miller is underrated and a very good starting point guard. Disagreed that he's a good fit in Philly. Philly is looking to lose a lot of games and get a high pick to add to the two low first-rounders they're getting from Denver. That means you don't want a good point guard who also happens to be too old to really count as a "rebuilding" piece. It seems to me that the Sixers and the Heat should be running to swap Miller for James Posey and his expiring contract. The Heat are looking to win now, and Gary Payton, despite his illustrious career, is pretty awful at this point. Meanwhile, absent Miller the Sixers should be bad enough to take a serious run at a top-three pick.
The budget deficit poses an interesting political economy problem for the Democrats. During the Clinton years, the party committed itself to a program of fiscal discipline and balanced budgets. As a long-term strategy for managing the country's economy, this seems to me to have been a good one. But as Paul Krugman writes, "it’s now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of contemporary American politics." In particular, the politics of fiscal restraint have turned out to be a shell game. Ronald Reagan comes into office and cuts income taxes. The results, huge and incredibly acute deficits. Then along comes Alan Greenspan and his Social Security commission. They raise FICA taxes (which fall much more heavily on the middle- and working-classes than do income taxes) over and above what's actually needed to finance Social Security in order to "pre-fund" the system.
In practice, this merely allows the non-Social Security portions of the budget to remain in steep deficit thanks to Reagan's combination of income tax cuts and defense spending hikes. Then Bill Clinton comes into office, and raises taxes and restrains spending growth in order to get the budget under control. Then along comes George W. Bush who promptly cuts income taxes again, leading to the re-explosion of deficits. Krugman again: "With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that conservatives who claimed to care about deficits when Democrats were in power never meant it. Let’s not forget how Alan Greenspan, who posed as the high priest of fiscal rectitude as long as Bill Clinton was in the White House, became an apologist for tax cuts — even in the face of budget deficits — once a Republican took up residence."
Thus, I agree with Krugman's conclusion. The country can live with modest-sized deficits even if it might be better to live without them. Democrats should try to avoid increasing the budget deficit, but shouldn't expend their time, energy, or political capital on reducing it either: "By spending money well, Democrats can both improve Americans’ lives and, more broadly, offer a demonstration of the benefits of good government. Deficit reduction, on the other hand, might just end up playing into the hands of the next irresponsible president."
It was often said of Bill Clinton that one of his great political assets was good fortune in terms of his enemies. The same is much more true of his wife. As Kevin Drum and Steve Benen note, Dick Morris' furious hostility to New York's junior senator can't but make you like her. And his threat to actually leave the country if she wins, well, that's icing on the cake. And then, of course, there's Martin Peretz:
Hillary has been scheming for the presidency since the day her husband entered the White House, which is why she didn't much take to Al Gore. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she conspired with James Baker--or is that just me?
The same column's praise of Barack Obama, meanwhile, is giving me doubts. He's "a latter-day Martin Luther King Jr.," and "a picture of America's future, black and white" as well as "Supple in mind and bearing, evoking energy and thoughtfulness." Peretz asks, "what, for heaven's sake, is there to criticize about Obama? Nothing." As I say, troubling. Maybe Petey wants to give me some Edwards '08 bumper stickers.
UPDATE: In case of confusion, put this case against Obama in the "light-hearted" file.
Here is the Flynt Leverett op-ed the National Security Council wouldn't permit to see the light of day, complete with redactions. More brackground here. It's clear from reading the thing that this simply isn't an op-ed about classified information. The section where all the redactions are coming from is a brief rundown of US-Iranian relations in the Bush years -- that information's all out there already, it simply isn't very well-known and it's a bit embarrassing to the White House.
Sometimes it's interesting to go looking for information on the internet without any particular point in mind. This is the recent trading history of a Tradesports contract that pays off if the Denver Nuggets win the Western Conference Championship. Obviously, the betting community liked the trade. But they didn't like it that much. You can buy San Antonio at 30, Dallas at 24, Phoenix at 21.9, and Houston at 9.3, and Utah at 8.2 -- Denver's 6.5 just barely edges out the Lakers at 5.8, which seems a bit absurd to me. I'm not super-optimistic about this deal, but Denver already has a slightly better record than Houston and, at a minimum, you've got to figure the trade definitively puts them above the Rockets, Lakers, and other Western Conference also-rans.
Looking at Darfur and the strains on US troops being caused by deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Michael O'Hanlon argues that we should create a dedicated genocide-prevention division of about 20,000 troops within the Army:
A genocide-prevention division within the U.S. Army would circumvent this problem. Since its only mission would be to stop genocides, deploying the force would never require us to ask more of soldiers who already have their hands full with other conflicts. Moreover, those volunteering for the new force would know exactly what they were getting into and enlist specifically because they embraced the mission. These soldiers could be recruited from the ranks of idealistic college and high school students across the nation who have done so much to keep Darfur in the public eye.
Color me skeptical. Different kinds of soldiers get different kinds of training, but they're all at least semi-fungible. If we had a spare genocide-prevention division lying around, it would be getting sent to Iraq as part of the "surge" not to Africa. The President would simply argue that escalation of the Iraq War is a genocide-prevention mission because of the sectarian violence. Then on the flipside, I'm not sure there's a discrete military task called "genocide prevention." You might, in an effort to halt a genocide, bomb some buildings or troop formations somewhere. Alternatively, as part of a war to overthrow the Taliban you might wind up policing the streets of Kabul and taking responsibility for the safety of the city's residents. So you want some military forces who specialize in bombing, and others who specialize in policing, but you don't have some troops who specialize in genocide prevention and others who specialize in attacking hostile governments.
At any rate, though the mass killing of civilians is certainly awful on US foreign policy should seek to minimize violations of the international prohibition of such tactics, I do think pursuit of such a goal needs to be put in a broader context [UPDATE: what follows here is an excerpt from Ye Olde Book Drafte]:
Unfortunately, to many liberals and many members of the administration, Kosovo came to be viewed not as an unusual case -- an outlier defining the limits of when liberals would endorse the use of aggressive force absent U.N. authorization -- but as setting a baseline for an ill-defined new era of humanitarian militarism. Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar thought to have been in line for a top post in a hypothetical Kerry administration, penned a 1999 article advocating military intervention "whenever the rate of killing in a country or region greatly exceeds the U.S. murder rate, whether the killing is genocidal in nature or not" utterly without reference to the United Nations or any other sort of multilateral authority. He listed ten countries -- Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, North Korea, and Kosovo -- where interventions would have been warranted by this standard during the Clinton administration alone. Mercifully, he conceded that fighting the Russian Army in Chechnya was not a very pragmatic option (as he says, it "would have risked a major-power war between nuclear-weapons states with the potential to kill far more people than the intervention could have saved" ) but gave no consideration to the possibility that launching unprovoked unilateral military strikes at the rate of one every nine months or so would destabilize the entire international system. Indeed, despite O'Hanlon's demurral on the Russia front, later that year The New Republic was lamenting that "Milosevic-like deeds by Milosevic's allies will provoke only scolding followed by winking" rather than some unspecified more robust action.
I don't think a 20,000 member division is going to be able to meet the ambitions of a policy like that.
One thing I don't really understand is the sentiment that America's military posture in the Middle East is somehow justified or at minimum caused by that region's large oil reserves. Oil, obviously, is a valuable commodity, but it's not that valuable. The Iraqi state's oil revenue is about $20 billion per year, which is a lot of money, but only a small fraction of the annual cost of occupying the country. Looked at another way, Iraq produces about 2.25 million barrels per day of oil and crude sells for around $62 a barrel. 62 times 2.25 million times 365 is a large number -- about $51 billion -- but still way less than the annual cost of the war.
Or, for yet another perspective, American consumers use about 20 million barrels a day of black gold -- good for 7.3 billion barrels in a year. Now suppose you think that withdrawing military forces from the region would lead to widespread chaos and $100 a barrel oil. That means higher energy prices for consumers. But if US consumers could just pocket the cash that's instead being spent on military operations in the area, they'd still have much more post-oil money on hand even if consumption didn't drop at all in response to the price hike.
I was just thinking this morning that we've had a delightfully mild winter here in the District and that was basically awesome. The New York Times, however, manages to come through and find the dark cloud in the silver lining: Retail disaster for people who sell coats. And, indeed, it's true. Through some kind of screw-up, I accidentally wound up losing my three winter coats when I move
