I watched Friday night's thrilling overtime win against Phoenix and, while I certainly enjoyed the thrill of victory, I was almost sad to see the Wizards win. The trouble is that when you see the 'zards take down one of the league's elite teams -- on the road, in the fourth game in five nights, no less -- you start developing dreams of glory. But these are still the Wizards, the team that's managed to get blown out by New York and Memphis. What's the deal? Noam Scheiber has a theory that he spells out here which happens to be very similar to one I concocted during a Saturday morning Metro ride.
I think the actual explanation, though, is simpler. Look here and, roughly speaking, you'll see that whether or not the Wizards win seems determined almost exclusively by how many points Gilbert Arenas scores. There are really only two games -- a December 9 loss to Houston where he scored 41, and an ugly November 28 win over Atlanta where he scored 21 -- where this breaks down. It would be worth doing a more sophisticated analysis that distinguished scoring driven by a high usage rate, scoring driven by high shooting efficiency, and scoring driven by a fast pace. One way or another, though, this mostly seems to come down to the wattage of the team's star power.
Ethiopia decides to really go for it, unleashing warplanes to attack the Islamic Courts Movement that controls most of Somalia in support of that country's feeble de jure government. The Islamists are being supported by "several thousand soldiers from Eritrea" along with "a growing number of Muslim mercenaries from Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Libya who want to turn Somalia into the third front of jihad, after Iraq and Afghanistan." The Ethiopian military, meanwhile, has been trained and equipped by the United States, is the class of the region, and appears to be intervening in Somalia with American support:
The question now seems to be if Ethiopia will go into Mogadishu and try to finish off the Islamist military, which many fear could spur a long and ugly insurgency, or simply deal them enough of a blow to force them back to the negotiating table with the transitional government. Ethiopia’s prime minister recently told American officials that he could wipe out the Islamists “ in one to two weeks.”
I still don't know much about the Horn of Africa (I read this International Crisis Group material but it's all a bit outdated) but on general principles fear of spurring a long and ugly insurgency seems sound. A war under these circumstances would seem to have a basically religious character insofar as we agree with Jeffrey Gettleman's characterization that "While Somalia is almost purely Muslim, neighboring Ethiopia has a strong Christian identity, even though it is actually about half Muslim."
Since Jonah Goldberg seems confused about this let me note that the difference is that race has historically been the central issue in American politics, whereas whether or not Fidel Castro's regime is repressive isn't even the central issue in American Cuba policy.
My "holiday" present to myself -- a pair of Gilbert Arenas signature sneakers. Two problems with this product. One is that Adidas unwisely named them the "Gil Zeros" instead of the "Agent Zeros" or the "Hibachi" or something cool. The other is that despite my hopes, I'm not actually noticing any substantial increase in my quickness and athleticism. On the upside, the random dudes hanging around the parking lot outside of Lowest Price Gas on 14th and W were duly impressed and they're significantly bigger than my 1997-vintage Sambas and I think I could probably get listed at 6'2" wearing them.
Meanwhile, word to the wise for any non-celebrators in the DC area: The Red Room, unlike virtually all other establishments, is open on Christmas Eve, starting at 9:30PM. The scene, based on last year's experience, is a little grim, but it's better than nothing . . . various Jewish liberal media figures will be in attendance.
I'll be celebrating with Ackerman in Chinatown watching The Good Shepherd and eating fried noodles, but I'd like to wish a merry Christmas to all the goyim of the world. Meanwhile, the Christmas Eve seen at the Black Cat was disappointingly lively -- nothing like the deadness of last December for some reason. What's more, their jukebox no longer features "Fairytale of New York" which sort of ruined the whole thing.
On a more substantive note, wouldn't complaints about Iranian interference in Iraq be more credible were the country not currently occupied by 130,000 or so American soldiers? I mean, if Iran conquered Canada, I assume we'd try and put some agents in place on the ground.
As I've said previously, expanding the number of soldiers in the Army is a reasonable idea. But it's also a very expensive proposition: "every 10,000 new soldiers add about $1.2 billion in personnel costs to the Pentagon’s annual budget. On top of that, equipment for 10,000 new troops would cost an additional $2 billion, according to Army statistics." What's more, we're not talking about 10,000 new troops:
Instead, civilian and military officials said, they are drawing up tentative proposals that would make permanent the 30,000-troop temporary increase approved by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then add 30,000 more troops to the Army over the next five years, resulting in an active-duty Army with 542,400 soldiers by 2012.
So this is a $19.2 billion annual commitment that we should probably round up to more like $20 billion since unless you want standards to drop you're going to have increased recruiting expenditures. Under the circumstances, I just can't see the case for an increase of that scale in the defense budget which is already giant in a global context. You could easily find the money by cutting back other DOD programs, and that kind of shift in resources would be a good idea. It's pretty clear, though, that the driving force behind embrace of this idea is mostly about politics and posturing rather than a serious effort to set priorities so I think pessimism is warranted.
This sounds incredibly ill-advised to me: "American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda."
There's just no way that a foreign invasion by a Christian army of a Muslim country is going to check the growing power of the Islamists in any meaningful sense. The exact quantity of acreage under Islamists control is no skin off our backs. We need to worry about people plotting against the USA being sheltered somewhere in that acreage. Encouraging Ethiopia to go to war with the Islamists merely encourages them to collaborate in efforts to attack the United States. If the Ethiopian military could somehow eliminate Somali Islamism as a social and political force, that would be one thing, but there's just no way they can do that.
Okay. To boil this Somalia business down to a simpler question, I read "American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda." Way back when the Islamists first took over, I read "Already American officials have said that a handful of foreign fighters with links to Al Qaeda are being shielded by Mogadishu's Islamist leaders."
What are the names of these people the Islamists are sheltering? How many of them are there? Who are they? What have they done? What diplomatic efforts has the United States made to get the Islamists to turn them over? Pardon me for being cynical, but in this day and age my suspicion is that names aren't involved in these articles but there's no one in particular the Bush administration is worrying about and this is mostly hype and paranoia. But maybe not. So name some names.
I don't want to ruin anyone's post-Christmas day of recovery, but this Glenn Reynolds post is really distressing. Some Iranian officials come to Iraq, get themselves taken prisoner by the American military, and Reynolds sees this as a convenient pretext for the United States to launch a war with Iran. But what's the pretext? And why should we be looking for excuses to start a war with Iran?
One upside to America's rather sketchy and underdeveloped welfare state is that when we consider what sorts of things we'd like to do, we can easily look around the world for examples of different approaches to these issues. Isaac Chotiner and Paul Krugman, for example, note that Tony Blair's targeted anti-poverty initiatives have been very successful in the UK. At the same time, Britain has a health care system that's not very well regarded compared to other European examples, so we can look elsewhere for models for that.
Jonathan Cohn, similarly, takes a fairly comprehensive look at the successful Danish economic model, which has generated a GDP per capita close to American levels with much less structural inequality. The basic shape of things here is to combine US-style flexible labor market rules with a series of measures designed to make labor market fluctuation much more tolerable -- health care and child care services that will always be there come what may, extremely generous short-term unemployment insurance, and very aggressive high-quality retraining and placement services.
UPDATE: Note that Denmark, like Iceland, rates higher on the Heritage Economic Freedom Index, through the Scandinavian combination of massive welfare states and relatively light regulation. The thing to say in response to this is that the Scandinavian countries are really little and it might not work as well in a big country, but I don't understand what the causal mechanism for non-scalability is supposed to be. I'll happily grant that it's politically easier to put a Scandinavian-style system together in a small, homogeneous country, but that's different from saying it wouldn't work on the merits.
The second half of today's WaPocoverage of the Somalia-Ethiopia war does a good job of calling into question the premises of US policy in the Horn of Africa. We note that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia "along with the United States, has accused the [Islamic Courts] movement of harboring terrorists" but this is "an allegation it has denied." Neither Ethiopia nor the United States is prepared to provide names of any terrorists who are being harbored. Meanwhile, "Opposition groups inside Ethiopia say that Meles, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has shrewdly played up the terrorism charges to win U.S. support." We're going along with this because "based in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi E. Frazer has asserted that the Islamic movement is now under the control of an al-Qaeda cell, a claim that regional analysts believe is exaggerated."
Emphasis added. In other words, we're backing Ethiopia's war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia. But what else would the intelligence say? The US government's conflict with the Islamic Courts began because "the United States financed warlords in Somalia who described themselves as an 'anti-terrorism coalition' but who mostly terrorized local Somalis, who came to despise them." This "anti-terrorism coalition" was nothing other than the exact same warlords who ruined the country in the 1990s renaming themselves for the post-9/11 era.
I'd really like to see the DC-based media get on top of these questions. Can someone ask Tony Snow or George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice or Steven Hadley to name the terrorists the Islamic Courts are harboring? To explain what we've tried to do to secure their custody short of backing a full-scale Ethiopian invasion of Somalia?
UPDATE: Okay. Below the fold you'll find the State Department's counterterrorism country report on Somalia. I think you'll find the lack of menace here striking:
Spencer was a fan. Me, not so much. The film's pretty successful on the level of ideas, I'll grant you, but Eric Roth tends to pace his screenplays at a leisurely pace. That can be okay. But the film's also suffused with a persistent thematic gloominess. That, too, can be okay. But then you add in Matt Damon in the lead role. His signature affect-less performances can be extremely effective in the right hands (Bourne Identity, The Departed) but in combination with the gloominess, the slow pace, and the long length of the film, the results are just deadly dull.
The portrayal of vintage WASP mores -- alcoholism, loveless marriages, otherwise-serious men singing and dancing, secret societies, beloved gay teachers -- however, is pretty cool. On the other hand, at this point in time there's really nothing more cliché and, frankly, a little churlish than Jews and white Catholics teaming up to offer unflattering portrayals of the old regime elite we've displaced.
With the Heat winning a third straight Christmas Day matchup against the Lakers, isn't it time to retire this pseudo-tradition? Shaq, the ostensible source of interest in this drama, didn't even play and even if he had played everyone knows it's Wade's team at this point. Plus, Kobe and Diesel have at least officially buried the hatched. There's really just no there there. I'd be much happier if they went back to two games, and did rematches of the previous spring's Conference Championship games. It's frustrating, to me, that the League doesn't do a better job of trying to actually market NBA basketball at its finest instead of getting all gimmicky.
Major Kelley Thibodeau, spokeswoman for the task force of American military personnel based in nearby in Djibouti explains: "Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia. The Americans don’t go forward with the Ethiopians. They are training Ethiopians in Ethiopia."
Seriously? Here's how this is supposed to work. Major Kelley is talking to her superior officer: "What should I say if reporters ask about our involvement." Colonel so-and-so replies, "officially, we haven't put anybody in Somalia." Major Kelley, when asked about this by a reporter, either replies "we haven't put anybody in Somalia" or else refuses to answer the question or somehow evades it. Whatever she does, she can't just repeat "officially, we haven't put anybody in Somalia." That gives the whole game away! She might as well just say "we've secretly put people in Somalia" at this point.
ADDED: A key question -- with an unknowable answer -- is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?
Leaving aside the curious "path of fighting back" construction (against whom were we "fighting back" in Iraq), we can probably estimate the "unknowable answer" here by projecting forward based on the total number of Americans killed in Iraq-sponsored terrorist attacks from 1991-2002: Zero. To be generous, a handful of American soldiers might have died trying to enforce the no-fly zones had there been no invasion.
Sommer located the Ninento Wii Tom and Charles have been looking for and I tried it out earlier this evening: Wii Sports is pretty awesome. That said, there's something odd about a video game system that's actually physically strenuous. I got into some monster rallies playing Wii Tennis and I think I hurt my elbow. I mean, at the end of the day are we going to get boxing video games you can only win by becoming a really great boxer? Why not just box? Less head trauma, I guess. But I sort of miss the old John Elway's Quarterback days when I could be a superstar without knowing a damn thing about how to play football.
One gets the sense from time to time that George W. Bush has become such a horrible president largely out of a desire to avoid Gerald Ford's fate; to avoid becoming someone who will go down in history most likely as the answer to a trivia question rather than remembered for dramatic events he initiated. Naturally, hundreds of presidential "ranking" systems in which only the ones who oversee something big manage to rate further encourage this line of thinking. Turns out to not actually work so well as a governing philosophy. There are worse fates than mediocrity.
Alongside the obvious problems of life and the world, every so often you find out about a new one. For example, suppose you're a married African-American dual income professional couple and you want to hire a nanny for your kids. Big trouble: "'Very rarely will an African-American woman work for an African-American boss,' said Pat Cascio, the owner of Morningside Nannies in Houston and the president of the International Nanny Association." Perhaps not the worst problem in the world, but still:
Many of the African-American nannies who make up 40 percent of her work force fear that people of their own color will be "uppity and demanding,” said Ms. Cascio, who is white. After interviews, she said, those nannies "will call us and say, 'Why didn’t you tell me'" the family is black?
All strange. Further complicating matters, "African-American professionals, who constantly battle the stereotype that blacks do not speak proper English, sometimes hesitate to hire Caribbean nannies who speak with lilting accents or island patois, said Cameron L. Macdonald, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison." According to Mary Waters' book, black people actually suffer from substantially less discrimination if they speak with island accents. Sudhir Venkatash in Off The Books has a different story to tell about nannying. He describes it as difficult for the women he observed to break into nannying for white families but said the pastors at inner-city churches would regularly place people with middle class congregants commuting from the suburbs -- but only on a short-term basis and only in exchange for a broker's fee.
My theory about the popularity of a "more troops" strategy for Iraq among pundits and politicians had been that they knew this wasn't going to happen. By recommending a course of action that you know won't be adopted, you'll get to blame the catastrophe on Iraq on (a) treasonous anti-war types, and (b) George W. Bush while leaving super-hawk ideology unscathed. The trouble, of course, is that Bush now looks set to embrace the "surge" strategy. So Jack Keane and Fred Kagan take to the pages of The Washington Post to argue that a three or six month surge "would virtually ensure defeat." Instead we need "a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so."
Once you're talking about an 18 month deployment, of course, you're not really looking at a surge. And the logistics of producing the surge by extending deployments start to get much more difficult. So Bush may get his surge and Kagan may still get to claim his brilliant strategy was never adopted after all. Be that as it may, the point is that this war will still be in full-swing -- possibly even further escalated beyond where it is today -- during the 2008 campaign.
Plus: Double entendre of the day: "The only 'surge' option that makes sense is both long and large."
UPDATE: Paradox of the day, J-Pod: "The key here is time. A 'temporary' troop surge will be a disaster." A permanent surge, sure. Just remember, ignorance is strength.
Joe Biden has often used his platform as the Democrat most likely to be paid attention to on national security issues to unimpressive effect. But with regards to the Bush escalation plan, he's playing for the good guys: "I totally oppose this surging of additional American troops into Baghdad. It’s contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both inside and outside the administration." Biden says he'll start his Iraq hearings on January 9.
On Tuesday, a day after an Ethiopian jet strafed the airport in Mogadishu, the capital, the State Department issued internal guidance to staff members, instructing officials to play down the invasion in public statements.
“Should the press focus on the role of Ethiopia inside Somalia,” read a copy of the guidelines that was given to The New York Times by an American official here, “emphasize that this is a distraction from the issue of dialogue between the T.F.I.’s and Islamic courts and shift the focus back to the need for dialogue.” T.F.I. is an abbreviation for the weak transitional government in Somalia.
“The press must not be allowed to make this about Ethiopia, or Ethiopia violating the territorial integrity of Somalia,” the guidance said.
Of course these talking points become less effective when put out in this form. But just remember, "Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia."
I'd forgotten that The New York Sun is so around the bend that they don't print the term "Palestinians." Instead, we read that Barack Obama "has faulted the Bush administration for not pushing harder for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs." Lawyer Alan Solow, a longtime Obama supporter and Jewish Community Center Association leader is trotted out to assure Sun readers that Obama has "been very strong on the defense of a safe and secure Israel." The article also notes that Obama says "he would tend to support a missile strike on Iran if other methods fail to get Tehran to abandon its nuclear program" which I think is unfortunate.
I was most interested to see the views of Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell and a major Obama supporter. Power turns out to have significantly sounder views (none of this nonsense for example) than I had thought. All in all, he looks pretty good assuming he's not too serious about that whole starting a war with Iran thing.
Wizards recap up at DCist. Let me just note that I was super-excited about the Darius Songaila signing, but insofar as the alternative backup player is Jarvis Hayes, I'm really looking forward to seeing him play.
Forced to choose between intensive inquiry into the idea of swapping Ron Artest for Corey Maggette or else looking further at the Horn of African situation, I reluctantly chose what was behind door number two. Take a look back, shall we, at the December 7 State Department briefing. Sean McCormick got a question: "Sean, on Somalia. The Islamists say that they are sort of less than happy with the UN's endorsement of this African peacekeeping force and they say that it's just going to add fuel to the fire. I wondered whether you -- were causing sort of a regional war?" McCormick replies, "no." The questioner wants more: "Do you have any comment?" McCormick elaborates:
Look, this is -- this force was authorized as a training and protection force for the Transitional Federal Institutions. Its approval takes place within the context of policy that we believe that the way forward here is for negotiations between the Islamic Courts and the Transitional Federal Institutions. As long as the Islamic Courts perceive that they can continue to back the Transitional Federal Institutions into a tighter and tighter and smaller and smaller corner, there of course is less and less incentive one would expect for them to actually want to negotiate. So I can understand why they may be less than happy about this. But this is a policy that is endorsed by a number of different countries in the region.
The force will be deployed under the aegis of the IGAD countries, which is the Intergovernmental Authority for Development, and it's an East African regional organization. And the resolution also clearly states that neighboring states: Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti will not deploy troops to Somalia. So it actually specifically addresses this idea that somehow this action will directly lead to some wider conflict on the -- in the Horn of Africa.
In short, the state of play a few weeks ago was this. Islamists were threatening to overrun the powerless Transitional Government unless an international peacekeeping force was sent in to protect them. So the United States sought to get such a force and, indeed, the UN agreed to authorize one. The Islamic Courts Union said that such a move would lead to a regional war. According to The Washington Post, "the United States accommodated a European request to exclude participation by Somalia's neighbors, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, in the new force." Our stated policy, as McCormick indicated, was to avoid rather than cause a regional war.
Now at this time, Ethiopia had already "sent thousands of troops [to Somalia] to help prop up the government." Presumably, the deployment of a UN-approved force that would exclude Ethiopian participation (it was to be led by Uganda) would have precluded the Ethiopians from further expanding their ambit of control in Somalia. Thus, the war is launched to pre-empt the deployment of the Ugandan-led force -- apparently with American approval contrary to the policy McCormick outlined earlier in December. New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz approves, citing the prospects for a Jew/Rastafarian/Christian alliance against Islamist influence in East Africa.
Spencer spent some time working the phones in an effort to answer the question of the hour: which terrorists are the Islamic Courts Union harboring. "That's a good question," conceded Carl Kropf from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who didn't know the answer.
As you'll see if you read Spencer's post, there is an answer. The Somali terror nexus isn't something invented out of whole cloth. On the other hand, it really doesn't seem to me that there's much there there. We want three guys, one of whom (Abu Tahai al-Sudani) there doesn't appear to be any information about other than that we say he's a terrorist, and the actual relationship between our desire to apprehend these dudes and the question of who controls Mogadishu is pretty vague. They were in Somalia before the ICU took power, and it's at least not obvious to me why kicking the ICU out of the capital (or wherever they're being kicked) would bring them to our custody.
The fact that the designated spokespersons for the US government didn't have an answer at hand to the admittedly good question of what the basis of our policy was tends to indicate to me that the policy is not incredibly well-founded. As recently as the December 20 State Department briefing, Sean McCormack was saying America's top policy priority was "that we don't want to see the conflict in Somalia spread to the region . . . we don't want to see a proxy fight in Somalia," not anything about Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. A week later: Proxy fight on!
Islamists abandon Mogadishu in the face of Ethiopia's apparently unstoppable conventional assault, leaving the capital back under conditions of clan-based anarchy. It will be interesting to see if the Ethiopians and/or the transitional government try to actually assert control over the capital. This has the rough shape of the result I would have anticipated (conventional success followed by hard-to-solve problems) but I must admit I wouldn't have believed the Ethiopian military had the logistical capacity to advance this quickly.
This probably goes without saying, but now that John Edwards is kicking off his presidential campaign with, among other things, an ad on my sidebar I guess I should say that accepting his ad, or anyone else's ad, is not an endorsement.
I would like to encourage further advertisements, however, by emphasizing that I only have a little integrity and paying me money will convince me to post your YouTube video (purely as an informational service to my readers, of course). Thus far, the field isn't really inspiring me to take sides or to feel like I should invest a lot of energy in deciding which side to take. All else being equal, I'd like to avoid the blogosphere being filled with this sort of thing, but I suppose it's inevitable.
In an unrelated Ethiopia news story, an interesting New York Times feature looks at the problem of malnourished children, especially in Africa, and especially in Ethiopia where there are some relatively new and pretty promising programs in place to try and deal with the problem. As the article observes:
Yet almost half of Ethiopia’s children are malnourished, and most do not die. Some suffer a different fate. Robbed of vital nutrients as children, they grow up stunted and sickly, weaklings in a land that still runs on manual labor. Some become intellectually stunted adults, shorn of as many as 15 I.Q. points, unable to learn or even to concentrate, inclined to drop out of school early.
The result, obviously, is a kind of trap of impoverishment. Poor, badly governed states have a lot of children who suffer from these problems. The next generation grows up to be relatively lacking in human capital as a consequence of childhood malnourishment. And that, in turn, helps continue the country down a path of being poor and badly governed. Obviously, delivering food to hungry people is something rich countries are pretty well-positioned to do, and rich countries (especially the United States) do, in fact, provide a pretty large amount of food aid. But generous provision can cause problems of its own, distorting and undermining local markets in food production and distribution, when what you'd like to achieve is to put the country on a sustainable path where it no longer needs that kind of aid.
Josh Trevino is none too happy with my Ethiopia commentary. Trevino knows a good deal more about Africa than I do and has some experience with recent American policymaking on that continent. Thus, even though I disagree with the general thrust of his commentary, let me recommend his Christmas afternoon post on the war which confirms the basic point that these events are tied to deliberate American policies. He also usefully spells out the basic strategic thinking here. His take on Ethiopia's July intervention:
Interesting Washington Post op-ed page today. Bob Dole says Gerald Ford was great. David Broder agrees as does George Will. Robert Novak says he wasn't right-wing enough. It's a good thing they give this stuff away for free on the internet, because if I'd paid money for a newspaper and then wound up with a subscription to Pravda I'd be pretty upset.
As promised previously. I really don't see why the Clippers would seriously consider doing this. When Sacramento traded for Ron-Ron that was a risk. Trading for him at this point is a long-odds gamble I'd only want to take for a giant upside payoff. Artest, meanwhile, isn't that much better than Maggette. He's a worse scorer from either a volume or an efficiency perspective and a worse rebounder. Obviously, he's a better defender but the point is just that even in the unlikely case that Artest in LA experience did work out it's still not an unambiguous upgrade. Chris Sheridan says that Maggette "just like every other key player on the Clippers -- has had a precipitous drop in production this season while waiting for another deal to go down." But where's the precipitous drop? If by "precipitous drop in production" Sheridan means "small reduction in playing time" I'll agree. Maggette's points-per-40 are down (22.6 versus 24.1) but his rebounds-per-40 are up (8.5 versus 7.1).
The Clippers' woes this season have no particular relationship to Maggette. Other West teams have improved (often because of returns of players who were MIA with injury for most of last year), Elton Brand has returned to his previous standard of excellent basketball rather than to the extraordinary heights to which he soared last season, and Sam Cassell has been playing substantially fewer minutes.
I don't know when Scott Stanzel started working as a White House spokesman, but his rejoinder to Joe Biden's anti-escalation views doesn't make much sense: "I would hope that Senator Biden would wait to hear what the president has to say before announcing what he's opposed to." So while the Decider dithers none of us are allowed to offer our opinions about what he should do? I suppose it would be convenient for the White House message team if things worked that way. I think Gary Schmitt from PNAC is insightful on the psychodynamics here:
"No president wants to be remembered as the guy who lost a war," he said. "Who knows whether this is a day late and a dollar short, but it is a striking example of presidential will trying to bend the system to what he wants."
Roughly speaking, the fixed point of the president's thinking is an unwillingness to admit that the venture has failed. For a long time the best way to do that was to simply deny that there was a problem. Political strategy for the midterms, however, dictated that the president had to acknowledge the public's concerns about the war and concede that things weren't going well. At that point, simply staying the course doesn't work anymore. But de-escalating would be an admission of failure, so the only option is to choose escalation. Thus, the idea of an escalation starts getting pushed and we start reading things int he paper like "Top military officials have said that they are open to sending more U.S. troops to Iraq if there is a specific strategic mission for them." Consider the process here. It's not that the president has some policy initiative in mind whose operational requirements dictate a surge in force levels. Rather, locked in the prison of his own denial he came to the conclusion that he should back an escalation, prompting the current search for a mission.
Showing at least some vague measure of good sense, the Bush administration is officially against Israel's plans to construct a new settlement in the West Bank, though they don't seem inclined to actually do anything about it. New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz explains that the new settlement is a good idea because "there needs to be a sliver of land between what will ultimately be a Palestinian state and Jordan." The benefits of such a policy are clear: "An Israeli buffer between Jordan and nascent Palestine will not only protect Jordan from its mischievous neighbors to the west. It will protect Israel from what would otherwise be a new Jordan. Also called Palestine, and part of it."
Back in the real world, obviously, if Israel insists on such a policy there's never going to be peace with the Palestinians, but I assume that's fine by him.
While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States. Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought.
And what about al-Qaeda? Lieberman appears to be arguing later in the article that Iran and al-Qaeda are collaborating in Iraq since otherwise it's hard to make sense of the claim that "If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism." Needless to say, he's backing the Bush/McCain escalation plan.
One problem here is that to the extent you see the dark hand of Iran behind all events in Iraq, the situation should logically be viewed as more rather than less hopeless. The reason, of course, is that Iran can escalate every bit as much as we can. Whoever's equipping, say, the Mahdi Army clearly isn't equipping them very well -- Hezbollah is much better-armed. Suppose we escalate and the Iranians counter-escalate by giving our foes wire-guided anti-tank missiles, katyusha rockets, Iglas and so forth -- then you're talking about a really bad scene. Obviously, though, that's logic and hawks aren't into logic.
The Washington Post editorial page is mad at human rights groups for complaining about procedural flaws in Saddam Hussein's trial since, after all, we all know Saddam is guilty. Martin Peretz is upset that death penalty opponents oppose executing Saddam Hussein since, after all, we all know Saddam's a really bad guy.
Do these guys not understand the concept of principles? The point of the belief that all people are entitled to fair trials before receiving criminal sentences is that all people are entitled to fair trials. The point of the belief that capital punishment is immoral (not a belief I share, incidentally) is that it's always immoral. It's not as if Amnesty International is confused and doesn't understand that Saddam isn't a very sympathetic case. Rather, the point is that organizations committed to principles of human rights -- fair trials, no executions -- need to uphold those principles even when violating them sounds appealing. If they didn't, the groups wouldn't be standing for anything.
Robert Farley doubts that "anything that happens in Somalia is going to have a significant impact on foreign opinion outside of, well, Somalia and Ethiopia." I think there's a pretty strong case for that. Nevertheless, it's important to recall that the group of truly threatening anti-American terrorists in the world is really small. One one level, this should give us considerable comfort. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 it appeared plausible that the United States was going to face waves of sustained terror attacks implemented by a reasonably deep pool of people. That turns out not to be the case. On the other hand, it should make us worry. There were very few people interested in mounting large-scale terrorist attacks on the United States and nevertheless that small pool of people was able to pull off a pretty nasty operation.
What there is, however, is a much larger pool of people in some sense drawn to Islamist political movements and to various nationalist causes that involve Muslim populations. Under the circumstances, inserting the United States into disputes that involve Islamists fighting non-Muslim invaders is always very dangerous -- it risks slippage of people from the big pool into the small pool. After all, the reason why the small pool is so much smaller than the large pool is that despite widespread dislike of the United States relatively few people believe Osama bin Laden's message that these localized conflicts are all inextricably linked to the need for jihad against the far enemy. Our actions in the Horn of Africa probably won't have a big impact on people doing there thing in Cairo or Riyadh or Islamabad but it clearly will have an impact on people living in the Horn.
Now that said, sometimes you do have to back the non-Muslim side in a local conflict. Maybe the Islamist side is threatening some crucial American interests. That, however, isn't the case here. We simply don't have any interests in that area that are more important than our interest in trying to avoid a situation where young Somali men cut their teeth for a few years in a guerilla war with Ethiopia and then decide to take the fight to the far enemy.
Naturally, I agree with Ed Kilgore's basic sentiments regarding Joe Lieberman's op-ed today. But as a slightly -- but only slightly -- pedantic point of clarification, I think we should be clear that Lieberman doesn't have a blind spot about Iraq, the "blind spot" extends to the question of American foreign policy throughout the region, if not the entire region. What's more, I don't really think "blind spot" is the right word for it. Lieberman's ideas about Iran, Iraq, al-Qaeda, escalation, and how this all relates are crazy, but they're not idiosyncratic.
You can find the same ideas in The Weekly Standard, at the American Enterprise Institute, and from all sorts of other outfits around town. Lieberman's not saying anything that dozens of other neoconservative foreign policy analysts are saying. Indeed, this is exactly what Marshall Wittman was saying before he left the DLC to go work for Lieberman, so there's no real surprise here. But there's the rub; on the question of national security policy Lieberman's not just a "moderate" he's on the other side, following the trajectory of an earlier generation of neoconservatives from relatively hawkish Democrat to total agreements with right-wing Republicans. Maybe he thinks he'll be John McCain's running mate in 2008.
"In the general condemnation of neo-conservatism," writes Victor Davis Hanson, "we forget, at least as it pertains to foreign policy, it arose from a variety of causes, not the least as the reaction against the moral bankruptcy of both rightist realism and leftist appeasement." He continues:
We were reminded of those poles these past few days with news that confirmed Arafat's order to murder American diplomats in Khartoum. That apparently had made no affect on Bill Clinton, at least if it were really true as legend claims that such a terrorist much later was the most frequent overnight foreign guest to the Clinton White House.
Suffice it to say I don't see things this way. The news was that Arafat ordered the killing of American diplomats back in 1973. But it's been a long time since Palestinian nationalist groups deliberately targeted Americans. In other words, violent Palestinian nationalism used to be a problem for American security and now it isn't a problem anymore. Why's that? Well, appeasement. The process of engagement initiated by Henry Kissinger, significantly advanced during Jimmy Carter's administration, and pushed further down the road by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton succeeded in making the problem go away. Along the way, this diplomatic process also managed to significantly enhance Israel security by leading Egypt to drop out of the anti-Israel coalition in the Middle East. What's more, during the Clinton years the engagement process came close to achieving a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that would have further enhanced Israeli security and removed a significant diplomatic problem for the United States of America.
At the end of the day and for various reasons, that ultimate goal was not achieved. But the process that came close to success did achieve a great deal. It didn't do so quickly or easily, but it did achieve a lot. And there's every reason to believe that an American administration willing to continue down that path would be able to achieve much more. Certainly, the Bush administration's alternative approach has managed to be enormously more costly while bringing about essentially nothing in the way of positive results.
The deed is done. Sad to see even something as justice for a major-league war criminal rendered tawdry by this administration. Here's a report on the infamous Anfal Campaign that Saddam wasn't tried for in order to spare Donald Rumsfeld embarrassment.
Nancy Pelosi: "The execution of Saddam Hussein ends a tragic chapter in the history of Iraq, but it is not a substitute for an effective strategy that will bring peace to the region and allow the responsible redeployment of U.S. forces."
Chris Cillizza is doing a potentially valuable continuing feature where he details the "inner circle" of different presidential contenders. Today's edition looks at Team Edwards which consists overwhelmingly of people I have no real opinion on. Indeed, it's mostly composed of people I've never heard of. I did meet Jennifer Palmieri once, years ago, before she was working for Edwards, and she seemed smart and pleasant. Realistically, the main thing I learned from the exercise is that I know almost nothing about the world of political operatives.
In less than one week's time . . . the social event of the season . . . Iraq: A Turning Point by the American Enterprise Institute:
U.S. senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and U.S. senator Joseph Lieberman (I-D-Conn.) recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq. Both held extensive discussions with U.S. forces and Iraqi government officials. In light of a possible change in course for U.S. strategy in Iraq, their views will be critical in the upcoming Congressional debate.
At this important time, AEI resident scholar Frederick W. Kagan and former acting Army chief of staff General Jack Keane will release the updated and final version of phase one of “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” The study calls for a large and sustained surge of U.S. forces to secure and protect critical areas of Baghdad. Mr. Kagan directed the report in consultation with military and regional experts, including General Keane, former Afghanistan coalition commander Lieutenant General David Barno, and other officers involved with the successful operations of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar. An interim version of the report was released on December 14, 2006.
At this event, Mr. Kagan and General Keane will present their final report, which outlines how the United States can win in Iraq and why victory is the only acceptable outcome.
Unlike in the musical arena, my cinematic tastes are pretty wide-ranging and by no means restricted to a single genre. Thus, I count six films as worthy of unambiguous recommendation -- The Queen, The Descent, The Departed, Talladega Nights, Tristram Shandy, and Brick. I'm having a great deal of trouble working those into an ordinal ranking. I would say Tristram Shandy and Brick are probably movies for cinephiles, while Descent and Departed have the most mainstream appeal. For whatever reason, a healthy number of people who I would have thought would like Talladega Nights didn't, in practice, enjoy it. Thus The Queen is probably the best movie of the year in some sense, though I'd say I liked Tristram Shandy the best personally.
That leaves the need for four more movies to fill out a top-ten list and I'm going to go with Half Nelson, V for Vendetta, Little Miss Sunshine, and Casino Royale but the exclusion of Apocalypto, Little Children and The Road from Guantanamo from that list is a bit arbitrary since I liked those three a lot, too. I haven't re-viewed any of these movies, so it's possible that my rankings will change over time.
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