Resolutions

I agree with Nick Kristof -- George W. Bush would be a pretty good president if he reversed, um, all of his ideas about public policy and started governing like a liberal Democrat. I'm not sure that really would "rescue" his "legacy" since even the best possible policies simply can't undue the damage caused by the invasion of Iraq (or, say, having invading Afghanistan and failed to achieve any of our major objectives there) in two years' time.

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Losing by Winning

Jon Chait takes on the topic of elections it's better to lose, noting that liberalism would probably have been in much better shape had Gerald Ford been re-elected in 1976 leaving the GOP, rather than Jimmy Carter, saddled with the essentially unsolvable problems of America in the late 1970s:

And the elections that people think don't matter often do. Moderates and liberals widely regarded the 2000 presidential campaign as a snoozer. Apathetic liberals held "shadow conventions" that year to highlight the stultifying timidity of the two major parties. The implicit premise of Ralph Nader's 2000 candidacy was that it was as good a year as any for liberals to make a protest statement and throw the election to a Republican. We now can see that the radicalism of George W. Bush, then half-concealed, along with the rallying effect of Sept. 11 made the 2000 election incredibly consequential.

This consideration of the little-appreciated-at-the-time significance of the 2000 election, however, is the reason why I don't think it ever makes sense to do anything other than try your best to win. The 2000 election turns out to have been incredibly important primarily because of 9/11. The giant external shock created a public expectation of dramatic policy shifts which, of course, made it much easier than it otherwise would have been to implement such shifts and far harder to obstruct or prevent them. Thus, a kind of latent radicalism inside the Bush administration was unleashed in a way it otherwise wouldn't have been. Events, in short, are incredibly important and one of the main things presidents do is respond to them. Meanwhile, it's just not possible to know in advance which four-year periods are the ones that are going to feature dramatic events.

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Sweet Sovereignty

"Under heavy American pressure, the Iraqi government ordered two Iranians who had been detained in an American military raid to leave the country, Iraqi officials said Friday, ending a bitter, nine-day political standoff," reports The New York Times. Can you say untenable situation? The Bush administration (like Joe Lieberman) wants backing the Iraqi government to somehow be an anti-Iranian measure.

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3,000

The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we're passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success. So young men and women are out there killing and dying not because the people giving them their orders really think those orders are a good idea. Instead, they need to stay in Iraq, need to keep killing and keep dying, because the idea of admitting failure is too much for some people.

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Henley Awards

Jim Henley's annual blog awards post is, as usual, a delight.

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Negotiating With Ourselves

Paul Krugman's arguments on behalf of universal health care are well known and widely agreed upon by progressives. Then he gets controversial:

But now is the time to warn against plans that try to cover the uninsured without taking on the fundamental sources of our health system’s inefficiency. What’s wrong with both the Massachusetts plan and Senator Wyden’s plan is that they don’t operate like Medicare; instead, they funnel the money through private insurance companies.

Everyone knows why: would-be reformers are trying to avoid too strong a backlash from the insurance industry and other players who profit from our current system’s irrationality.

But look at what happened to Bill Clinton. He rejected a single-payer approach, even though he understood its merits, in favor of a complex plan that was supposed to co-opt private insurance companies by giving them a largely gratuitous role. And the reward for this “pragmatism” was that insurance companies went all-out against his plan anyway, with the notorious “Harry and Louise” ads that, yes, mocked the plan’s complexity.

I tend to agree with that. I'd happily take something like Wyden's proposal as a compromise measure, but it takes two to compromise. I'm not sure it makes sense for liberals to be pre-emptively offering concessions to the insurance industry with no guarantee that the insurance industry will support the measures being contemplated. To me, it makes more sense to just try and build as much support as possible for a single-payer system and then be prepared to compromise if special interests come to us with alternative universal schemes they're happier with.

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Downward Spiral

Is it just me, or does the tight race for first place in the woeful Atlantic Division seem to pose the risk of launching a downward spiral of tanking at the end of the season? After all, if 32 wins will earn you lottery pick in what's supposed to be an excellent draft, who really wants 35 wins and a hopeless playoff run? I could imagine three or four teams quietly throwing games in an effort to avoid becoming division champion. Meanwhile, as things stand right now, in the Eastern Conference the fifth seed gives you a considerably more favorable playoff matchup than does the third seed. On some level, I have to believe that the incredible awfulness of the Atlantic is a kind of karmic revenge on the NBA for thinking it had solved its seeding problems by decreeing during the offseason that winning a division would no longer guarantee a top-three slot.

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Mortal Combat

All my life, people have been telling me "Matt, you can't get drunk and start swinging knives around at people." To the weak-minded, this is good advice, but I do it all the time and there's never any ill-effect. For example, at a New Year's Eve party, I got into this small knife fight with Becks and it was all fine.

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Death Spiral for Iran?

Washington Post editorial page highlights some interesting new research:

An economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, [Roger] Stern contends that the Iranian oil industry is actually in something of a death spiral. Iran has been missing its OPEC quota of late, and while high oil prices have masked the decline by keeping revenue up, production has been declining. Higher domestic energy demand in Iran combined with difficulty in attracting foreign investment and other economic problems, he argues, make a rapid decline in oil exports likely -- ending in the "extinction" of Iranian oil exports in 2014-15.

The Post offers up the bloggish observation that "We don't know whether Mr. Stern is right." I don't know whether or not he's right, either, and I can't find the paper where Stern makes that argument. In this article, however, Stern winds up being quoted as having policy prescriptions I agree with.

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In Case You're Interested

In Team Bush's take on the past twelve months in Iraq, David Sanger, Michael Gordon, and John Burns have teamed up to offer a fairly comprehensive account based on interviews with a wide variety of key players. You can try and dress this up various different ways, but it comes down to Bush's advisers being consistently something like two or more years behind the reality curve in Iraq. So when the administration outlined its November 2005 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq lots of critics could be heard pointing out that it completely ignored the new civil war dynamic in Iraq. Now, 13 months later, the architects of that strategy are telling us they failed to anticipate the way sectarian violence would tear Iraq apart.

And, yes, they did fail to anticipate it. But the situation was, in fact, widely anticipated by any number of observers around the world. On another level, it's hard to blame Bush's advisors for not coming to him with sounder takes on what's happening. Everyone knows what kind of news and analysis is unwelcome in this administration, and everyone knows what happens to people who bring unwelcome news. So everyone sits around and gets "surprised" by the obvious and predictable.

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Free Will

The Times Science section has an article on free will that's much better than what you usually get from the popular press. A recent Economist article, by contrast, started with some observations about recent neuroscience, leapt to a conclusion about metaphysics, and then pondered whether the new freedom-less metaphysics didn't have sweeping consequences for liberalism, political freedom, etc.

As Julian explains this is all quite wrong. Political liberty, understood as the absence of coercion, has nothing in particular to do with radical metaphysical free will. What's more, there's less connection between the metaphysics of free will and the concept of responsibility than most people think. In most cases, it works perfectly well to think of whether and how to hold someone responsible for something as a pragmatic political decision. The kind of responsibility that may or may not be impacted by what we think about free will is something larger and more transcendent. Something like whether or not it makes sense for God to hold people responsible for their wrongdoing (by, e.g. sending them to hell) if God also created a predetermined universe (as, I think, orthodox Muslims are supposed to believe), which is tied up with all your traditional theological problems about theodicy and so forth. For the purposes of making profane decisions about governance, though, we can kind of ignore all that stuff.

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Discrimination

The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one.

They were also prone to mark down women’s prospects for promotion and to assess them as more controlling than men in their management style.

Read all about it in The Sunday Times. Let me note that these survey results could have been framed in any number of ways. The newspaper chooses to frame it as debunking the notion that women are held back in the workplace by discrimination by men. As best I can tell, however, the survey actually indicates that men and women were both inclined to discriminate against women candidates, but that men were somewhat less so inclined than were women.

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Vous Descendus Mon Cuirassé!

From the world is flat files, I'm in one of those Starbucks-inside-Barnes&Noble places that make contemporary America so great and next to me two little French girls are using pen and paper to play a game that seems to be roughly battleship except I don't recognize the words they're using as indicating naval vessels. It occurs to me at this moment that I somehow never realized that this was a game you could easily play without actually buying the plastic board and little pieces.

UPDATE: I was trying to piece the correct French together, but apparently it should be "vous avez coulé mon cuirassé."

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Astronomical Revisionism

In the course of arguing for school vouchers, Andrew Coulson tries out a little analogy:

Unaware that the planets orbit the sun, pre-Copernican astronomers tried to reproduce their trajectories with clever, intricate, but inevitably doomed geocentric models. In a similar vein, the Center struggled unsuccessfully to reproduce market incentives within their state-centric policy environment.

This is neither here nor there as far as education policy goes, but people are under some serious misapprehensions regarding Copernicus. The thing about pre-Copernican astronomy was that it was actually very good at calculating the orbits of the planets. It was also nicely integrated into a theory of gravity -- objects fall toward the center of the earth because solids have a natural tendency to direct themselves toward the center of the universe. Copernicus, by boldly casting aside the geocentric theory, managed to wreck this theory of motion (he had nothing with which to replace it), and was able to replace the previous astronomical tables with new, less accurate ones. Copernicus, you see, assumed that the planets moved around the suns in circles, which gives you the wrong results. Pre-Copernican astronomers, by contrast, were able to use epicycles to very closely match the theory with the observed data.

The virtue of Copernicus' system is that it was much simpler to do Coperican calculations than it was to factor all the epicycles in. People liked it because it was only somewhat less accurate than its predecessor but substantially easier to use. It took decades, however, for later theorists to work out elliptical orbits and the modern theory of gravity that gave "Copernican" astronomy the theoretical foundations and accurate results that it initially lacked.

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Federalism and Uniformity

There's a bit of discussion about in conservative- and libertarian-leaning segments of the blogosphere on whether administrative decentralization (i.e., "states rights") means anything other than Jim Crow. I suppose there probably is. Approaching things from a different angle, however, Ezra Klein notes that under the American system of government "for all its federalism, there's precious little variation. The most generous cities display only a couple degrees of difference from the least. Santa Fe may have a living wage, but it doesn't have single-payer health care, or paid maternal leave, or massive job retraining. We hear talk about the genius of the states, but they all tend to work on basically the same problem, in basically the same way, leaving little room for brilliance to burst forth."

That seems about right to me. States seem to differ primarily in how they deal with some fairly trivial regulatory matters. Each state's rules governing alcoholic beverages differ somewhat from its neighbors, cigarette taxes and where (if ever) you're permitted to smoke indoors vary, but you don't see a ton of policy variation. No state, no matter how right-wing, has just voted to dismantle its public school system nor have we seen a state attempt single-payer health care. I wonder if this is parasitic on the fact that there's shockingly little institutional variation among American states.

US federalism is somewhat unusual in that the states have essentially total autonomy in terms of how they want to arrange the institutions of state government. The federal constitution only contains a vague requirement of a "Republican form of government" which seems to offer a lot of leeway. Nevertheless, 49 out of 50 states choose bicameralism. Zero states out of fifty opt for parliamentary-style governance where the state executive must maintain the confidence of the legislature. All fifty states, including tiny Rhode Island, implement a an interstitial country (or "parish") level of government between the state and towns and cities. All the states elect their legislators on the basis of single-member constituencies. You'd think that some state, at least, would try something different along some of these dimensions and see how it works out.

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World Turned Up and Down

Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer, strong contenders for the title of America's Worst Journalist, go head-to-head on Special Report with Brit Hume and Krauthammer emerges as the voice of (relative) reason:

FRED BARNES: And I don't think, and we see it in the media, in particular, that the Sunnis should be treated as some abused minority. They have accepted no guilt, no responsibility for Saddam's crimes . . . They have mounted the insurgency, and those who weren't a part of it allowed it. They provided the ocean that allowed these insurgents to swim in. . . .

I'm not worried about harmony. What I'm worried about is crushing the Sunni insurgency, because nothing good can happen until then. There's no offer that can be made that somebody can accept. First you have to have security. You can't have this level of violence there caused mostly by the Sunni insurgency. They're the ones who are carrying out all the suicide bombings, and they can get mad about it because they think it wasn't a dignified execution, I say so what.

KRAUTHAMMER: But the way to defeat it is to win over the clan leaders in the Sunni leaders. . . . And they will not come over to a government which is acting on behalf of Shiites.

The trouble that Krauthammer can't see, is that we're beyond the point where we can act in a meaningful way to bring about national reconciliation in Iraq. Only Iraqi political leaders can do that. At this point, our real role in the country is to be manipulated by various actors there.

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Tossing Towels

Before the release of the ISG report, Spencer Ackerman predicted its real impact would be turning withdrawal into a "respectable" point of view. I don't think it's quite happened yet, but we do see more and more folks throwing in the towel. Andrew Sullivan stands for nothing if not the elite consensus, and he's had enough:

The moral cost of withdrawal is huge. We should do all we can to provide amnesty for any Iraqis who have been loyal to us. (It does not surprise me that we shamefully haven't. This is the Bush administration.) But the moral cost of plowing on is also exponential. It may merely delay the day of reckoning. It risks sending young Americans to die in order for a president to save face, not in order to win. The truth is: we have lost this battle, if not the war.

Escalation, at this point, is just throwing good money after bad. The good news, for hawks, is that it's not their money that they're throwing, not their lives that they're ruining.

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Children of Men

Late-breaking addition to the best movies of 2006. Various sources kept assuring me that I had to go see Children of Men. The problem: It was only playing in Georgetown. But I was determined. I walked to Georgetown and saw it. The matinée was weirdly well-attended since the federal government apparently gave people the day off for Gerald Ford's funeral. The results are pretty neat and the technical execution is really superb. I had a great time watching it despite not-so-promising circumstances. Unfortunately, though it didn't bother me at the time, the key developments didn't really make a great deal of sense. Spoiler-filled discussion below the fold.

Continue reading "Children of Men" »

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Where Are the Cuts?

From President Bush's Wall Street Journal op-ed available this morning:

Because revenues have grown and we've done a better job of holding the line on domestic spending, we met our goal of cutting the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule. By continuing these policies, we can balance the federal budget by 2012 while funding our priorities and making the tax cuts permanent. In early February, I will submit a budget that does exactly that. The bottom line is tax relief and spending restraint are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget. Now is not the time to raise taxes on the American people.

I'm dying to know where the cuts are going to be in this budget. Not, presumably, in defense, Social Security, Medicare, homeland security, or Medicaid. But to balance the budget while keeping the Bush tax cuts permanent without cutting those programs would require really, really steep cuts elsewhere. Certainly I wouldn't advise working together in a bipartisan manner with the White House on this. Either there are going to be some really egregious accounting gimmicks, or else there are going to be some proposed cuts that should be wielded as a mighty political bludgeon against those Republicans who, unlikely Bush, need to run for re-election. Realistically, the best thing that can be done for the budget short-term is to allow the bulk of the Bush tax cuts to expire.

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Why Hawks Win

Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon have a fascinating article in Foreign Policy arguing that a variety of human cognitive biases all tilt the scales in arguments unduly in favor of hawkish, aggressive solutions and away from dovish, compromise oriented ones. The editors of the FP website asked Matt Continetti and myself (aka "the Matt Continetti of the left") to write responses. You can see Continetti's take here and mine here. A second round should emerge online soon.

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The Turkmen Opposition

From the "I don't know anything about this but I'm suspicious" files comes Nurmuhammet Hanamov's op-ed about Turkmenistan in The Washington Post:

The United States must send a clear message to Niyazov's holdouts in the "interim government" in Ashgabat: that they will not have its support unless they agree to hold free and fair elections -- ones that allow all citizens of Turkmenistan, including exiled opposition leaders and political prisoners, to take part.

In particular, exile leader "Khudaiberdy Orazov, a former chairman of the National Bank and an accomplished and energetic leader" needs to be allowed to run. He'll be able to rely on the help of the "thriving community of bright Turkmen students and intellectuals who are living in Western countries and are ready to return and help rebuild their country." Never fear, however, we and Orazov will be greeted as liberators: "According to a recent poll, Orazov's candidacy would have the support of a majority of Turkmen voters." New regime's key priorities?

Priorities for a democratically elected government during the initial post-Niyazov reconstruction must be to release all political prisoners, conduct open tenders and allow Western companies to bid for a stake in developing Turkmenistan's oil and gas fields; to consider new ways of getting our gas and oil to Western markets; to restore private property that Niyazov confiscated from Turkmen citizens; and to create a reconstruction fund using Niyazov's personal bank accounts and proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to revive the health-care and education systems.

Mmm...oil and gas fields. Seriously, for all I know this is totally legit, but it sure doesn't seem legit. The author "is the founding chairman of the Republican Party of Turkmenistan in exile. Before announcing his opposition to President Saparmurad Niyazov's regime and going into exile in 2002, Hanamov served as Turkmenistan's ambassador to Turkey and Israel and chairman of Turkmenistan's State Planning Committee."

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The Space-Industrial Complex

"In 1962, President Kennedy succeeded in captivating Americans by explaining the advantages of being the first country to reach the moon and the dangers of allowing another nation to beat us there," writes Mario Cuomo in USA Today, "As a result, we did beat the Russians to the moon, and every year for the past four decades, we have invested billions of dollars in space exploration with little political or public opposition and produced brilliant success." Cuomo helpfully offered a link to Kennedy's speech, so I followed it. After all, I'm curious -- what advantages were there to having been the first country to reach the moon? In what way are Americans better-off than Canadians or Belgians in virtue of Armstrong's voyage? The speech doesn't actually enlighten on this front:

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? . . .

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."

These analogies aren't crazy reasons for doing things, but they do seem like odd reasons for public-sector endeavors. Rice plays Texas for honor, but also because people will buy tickets to the game, watch it on television, etc . . . football rivalries are entertaining spectacles financed by the people who find them entertaining. Mallory joined the Alpine Club to pursue his passion for mountain-climbing, he didn't get a job at the Royal Mountaineering Agency.

I'm not one of these "open outer space to more private-sector activity and we'll have colonies on Titan in seven weeks" people but it does seem to me that there's probably a sufficient mix of legitimate commercial uses for space and rich eccentric space enthusiasts (and, of course, there's the intersection of the two: providing space-related commercial services to wealthy eccentrics) to keep human activity going out there without giant subsidies to the aerospace industry. A general public-sector pullback from outer space in favor of NGOs and business enterprises would be a natural corollary to the principle of outer space as international ad demilitarized. The Bush administration, in keeping with longstanding Air Force priorities, seems more inclined in the opposite direction.

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Sweet

Keith Ellison to be sworn in on Thomas Jefferson's old Koran.

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How Convenient

My first reaction upon hearing the news was "fuck Pat Riley," but to offer a more measured take it seems mighty convenient for Pat Riley to be taking health-related leave now that his team is once again bad. Riley's obviously got some skills as a coach, but he's also a serious scumbag.

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Drug Wars

I guess this is something liberals and libertarians are supposed to agree about, but I consistently find it bizarre that there are some people who seem to think it would be a good idea if you could just walk into your local convenience store and pick up some heroin or crack along with your Fritos and Diet Coke. At times, people taking this line seem to argue that drug prohibition couldn't possibly be having any beneficial effects because, after all, you can still find heroin. Naturally enough, you don't see anyone proposing that the "war on mugging" be ended simply because mugging-prohibition has failed to actually eliminate the proscribed activity. That said, like any reasonable person I think many aspects of current crime-control and drug-control policy in the United States don't make sense. So I have a hard time knowing what to make of things like this from Jerry Taylor:

While it should be obvious to any fair-minded observer that our increasingly brutal war on drugs is a losing proposition on all counts, few of us seem to be fair minded observers. So allow me to pose a question to those of you still clinging to this benighted enterprise: Exactly what would it take to convince you that the drug war was causing more harm than good? Is there any bit of data, any hypothetical fact, or anything at all that would cause you to give up the policy ghost? Because if there is not, then we are in the realm of religious belief — and that’s about all that I can find to support this cruel, costly, and counterproductive jihad.

I mean, I'm not even clear on what question's being asked here. Do I think the status quo is preferable to total deregulation of currently prohibited drugs? I would say so. But considering how heavily regulated the use of alcohol and tobacco is, one hardly imagines that a heroin free-for-all (ads after school cartoons, for sale out of ice cream trucks) is a likely alternative policy. So, I don't know. What is the "war on drugs" exactly? Does it do more harm than good compared to what? That said, this Mike Males op-ed Taylor links to sure is interesting:

It’s time to end the obsession with hyping teenage drug use. The meaningless surveys that policy makers now rely on should be replaced with a comprehensive “drug abuse index” that pulls together largely ignored data on drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime, diseases and similar practical measures. . . .

Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California’s drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective policies.

I wouldn't have guessed that.

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Distant Relatives

Like a lot of writers I subscribe to a Google Alert for news about myself, because I wouldn't have gotten into writing unless I found myself incredibly fascinating. Since "Yglesias" is a rare name, whenever you see it, it's almost always my dad or one of my grandparets and since I'm interested in all those people I just leave the alert set for "Yglesias" rather than for "Matthew Yglesias" or some such. Sometimes that brings news of myself, or sometimes things like this Hollywood Reporter story about dad that popped up this morning. Sometimes, though, I learn about further-flung relatives:

After a November preliminary hearing, Madera County Judge Jennifer Detjen ordered Duran held for trial in the Dec. 20, 2005, death of Michelle Ann Yglesias. The 30-year-old Yglesias was Duran's cellmate in Valley State Prison for Women.

Hott.

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Unanswered Questions

Brad Plumer reminds that one consequence of Saddam Hussein's death is that we won't get a chance to find out his take on the origins of the Gulf War. There are persistent and plausible indications that America's ambassador to Iraq before the war, April Glaspie, told Saddam that "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait," which Saddam understood as an implicit green light to deal with the Kuwait situation however he saw fit, including via invasion. US officials, naturally, deny that this is what happened, since if it is it was a pretty embarrassing screw-up. Still, it's normally the case that if you take a good hard look at a war you're going to find that it wouldn't have happened absent some screw-ups. The Truman administration, famously, did something similar, appearing to leave South Korea outside the realm of American defense commitments and then going to war to preserve South Korean independence.

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No Conscience

I'm at the Wizards game last night, and with the score tied 105-105, Milwaukee set to inbound the ball, 27 seconds on the clock, the couple sitting in front of me decides it's time to leave. They wanted to beat the rush? Seriously? This is why I favor the death penalty.

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Incompetence Again

Perhaps people are bored with this question, so I'll put the main discussion below the fold, but Jacob Weisberg has an article out on the "Incompetence Dodge" issue in which he kindly links to the piece Sam and I wrote on this some time ago. As Weisberg says "What makes this backward-looking conversation more than academic is its implications for American foreign policy beyond Iraq." He disagrees with my take on this, but it's not really clear to me from his article why he disagrees with me other than that he seems to think that if he agrees with me that means he must be an "isolationist" and he doesn't want to be an isolationist.

Continue reading "Incompetence Again" »

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Woodrow Wilson

In honor of the 150th birthday of Woodrow Wilson, John Ikenberry offers fourteen points about the man, his foreign policy, and his legacy. Point six is probably the most important:

Wilson’s vision embodied both impulses toward “liberal imperialism” (or, more politely, “liberal interventionism”) and “liberal internationalism” – an awkward and problematic duality that continues among liberals today.

The “liberal imperial” impulse was on display in Wilson’s earlier interventions in Mexico in 1914 and 1916. Wilson said that America’s deployment of force was to help Mexico “adjust her unruly household.” Regarding Latin America, Wilson said: “We are friends of constitutional government in America; we are more than its friends, we are its champions. I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Indeed, Wilson used military force in an attempt to teach Southern republics, intervening in Cuba, the Dominion Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

The “liberal internationalist” impulse was articulated later during the Great War in the Fourteen Points address and in proposals for collective security and the League of Nations. This sentiment was stated perhaps most clearly in the summer of 1918 as the war was reaching its climax. Wilson gave his July 4th address at Mount Vernon and described his vision of postwar order: “What see seek is the reign of law, based on the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.”

I think "liberal hawks" have been having a lot of trouble recognizing that George W. Bush perfectly authentically represents the first, imperialistic version of Wilson and Wilsonianism. It's not a farce or a corruption of a perfect ideal. It just is the ideal and it happens to be a rather corrupt one. Then there's this other, rather different set of Wilsonian ideas which I think are a good deal better. John Judis wrote a great book about this.

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How to Save the Classics

All the 'sphere's a twitter about some libraries dumping little-read classics in favor of more high-demand contemporary bestsellers. Julian's post on this, however, inspired me to remark that far and away the most important thing for the preservation of the classics has nothing to do with library policies and everything to do with intellectual property policy.

In a world where classic works enter the public domain, people will get them one way or another. They'll be available for free download on the internet. E-book technology will improve. Print copies will cheaply available to people who want to buy them. Whether or not these things are in local libraries sort of won't be a huge deal one way or another. Now, traditionally, copyrights have had limited durations and "classic" books, being old by definition, tend to be in the public domain and hence widely available. In a digital era, they'll be super-available. But the emerging trend of the digital era is for retroactive extensions of copyright terms meaning that nothing new will ever enter the public domain. Ever.

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Advice to the Kids

Don't stay in school. Joakim Noah "had a Cinderella run for Florida last season and most likely would have been the No. 1 pick in the 2006 NBA draft had he declared," but times have changed, and "Noah is still ranked by most scouts as a top-five player in the draft, but lately I've been hearing a chorus of questions about his position, offense and failure to improve much this season."

I always find it incredibly frustrating to see sportswriters and tv commentators laud college underclassmen who make really, really dumb decisions not to turn pro. It was Matt Leinart a little while back, Joakim Noah last spring, and potentially Greg Oden this time around. I think people do it because they think staying in school sends a positive message to the kids or something. But while it generally is advisable to stay in school, there's no reason kids should be taught to celebrate people who make stupid financial decisions just out of some generic pro-school sentiments.

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Seymour Martin Lipset

Via Ed Kilgore, I see that the political scientist and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset died last week while I wasn't paying attention. He was a very great and brilliant man, if you've never read any of his books you really should.

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Shakeups

Lots of personnel moves in the national security department. John Negroponte is out as Director of National Intelligence and in as Deputy Secretary of State. Harriet Miers will no longer be in charge of explaining why torture is legal. What's more, David Petraeus won't be taking my advice and will instead assume command in Iraq where the world will get to see his counterinsurgency theories fail. Zalmay Khalilzad will be out as ambassador in Baghdad and move to Turtle Bay instead (John Bolton, I guess, will spend more time with his family).

Khalilzad's replacement will be Ryan Crocker, a career foreign service officer with an interesting resumé. At the moment, he's ambassador to Pakistan. During the late Clinton years, however, he was ambassador to Syria and he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs during the early Bush/Powell years. With Crocker and Petraeus leading the team in Iraq, I don't think it will any longer be viable to claim that the mission is failing because it's being run by hacks and know-nothings; the mission will fail because the mission is impossible. Last, in a break with precedent Bush will put a Navy officer, Admiral William Fallon in charge of Central Command.

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The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

Another day, another bad budget article in The Washington Post. Describing what happened after the 1997 budget deal, we learn:

The deficit disappeared sooner than that, and when Clinton left office the nation had its first surplus in three decades. But fiscal fortunes took a turn under Bush as he ushered in huge tax cuts, an early recession took its toll and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prompted a wave of new spending on the military and homeland defense.

9/11 and the small economic downturn early in Bush's term were "fortunes." Bush tax cuts, however, were not luck, they were policy choices. Similarly, while we can assume any president would have engage in 9/11-related defense spending, we can't just describe Bush's decision to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on invading Iraq as a straightforward consequence of 9/11. Worse, not only is all of this lumped in as "fortunes" but we're given no sense of the magnitude. How big were the tax cuts compared to revenue lost from the downturn? How much defense spending has there been and how much of that has been in Iraq? With information like that, readers might learn something from reading their morning paper.

People seeking information about the federal budget would be well-advised to look at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' slide show and their general federal budget page. The Washington Post offers pretty good Wizards coverage and their DC Sports Blog is a treat.

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Short-tempered

I'm in a foul mood and, frankly, shit like this article from Roger Cohen in the International Herald-Tribune doesn't improve the mood. It's a column in praise of the Euston Manifesto which, we're told, "has received too little attention" because it's too sane. Whatever. It's the end that rankles, however:

If you're tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti- Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.

I don't know how others feel about this, but I have to believe I'm not the only Jewish American who's getting tired of constantly having vague accusations of anti-semitism smeared around in my general direction. I mean, forget the anti-semitism. Since when has anti-Zionism become such a powerful force in American politics that we need the Euston Manifesto to save us all? But of course we're not talking about anti-semitism or anti-Zionism here. We're just talking about ordinary political disagreement. The article comes to me via Martin Peretz, who's status as a cosignatory of the Manifesto proudly demonstrates what a hollow farce it is to present the document as some kind of left position.

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Back to Somalia

So, I've been remiss in extending my Somalia coverage into the New Year, but suffice it to say that having foiled the Islamists plans to make a last stand in Kismayo, the Ethiopian-backed government is suffering from some chaos issues: "Just days after Ethiopian-led troops helped rout once powerful Islamist forces in Somalia and install a new government in the capital, security seemed to be unraveling across the country." Violence is coming in two forms, "antigovernment attacks and increased banditry, both of which were virtually unheard of during the Islamists’ short-lived reign." Washington Post reports on the return of warlordism to Mogadishu.

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Global Warming

It's, like, really warm out today and has been consistently this week. Which, on the whole, is a good thing. One can't help but wonder, however, when crazy things happen like flowers blossoming on trees. In January. Presumably, this is bad for the trees. I mean, it has to be, right? Plus, it's actually a little unnerving -- unnatural -- and it makes me fear what will happen in August. 130 degrees? Will giant half-melted bits of the polar ice cap come sliding down from Canada and crush my house?

I have concerns.

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A House Divided

One thing I've heard over the years is that George W. Bush and his top aides liked the idea of Dick Cheney being Vice President in part because Cheney lacks presidential ambitions. That way, everyone on the team would be working toward one goal: The greater glory of George Bush.

Realistically, I think this is going to prove to be a serious mistake. It's unprecedented in the modern era for a term-limited president not to have a designated successor. Such a successor lends coherence and continuity to the administration as a whole, understood as a complicated organism involving hundreds (if not thousands) of people at all kinds of levels. Without a successor, that organism is going to start fracturing, as people realize that the ticket to future jobs is no longer to continue toiling away for Bush, but rather to join a GOP presidential campaign. But those campaigns are going to be busy attacking each other and needing to differentiate themselves from each other -- nobody's going to be cooperating with the White House. Mike Allen's Time story on the disbanding of the Bush/Cheney '04 rapid response teams gets at some of this emerging dynamic.

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Die for Your Government

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," [ Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe] Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally not figuratively." Kevin Drum's alternative theory is that they figure if worst comes to worst, Iraq goes through some ethnic cleansing and the United States just backs whoever emerges controlling Baghdad in exchange for a willingness to host some permanent military bases.

Noting Jim Miklaszewski's report report that "one administration official admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one because the American people have run out of patience and President Bush is running out of time to achieve some kind of success in Iraq," Spencer Ackerman wondered "How many lives is a five-point bump in the polls worth, anyway?" Many, many lives, if you're George W. Bush. As Kahneman and Renshom observe:

Imagine, for example, the choice between:

Option A: A sure loss of $890

Option B: A 90 percent chance to lose $1,000 and a 10 percent chance to lose nothing.

In this situation, a large majority of decision makers will prefer the gamble in Option B, even though the other choice is statistically superior. People prefer to avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential loss, even if they risk losing significantly more. When things are going badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting one’s losses, often compounded by wishful thinking, is likely to dominate the calculus of the losing side. This brew of psychological factors tends to cause conflicts to endure long beyond the point where a reasonable observer would see the outcome as a near certainty. Many other factors pull in the same direction, notably the fact that for the leaders who have led their nation to the brink of defeat, the consequences of giving up will usually not be worse if the conflict is prolonged, even if they are worse for the citizens they lead.

This, I think, gets at the real truth. It doesn't matter to Bush and his top aides whether or not Iraq is, for all intents and purposes, hopeless. They don't pay any downside costs of escalating, so they're willing to make American military personnel and American taxpayers bear any burden and pay any price for even the vaguest hope that this will in some way increase the odds of something they could plausibly label "success" happening.

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In Retrospect...

... ABC News asks folks who were members of the Senate in October 2002 if they would be inclined to revise their vote based on what we now all know about the intelligence. I was interested to see Senators Clinton and Biden (among others) now in the doves-in-retrospect camp. One would think this question should be a no-brainer, but recall that as recently as 2004 such Democratic Party presidential and vice presidential nominees as John Kerry and John Edwards were still maintaining they'd voted the wrong way. Shortly after the campaign ended, both of them defected to the dove camp, but to the best of my knowledge Clinton was still sticking the hawk line.

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of GOP Senators either refused to answer or else dodged the question in silly ways. Folks should keep at it; this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. I also note that House members shouldn't be immune.

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Maria Leavey, RIP

Most readers probably won't recognize the name Maria Leavey unless it's by having read it sometime within the past 24 hours in the blogosphere, but suffice it to say that she's passed away and the progressive community and the world as a whole will be poorer for it. I was going to write that it's hard to explain exactly what role she played, but it's hard in part because I'm not really sure what role she played myself. She was someone who would pop up now and again, setting something up or arranging something else. One time she stopped by the office with homemade cookies (delicious!) but more often she was the driving force behind meetings, though at least once she was the driving force behind the creation of some multimedia content. A tireless worker, in short, who rarely sought (or received) credit for her labors, but undertook them nonetheless.

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New Plans

The Washington Post reported in this morning's edition that "In a speech today unveiling his own revised security plan, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to publicly welcome additional U.S. troops, a condition requested by the Bush administration." One would hope so. Obviously, if we're going to flood Iraq with thousands of additional soldiers, the support of the Iraqi government would seem to be crucial. As the Post continues, "Maliki's cooperation is pivotal to Bush's own efforts." So what do I see in my Associated Press coverage:

Al-Maliki is uneasy about the possible introduction of more U.S. troops, aides said, and he has repeatedly refused U.S. demands to crush the militia of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, one of the prime minister's most powerful backers.

Sami al-Askari, an al-Maliki political adviser, told The Associated Press on Friday that al-Maliki had not acquiesced to a reported White House plan to send as many as 9,000 more U.S. troops to Baghdad alone.

Oops? I'm not even sure. Once again, we see that this whole thing is backwards and horribly ill-conceived. Note that Maliki's new plan and Bush's new plan (which may or may not be the same plan) seem exactly the same as Operation Forward Together, a surge-based Baghdad security plan implemented in June 2006 that failed utterly.

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Yes, Bush is Unpopular

Wingnutsphere wrong again, there is no poll showing Nancy Pelosi to be less popular than George W. Bush and the reason MSM coverage of the two politicians doesn't reflect the fact that Pelosi is less popular than Bush is that Pelosi is not, in fact, less popular.

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Casey at the Bat

Appointing General George Casey Chief of Staff of the Army seems a bit at odds with that big long story last week about how Iraq was all Casey's fault, Bush was through with Casey, the post-Casey era was going to be awesome, etc., etc., etc.

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