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.
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.
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.
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 knifefight with Becks and it was all fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Postreports on the return of warlordism to Mogadishu.
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?
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.
"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.
... 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.
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.
The Washington Postreported 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.
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.
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.
I basically share Brad Plumer's take. Jonathan Edelstein tries to lay out two scenarios -- one optimistic and one pessimistic. His inclination is to be a pessimist. Obviously, though, nobody can know for certain about this kind of thing. Sufficiently wise leadership by various relevant actors could save the situation.
Word on the street is that they're putting a Navy guy in charge of CENTCOM because that's supposed to scare Iran. Either that, or it's because we're actually planning to start a war with Iran. In which case I'm scare. But now: Brunch.
For over three years, President Bush sided with the light-footprint school. He did so for personal reasons, not military ones. Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment.
But sometimes good men make bad choices, and it is now clear that the light-footprint approach has been a disaster. If the U.S. had committed more troops and established security back in 2003, when, as Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek recently reminded us, the Coalition Provisional Authority had 70 percent approval ratings, history would be different.
So, given all that, would adding troops now help? "Many in and out of the administration think so, hence all the talk about a surge — putting 20,000 more troops into Baghdad, finally occupying the dangerous neighborhoods, finally starting a jobs program, finally forcing national reconciliation." Brooks actually thinks it's too late for this. Instead, we should combine a surge with "giving up the dream of national reconciliation and acknowledging that Iraq is in the process of dividing itself" and "using adequate force levels (finally!) to help those who are returning to sectarian homelands. It would mean erecting buffers between populations where possible and establishing order in areas that remain mixed."
A bunch of questions arise. Is it really plausible that the difference between a stable democratic Iraq and the current mess is whether or not there were 20,000 more troops there in 2006? Note that 20,000 just coincidentally happens to be the number of troops currently logistically available for a surge. The standard "more troops" doctrine has always maintained that the initial occupation force should have included 400,000-500,000 troops, not 20,000 more troops. It's just too trivial a number to make a real difference (except, of course, to the people who will see their deployments extended, to those who die on extended deployments, to their wives, children, husbands, etc.).
What's more, almost four years into the war, if Bush is about to implement yet another new strategy and Brooks thinks that strategy is doomed to fail, isn't it time to just give up on the war? To stop offering further helpful suggestions? Why is Brooks so nanchalant about the wastage of lives looming in what he acknowledges is a doomed military escalation.
The naked painted ladies, part of the evening's entertainment -- and yes, naked naked, save for a thong and a head-to-toe paint job -- don't have to worry about goosebumps ruining the effect of all that . . . paint.
Frankly . . . I'm concerned. The extravaganza seems out of step with Arenas's chipped-shoulder ideology. Also, if he realizes that being young and rich could lead to tons of fun parties, where's he going to find the time to take his dogs on the treadmill. It's a worrying situation. The saving grace is that all these fans seem determined to vote Vince Carter into the All-Star Game, giving Gilbert the snub the Wiz need. If we get really, really lucky somehow the coaches will fail to select him, too. Kidd! Billups! Redd! Can't deny those guys.
I was cooking swordfish with a friend last night, and her fish cookbook (James Peterson's Fish & Shellfish) makes the following observation:
Although grilling and broiling are similar techniques—in some parts of the United States the two words are used interchangeably—grilling is used here to mean cooking over, but not in contact with, the heat source. Broiling is cooking under the heat source.
Here's the question: Which parts of the United States? Perhaps the southeast which is really the region I don't know anyone from. Initially, we thought we couldn't think of any examples of people using "broil" to mean "grill" or vice versa, but Burger King does refer to its burgers as "flame broiled" when I would say they're grilled.
In answer to Nicholas Beaudrot's question about term-limits for congressional committee chairs I don't think such limits are optimal policy. They are, however, superior to the leading alternative -- strict seniority. The main impact of term limits is to enhance the power of the congressional leadership vis-a-vis committee chairs. That's because all fairly senior members know that there's bound to be a reasonable amount of limits-related churn, making the leaders' views on what your next assignment should be very important.
This, in turn, is an important thing to do because the US government simply has too many veto points -- bicameralism, the need for presidential ascent, strong judicial review, and fairly strong federalism make it quite difficult to legislate in the United States. The era of strong committee chairs (and of strong committees) introduced even more veto points into the system, giving special interests extraordinary ability to frustrate popular general-interest legislation. Term limits have led to stronger leadership and weaker committee chairs and that's a good thing, even if ideally you might achieve that same result some other way.
NYTimestoday: "President Bush’s new Iraq policy will establish a series of goals that the Iraqi government will be expected to meet to try to ease sectarian tensions and stabilize the country politically and economically, senior administration officials said Sunday. Among these 'benchmarks' are steps that would draw more Sunnis into the political process, finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue and ease the government’s policy toward former Baath Party members, the officials said." Benchmarks, whoah! I remember back in December 2005 when benchmarks were surrender and only cheese-eating surrender monkeys thought we needed them.
But of course Bush changed his mind on October 25, 2006, telling Byron York, "“The idea is to develop with the Iraqi government a series of benchmarks — oil, federalism, constitutional reform, there’s like 20 different things — and have that developed in a way that they’re comfortable with and we’re comfortable with." That prompted Thomas Ricks' October 26, 2006 takedown "Bush's Proposal for Benchmarks Sounds Familiar" noting that Bush's remarks "left unclear how the benchmarks would be different from previous times when the United States has set out intentions, only to back down."
Never fear, though. There's a new strategy now: Benchmarks!
Via Robert Farley, an article noting that "The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades." One of the worst-covered aspects of the Bush foreign policy has been this element of proliferation policy -- namely, that one major source of our difficulty in getting the multilateral non-proliferation process to prevent Iran and North Korea from going nuclear is that we keep breaking the rules. The NPT requires the legitimate nuclear powers to be taking steps to disarm, toward an eventually goal of global nuclear abolition.
We're going in the other direction, hoping, in essence, for Iran to be subject to restrictions tighter than what the NPT requires of Iran, while the United States (and Israel, and now India as well) can violate its terms or refuse to join its framework without consequence. Brute force is the only way you could possibly enforce that sort of ruleset. If the actual goal were non-proliferation -- as opposed to asymetrical proliferation -- it would be easy to find alternatives to war.
Some would suggest that the right's newfound obsession with tone is not only hypocritical but an attempt to stifle criticism through arbitrary criteria, much like campus PC-niks. But I would not suggest that because that would be an angry thing to say, and I do not want to do any more damage to civil discourse than I already have.
Quite so. Normally, though, it seems to me that bloggers get bitten thusly, from time to time by Chait. It's obviously true that the blogosphere (and especially its progressive arm) involves a degree of vulgarity that wouldn't pass muster on television or in print, but the actual significance of this tends to escape me. Nevertheless, a lot of MSM types seem to enjoy pointing to this arbitrary stylistic difference between bloggers and "real" writers as a means of pre-empting consideration of criticism.
Alan Reynolds' longer paper making the argument that inequality hasn't increased in the United States is now available. I've had some time to look into this dispute since his initial op-ed came out, and nothing in the lengthier paper addresses any of my considerable concerns about his argument. Reynolds notes that the tax return data on which Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez based their work have some flaws. He does not, however, address what has to be considered the overwhelmingly most important reason for preferring the Piketty-Saez approach to the use of Census Bureau figures -- the Census doesn't count high incomes. It does something known as "top coding" where people are asked to report their household income according to a series of thresholds (less than X, X-Y, Y-Z, Z-A, A-B, over B) and then everyone who reports as being at or higher than the top threshold is counting as if they were at the threshold. The explosion in income for the top one percent that Piketty and Saez report (and bigger explosion for the top 0.1 percent, top 0.01 percent. etc) doesn't show up in the Census data because the Census doesn't measure very high incomes.
At times, Reynolds seems to be misinterpreting or misrepresenting his own data. He makes a big deal about how there's a large discontinuity in the tax data around the 1986 Tax Reform and that this can make changes look bigger than they really were. The conclusion he wants to reach, however, is that there's been no trend toward inequality. If you look at his table on page five, however, you can see that both before and after the discontinuity, there's a clear upward trend in the percentage of total income going to the top one percent.
I would recommend Pittkey and Saez's rebuttal for more on this. To make a long story short, Reynolds has me very convinced that journalists have frequently oversimplified or slightly misrepresented the inequality situation in the past oftentimes by mentioning the Pittkey/Saez paper. I'm not at all convinced, however, that we haven't seen a large increase in inequality. What's more, it's pretty clear that Reynolds and the venues in which he's publishing (Cato, WSJ editorial page) would oppose policies aimed at curbing the growth in inequality even if they did believe (or, perhaps, acknowledge) it was happening, which offers relatively little reason to regard this as a good-faith effort to measure the level of inequality in America.
UPDATE: To get a good look at the slipperiness we're dealing with here, check out the Cato Editor's blurb (emphasis added):
There are frequent complaints that U.S. income inequality has increased in recent decades. Estimates of rising inequality that are widely cited in the media are often based on federal income tax return data. Those data appear to show that the share of U.S. income going to the top 1 percent has increased substantially since the 1970s. A new study by Cato scholar Alan Reynolds shows that these claims are wrong in both their premises and their conclusions. In “Has U.S. Income Inequality Really Increased?,” Reynolds concludes, “There is no clear evidence of a significant and sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth since the late 1980s.”
Even if you believe that there's no "clear" evidence of a "significant and sustained" increase in inequality since the late 1980s this, rather clearly, wouldn't rebut the assertion that "the share of U.S. income going to the top 1 percent has increased substantially since the 1970s." People who would portray the two claims as contradictory are much more interested in convincing you that there's no inequality problem than they are in finding out what's happening with inequality.
DCist tries in vain to convince the political journalism world that Washington, DC is not, in fact, located on a swamp. At best, portions of Washington are tidal marsh. At the same time, much of the city is elevated above the river and has never had any even vaguely marshy attributes. What's more, we don't have to put up with straneg odors, only the metaphorical stench of corruption.
All of Europe gets cut off from crude oil supplies, apparently. Somewhat ironically, for the past few years the hot foreign policy concern has been that Russia would use its energy reserves to try and coerce Western European countries into doing something or other. Instead, Western Europe is being cut off as Belarus attempts to coerce Russia. At least maybe that's happening. Alternatively, it might just be an accident.
John Podhoretz offers the observation that "If Democrats offer a genuinely serious AMT reform that manages to cut taxes for tens of millions of middle-class people, the constituency for vetoing such a reform on the grounds that it would involve a tax-rate increase on those making more than $150,000 a year could fit comfortably into a Tokyo hotel room." Larry Kudlow responds that "Using $150K as a threshold means a school teacher and a cop. Not exactly rich people." J-Pod with a help from some readers notes in response that "Only 5 percent of American households report earnings higher than $157,000 a year" and follows up arguing that precise salaries for cops and teachers is irrelevant, the point is that "Five percent is a lot of households, true — 5 million or so. But to write as though a $150,000 salary in America puts you smack dab in the middle of the middle class, which was Larry's rhetorical purpose, just doesn't jibe with the way lives are lived in America."
Kudlow doesn't seem to have an answer to that, but Ramesh Ponnuru manages to weigh-in on Kudlow's side with a further observation:
The Clintonites thought that they were raising taxes only on the top 2 percent of Americans and cutting taxes for a lot of people (by expanding the earned income credit). They got branded as tax hikers anyway. (And it would have been a tough vote for them even if they hadn't raised the gas tax as part of the deal.)
Advice to always eschew the passive voice can be abused, but Ponnuru should consider the lack of agency in that story. Who branded the Clinton administration as "tax hikers" for their plan to raise taxes on a tiny minority of wealthy Americans while cutting taxes for a larger class of working poor people? Could that have been conservative politicians? And how well would that campaign have worked had the conservative politicians not been assisted by conservative pundits? These things don't just happen.
To echo my man Spencer, someone should let Jeffrey Goldberg know that whatever you want to call the fact that the Democratic base thinks fighting AIDS should be a top foreign policy priority means, it can't mean that Democrats are retreating from internationalism. We're looking at an intense concern for the well-being of foreigners who live in states too poor or too chaotic to take care of them properly and, perhaps, concern about the second-order consequences of indifference to their fate. As Henley likes to say here, the specter of "isolationism" in this context is merely "a reluctance to travel a long distance to kill foreigners at great expense."
Meanwhile, why would you be listening to Evan Bayh to put your finger on the pulse of things?
Bayh says it "would be tragic" if Iraq makes people too hesitant to launch a war against Iran "because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too." While Bayh's analysis of this would obviously be more credible if he hadn't been wrong about Iraq, his analysis is also simply wrong. What "we thought Iraq was" was a country likely to acquire a nuclear weapon that it was likely to deploy in an unprovoked first strike against the United States (possibly delivered via al-Qaeda) as well as a promising venue for an experiment in democratization-by-occupation. Not only was Iraq none of those things, but Iran is none of those things easier.
And so it goes for Goldberg. His basic view seems to be that if you're an "internationalist" you must agree with him that the war in Iraq should be continued indefinitely, perhaps escalated à la Bush/McCain, and then expanded to Iran. But if this is internationalism -- if it means committing an endless series of military blunders -- then who needs it? These policy prescriptions need to be defended on the merits, but their exponents don't quite seem to be able to muster that.
Brian Ulrich notes that the escalation of American military involvement in Iraq is going to be achieved, in part, by withdrawing forces from Afghanistan which is apparently an "economy of force" operation where the important thing is simply not to allow it to drain too many resources from the government's top priority of wasting resources in Iraq. Sad to say, but I think it's all-but-inevitable at this point that Afghanistan will, due to neglect, be passed the tipping point by the time we get a new president in this country.
And he raised a crucial distinction: A war against Iraq and the war on terrorism are not identical. Indeed, an immediate attack (in January, one assumes) on Saddam Hussein—which everyone expects, and we must hope, will result in a rapid success—could complicate the larger campaign. A successful war against Iraq raises at least three nettlesome questions. . . .
Almost every politician I've spoken with—Democrat and Republican—has grave doubts about at least some of the details of the operation that we seem to be hurtling toward. After all, for the past 20 years it has been America's tacit but obvious policy to keep Saddam Hussein in power, weapons of mass destruction and all, because his removal was likely to destabilize the region. There are Kurds in the north of Iraq, Shiites (a majority of the population) in the south, Sunnis in between; their postwar loyalties and configurations are unpredictable. It is also quite probable that the next government in Iraq will not be perceived by its neighbors as the avatar of democracy and religious tolerance in the region, but as an American client state. The notion that the incipient pummeling of Baghdad will usher in an Islamic Enlightenment is laughable.
Now that said, Klein would hardly be unique if he found himself skeptical about the war in summer/fall 2002 only to be convinced by the administration's late 2002 PR push and Colin Powell's infamous 2003 UN speech (there was certainly some point in 2002 when I became very skeptical about the war before becoming re-convinced of its wisdom), but back in September '02 he was pretty anti-war.
If I may pile on a bit late, the truly odd thing about Sean Hannity's "Enemy of the State" feature is the specific locution -- state -- which is so deeply at odds with the quasi-populist tradition of the American right. Not enemy of the nation, enemy of the country, enemy of the people, enemy of America, but enemy of the state. The particular blend of authoritarianism and anti-statism that's typical of American conservatism from Tailgunner Joe to Liberality for All is incoherent, but at least it gives crypto-fascists the comfort of staying crypto.
Hannity by contrast has simply lost it. On the most obvious level, he seems confused about the fact that he's not an agent of the state and has no business proclaiming who the state's enemies are. Yes, the Pravda-like qualities of Fox News and the ease with which one can go from being an unofficial spokesman for George W. Bush at Fox to being an official spokesman for him in the West Wing may induce confusion, but surely Hannity is aware on some level that he's not a government employee. The episode reaches its bizarre peak when Hannity issues the demagogue's standard disclaimer -- "[Sean] Penn can say whatever he wants" -- such a cliché that Hannity must be honestly unaware of how nonsensical such a disclaimer is when branded with a chiron branding the speaker an enemy of the state for his words.
Then Hannity states, oddly, that Penn "speaks only for himself and other bad actors" when expressing the sentiment that Hannity is a "whore" and the Bush administration personnel "bastards." That's crazy. Lots of people, including your humble blogger, think Hannity is a bastard and that Bush's key aides are bastards. The Stalinist aesthetics here, moreover, are absurd. Since when is Penn a bad actor? Since he began expressing political views conservatives don't like? Give me a break.
A small-scale special forces raid on an al-Qaeda cell in Somalia sounds like a good idea to me. The article, however, is quite unclear as to who the targets of the operation were, whether or not we hit them, etc. Presumably more information will come out later. One thing I wish I understood better was the specops people's love of the AC-130 gunship whose primary attributes (loud, slow, hard to maintain) don't seem all that appealing.
Dave Weigel sticks up for Joe McCarthy who was "was (in his mind, at least) protecting American tradition, religion, and capitalism against the threat of Communism, which if implemented would abolish all of that. Hannity, like far too many Fox News pundits and radio hosts, are protecting George W. Bush against criticism from, well, everyone, from Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo to Cindy Sheehan and Dennis Kucinich." I think there's something to that. Fox News, in particular, seems much more invested in the greater glory of George W. Bush than in anything even resembling a set of ideas.
I wonder if really elite pundits like Joe Klein ever feel weird about writing that something might look bad even though it makes sense on the merits. After all, Klein has a substantial ability to affect how things are perceived. He notes that "Just because [liberals are] right about Iraq, and about this escalation, it doesn't mean they won't be blamed by the public if the result of an American withdrawal is lethal chaos in the region and $200 per barrel oil" which is true. On the other hand, if American withdraws and Joe Klein and other similarly situated people all focus their energy on placing the blame where it belongs -- on the war's architects -- then the odds are pretty good that liberals won't be blamed.
The Note's "Gang of 500" business is a joke, but only sort of. A rather small number of writers, producers, and editors for ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the Associated Press substantially determine how things will be play in the press. If those people decide that doing something will "look weak" and then cover it as if it does "look weak" it then will, in fact, look weak. If they determine the reverse, the reverse will probably happen.
I worry about my friends sometimes. Why would Catherine want some lame bag for her birthday when Apple just announced the iPhone, a.k.a. the Coolest Thing Ever (sorry, Wii). Young Ezra Klein, meanwhile, is all sad that the iPhone will be exclusively available through Cingular's utterly whack network. But so what? As long as it can sometimes complete a call, I'll be thrilled. I can't sign up soon enough. Apparently, though, they're not actually available until June.
Most top U.S. military officials—even members of George W. Bush’s administration such as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley—did not recommend a “surge” or escalation of U.S. troops into Iraq when they were interviewed by the Iraq Study Group last fall, says group member Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton. Instead of a surge—which the president plans to announce in a speech to the nation tomorrow—these officials recommended at the time that more U.S. advisers be embedded in Iraqi units, Panetta says. That later led the bipartisan commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton to come to the same conclusion, he says. Panetta also says that the officials interviewed knew that one of the Study Group’s central recommendations—that U.S. advisory teams in Iraq be quadrupled—was largely incompatible with a ramp-up of troops. The reason? In order to increase the number of U.S. advisory teams to that degree, American combat brigades must be withdrawn so the officers in those units can be turned into advisers. That is apparently not going to happen now, at least not quickly.
Notably, according to the interview even Lieutenant General David Petraeus wasn't on board for a surge when the ISG spoke to him six months ago. All of which reminds me, in essence, that I should link to Michael Hirsch more often. What's more, this Center for American Progress report on congressional options vis-a-vis military deployments is vital stuff that I'll probably write more on tomorrow.
When, as Brian Beutler points out, the junket is organized by a 501(c) 3 organization affiliated with a lobbying organization rather than by the lobbyists as such. As Beutler notes, the major beneficiaries of this loophole are the Aspen Institute, which I think legitimately isn't a lobbying group, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which, self-describing as "America's pro-Israel Lobby," clearly is a lobbying outfit.
My assumption, though, is that AIPAC won't be alone among major lobbying groups for long, and that lots of trade associations are going to be developing a newfound interest in establishing not-for-profit "educational" institutions in the near future.
I don't really know how to respond to Jason Zengerle trotting out the hearty chestnut that proponents of withdrawal from Iraq such as myself are in danger of "underestimat[ing] the consequences of it." I had a draft of a long post written. I decided to delete it. I don't see a point in getting tied down in side issues about who is and isn't being too cavalier about what. I'll just say that my opposition to prolonging or escalating the American military deployment in Iraq has nothing to do with optimism about the consequences of withdrawal and everything do to with pessimism about the efficacy of either "surging" or staying the course.
If Zengerle -- or Joe Klein or whomever -- has an argument in favor of surging that he'd like to present, I'll happily respond to it but it's weird to just debate tone with people who are disinclined to reach a judgment on the substantive issue at hand.
Super-loyal readers may have been paying attention the afternoon of December 26 when I noted Major Kelley Thibodeau seemingly going off her game to explain that "Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia. The Americans don’t go forward with the Ethiopians. They are training Ethiopians in Ethiopia." According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross the truth is that:
U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. “In fact,” he said, “they were part of the first group in.”
These ground forces include CIA paramilitary officers who are based out of Galkayo, in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland, Special Operations forces, and Marine units operating out of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.
It's also looking more like that AC-130 strike was directed against some random anti-Ethiopian fighters rather than "an al-Qaeda cell" as per the initial claim. I'm not sure I grasp why the administration prefers to mislead about this stuff. I don't approve of a policy of having the United States directly insert itself into Ethiopia's issues with the Islamic Courts Union, but this hasn't seemed to me to be an incredibly popular position. I would think Bush would be bragging about his involvement in Ethiopia's swift conquest of Somalia. Perhaps the administration just lies on principle?
The Washington Postreports that America's generals don't think much of Bush's plan "to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground." Interestingly, even though they don't put it that way, even th eauthors of the surge plan think this is a bad idea: "Kagan and Keane both emphasized that the surge has to be both substantial (minimum 30,000 troops) and sustained (minimum 18 months)." A Kagan-Keane sized escalation won't be mounted because the Joint Chiefs say it's logistically impossible. But according to Kagan and Keane success requires "a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail."
This is the sort of thing that can make a man shrill; I'm not sure what other indication you need that this cruel farce is being undertaken in bad faith. Or does Bush have some actual reason to believe that the number of additional troops required for the Iraq mission to succeed just so happens to be the exact number of troops who it's logistically possible to send? That's be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn't it?
I taped a diavlog with Ann Althouse on Monday during which we wound up mostly agreeing that the Democratic congress was unlikely to change very much about Iraq, largely because they can't change very much. As I noted yesterday, however, after we recorded the episode, the Center for American Progress released this briefing paper on congressional powers over military deployments and also organized a conference call on the subject. Armed with said facts and information, I'm now much more inclined to think the Democrats have some options.
I continue to worry, however, that if Democrats merely try to halt the surge, the issue would be regarded as non-justiciable. Marty Lederman doubts this, but let me try to sketch out a scenario. The Bush administration requests supplemental funding for Iraq. The congress, as per the Center's suggestion, attached a provision to the appropriation mandating that troop levels not rise above some target figure. Bush signs the appropriation and issues a signing statement saying that his commander in chief power allows him to blah blah blah. Then Bush simply orders some brigades to Iraq such that force levels would pass over the cap and the orders duly pass down the chain of command -- troops begin to move. What happens next? Someone sues? The Supreme Court orders one of the division to return to the USA? Which one? Federal courts normally give wide deference to executive authority on national security measures and I just find it very hard to imagine them getting involved in that kind of a dispute.
Just as I say in my column on the personnel shakeup I think that for better or for worse (which is to say for worse) we're more-or-less stuck with Bush and his poor decisionmaking no matter what anyone else says or does.
Mona Charen gives us some of that good, principled, serious conservative national security policy analysis: "The President also plans to ask for a larger army – a little late and so necessary! It will be interesting to see how the Democrats in Congress handle that one. All that talk of supporting the troops. . ."
For better or for worse, expanding the end strength of the Army has been a longstanding Democratic Party policy proposal. It was, for example, part of John Kerry platform. Did Charen or anyone else at NRO ever suggest that George W. Bush's longstanding opposition to this idea impugned his patriotism or level of support for our troops?
John Hollinger, discussing the Derek Fisher trade goes all pinko: "Often when a trade is made commentators will cop out and say, 'I think this deal will help both teams.' Usually they're full of it, but every so often a deal plays out that really does have strong benefits for both sides." I don't have a quantitative analysis at my fingertips, but I think it's rather frequent for trades to benefit both teams, just as market exchanges often do in the non-sports world. Even in a classic unequal deal like the Iverson trade, it's still the case that Philly's better off with some cap room, two additional draft picks, and a solid shot at tanking the season than they would have been with an unhappy Answer. Philadelphia moved from a bad, hopeless situation to a bad situation where there's some hope and Denver obviously improved its team by acquiring Iverson.
Via an indignant Martin Peretz, a New York Times article about voice recordings of Saddam Hussein discussing his brutal repression of the Kurds in the late 1980s. Remarks Peretz, "Saddam thrills to say, 'Yes, they will kill thousands.' And, yes, roughly 180,000 Kurds were killed by chemical warfare. So, please, stop this nonsense about how he didn't deserve to die." At the time of the killing, of course, Peretz was using his perch as owner and editor in chief of The New Republic to print articles like the classic April 1987 Laurie Mylroie / Daniel Pipes collaboration "Back Iraq: It's Time for a U.S. Tilt".
UPDATE: The theory has been raised in comments that Saddam was a swell dude at the time of publication and only became evil later during 1988's Anfal campaign. I would recommend a read of chapter one and chapter two of the Human Rights Watch Anfal Report which deals with events before the publication of the Mylroie/Pipes article. The worst was yet to come, but things were pretty damn bad already. Certainly nobody genuinely concerned about the well-being of Kurdish people would have been urging a pro-Iraqi tilt.
Get your GOP Bush Iraq speech talking points right here. These are from the House Armed Services Committee and these come from the House Republican Conference. Suffice it to say that the general plan seems to be to attack attacks on the idea of escalation without defending escalation as such. Call it the Zengerle/Klein strategy.
I've neither seen it nor read it since I was at the Wizards game where DC won despite Agent Zero scoring "only" 20 points on horrible 5-16 shooting. Goes to show crazy things can happen. Thus, the surge is a good idea. Just kidding. It's still crazy. But as I say, haven't read or seen the speech yet (will get on that). For now, let me note the reaction of Michael Gerson, currently pretending to be a foreign policy expert at CFR but in fact Bush's speechwriter 2000-2006:
The speech was direct, strong and detailed. But the policy announced tonight matters far more than the words—and that policy represents a major shift. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, the president has set out a realistic plan to secure the citizens of that city in order to allow political and economic progress to move forward.
Gerson goes on, offering the level of BS one would expect from the man who wrote the presidents BS for so many years, but just consider this: Gerson concedes that the administration proceeded for years without a realistic plan!
Okay, looked at the text. The main thing people are noting is that there's nothing new here. Like every other "new" strategy for Iraq the president has unveiled (and I think this is the third) it isn't actually new, it's more of the same. That, however, isn't quite true. Bush argues that in the past "there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." I think this is a quiet reference to complaints that have been bubbling for some time on the time that the rules of engagement on American forces are too restrictive. So, in short, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing for. But we'll have somewhat more troops doing it and they'll be unleashing a somewhat larger level of violence. This last thing, if I'm correct, runs totally against the doctrine in General Petraeus' counterinsurgency manual but it suits General Odierno's tastes, the president's tastes, and the views of conservative pundits, so why not go for it?
The other, and even more important, new thing is that Bush seems to be saying here that he intends to start one or two new wars:
Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.
It's hard to see how will do these things without launching military attacks on Iran or Syria. He goes on to talk about how he "ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region" and, of course, he put a Navy guy in charge of CENTCOM.
Tavernise and Burns reporting from Baghdad note that "As President Bush challenges public opinion at home by committing more American troops, he is confronted by a paradox: an Iraqi government that does not really want them." For the purposes of being non-shrill and non-alienating it's generally a good plan to avoid the term, but the key to this paradox is, of course, imperialism. Iraq is, legally, a sovereign nation, but Nouri al-Maliki is, practically speaking, in no position to contradict White House dictates. Privately, however, "aides to Mr. Maliki have been saying for weeks that the government is wary of the proposal."
So to sum up, neither the American military nor the American congress nor the American people nor the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi public wants an American military escalation. Naturally, we're getting one.
Lots of activity on the health care policy front recently. For detailed analysis of the Schwarzennegger plan you should turn to Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein. What I'll say is that insofar as universal health care plans that I'm not enthusiastic about go, this is the kind of plan you're looking for -- one proposed by Republicans. I think there's a big difference between the sort of measures it might be reasonable to accept as part of a compromise the other side proposes and the sort of concessions that it makes sense for progressives to concede in advance. For more the kind of thing I'd like to see the good guys fighting for, check out this plan from EPI and public policy golden boy Jacob Hacker:
What Health Care for America would do is simple: every legal resident of the United States who lacks access to Medicare or good workplace coverage would be able to buy into the "Health Care for America Plan," a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare. This new program would team up with Medicare to bargain for lower prices and upgrade the quality of care so that every enrollee would have access to either an affordable Medicare-like plan with free choice of providers or to a selection of comprehensive private plans.
At the same time, employers would be asked to either provide coverage as good as this new plan or, failing that, make a relatively modest payroll-based contribution to the Health Care for America Plan to help finance coverage for their workers. At a stroke, then, no one with a direct or family tie to the workforce would remain uninsured. The self-employed could buy into the plan by paying the same payroll-based contribution; those without workplace ties would be able to buy into Health Care for America by paying an income-related premium. The states would be given powerful incentives to enroll any remaining uninsured.
This, to me, is good. It compromises away from the ideal end-state, but does so in a smart way. The idea is less to appease the insurance companies (nice to achieve, but probably impossible) than it is to simply appease people who are happy with their current health insurance situation. Now, as it happens, it seems to me that if this plan were implemented and succeeded on any level it would, in fact, speed up the already rapid unraveling of the employer-based system and can expect to be opposed tooth and nail by insurance companies, but from where I sit, that's inevitable -- the forces of progress are fated to an arduous generational struggle against the health care industry and there's not much to be done about it.
Metaphors are very important, in politics as elsewhere. Michael O'Hare tries a bit to pick apart the metaphor of escalation as a "hail mary" pass, but I think he misses the central point. In a football game, the point of a hail mary play is that it's a desperate gamble embarked upon by a team that has nothing to lose. It's a risky, low percentage play and running it tends to increase your chances of losing the football game. But when the only alternative is certain defeat, it looks more appealing. This, however, is because all losses are equal in football.
Wars peripheral to the national interest aren't like that. Leaving Iraq in a shambles will have bad results, possibly even very bad results, but it's not as if we need to attempt one last desperate gamble or else the nation faces certain destruction.
The point of view from which the hail mary metaphor makes the most sense is if your primary concern is not the interests of the United States of America but the reputation of George W. Bush and other leading architects of war. From that point of view, the difference between initiating and then losing a war at great cost and initiating and then losing a war at even greater cost really is minimal, much like in a football game. From Bush's point of view, conceding that his Iraq policy has failed is so catastrophic to his ego and reputation that it makes perfect sense to ask other people to bear any burden and pay any price for even the smallest sliver of a hope of even deferring the problem successfully. For the country, though, it doesn't make sense at all.
I suppose the main problem with labeling the troop increase an "escalation" is that it's hard to know what to call the continuation of the other escalation, as our deployment of naval assets (and officers) and verbal threats to Iran is backed up by attacking an Iranian consulate in Kurdistan and holding six diplomatic personnel hostage. Hat tips to Jonah G. and Ackerman. There are more legal wrinkles here than I would have thought, but on the foreign policy level the implications seem clear.
Russ Feingold says "Some will claim that cutting off funding for the war would endanger our brave troops on the ground. Not true. The safety of our service men and women in Iraq is paramount, and we can and should end funding for the war without putting our troops in further danger." I tend to agree. Let me propose, however, a terminological switch. Talk of "cutting off funding" for the war implies that the troops will be sitting there in Iraq and then one day -- bam -- run out of money. The funding issue, however, is a red herring to anyone not steeped in the arcana of the legislative process. Before the 2006 midterms, most Democrats were happy to call for a "phased redeployment" of American troops out of Iraq. That language was politically viable and describes sensible policy. The right thing to do after the election is for congress to mandate a phased redeployment of American troops out of Iraq.
Yes, it's true, that the means by which such a mandate would be achieved are financial, but the money isn't the crux of the matter. The proposal on the table is to redeploy our forces. It was the proposal before the election and with the election won, Democrats should be writing legislation to mandate it. Bush will presumably veto such legislation, but that's the best the congress can do and the congress should do its best. But don't talk about the money, talk about the troops.
Chris Webber wants to go to Miami, Detroit, San Antonio, Dallas, or the LA Lakers. I was going to say that though it's not going to happen, I'd sort of like to see a Webber return to Washington, where we could use some backup power forward action. But of course DC plays too fast a pace for Webber. Then again, so do the Lakers. He should consider adding slow, slow Houston to his list of possible destinations. Meanwhile, in other trade news Earl Boykins is heading to MIlwaukee in exchange for Steve Blake.
Blake was on the Wizards for my first two season in town, and I consider him a contender for worst player in the league. His 3.6 points on 43.5 TS% (that's .349 from the field, .279 behind the arc, .550 from the stripe) in 17.7 minutes per game this season fail to impress but so do his substandard defense and rebounding. I date the emergence of the Wizards as an NBA team worth following to the departure of Blake and Juan Dixon from the squad. Both are bad players but, of course, the Wizards (like many teams) have any number of fairly bad players on the roster. The trouble is that both excelled at Maryland, were popular with the local fans (enthusiastic cheers every time they came in even though they sucked), and had clearly been acquired for this reason.
Acquiring players because of real or imagined fan appeal -- especially when said appeal is based on the player's former status as an amateur -- is the management strategy of the damned (see also Charlotte Bobcats) on a par with gimmicks like adding Michael Jordan to your front office (see also, um, the Charlotte Bobcats) and the best thing a franchise can do is firmly wash its hands of such business. To wax non-quantitatively for the moment, it sends a terrible message to fans and players alike -- we all recognize a certain tension between business objectives and sports objectives, but any decent ownership and management group should, at a minimum, be putting winning games firmly at the center of its business strategy. Put together a good team, and the fans will follow.
This, meanwhile, is crying out for comment. It almost seems like trolling.
All 233 Democrats joined by 82 Republicans voted yesterday to raise the minimum wage. Of course, the 2006 swing in congress was substantial, but it wasn't nearly that big. If 82 Republicans are prepared to raise the minimum wage, why didn't it go up last congress? And what happened to the vaunted GOP discipline? Why are the Democrats so orderly all of a sudden. In short, nothing succeeds like success.
The major perk of being in the majority is that in addition to having more votes than the other guy (the numerical difference between the majority and minority parties is not especially large, nor was it in the previous two or three congresses), you get to decide what gets voted on. A GOP majority blocks minimum wage increases but not bringing them to the floor for a vote. Or, even better, by brining them to the floor but only paired with a bunch of special interest giveaways and giant tax cuts. That way, Republicans who want to be on record as "for" a minimum wage get to vote for one, while a coalition of Democrats and other Republicans vote the bill down. With the Democrats in charge, though, things are different -- you get a vote on a clean bill. What's more, since the bill is going to pass one way or another, every even vaguely Republican member may as well vote for it. Consequently, the GOP caucus is suddenly thrown into chaos.
The same Cohen column that inveighed against Bush-bashers contained an endorsement of what he called "an expression of moderate sanity," a document titled "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto," which, he explained, "precisely because of its sanity...has received too little attention." Cohen celebrates this manifesto--which, naturally, embraces the incompetence dodge--as an alternative to "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."
Again, on the identities of these "hindsighters," "screamers," anti-Americans and anI ti-Semites "masquerading as anti-Zionists," Cohen was silent. Had he taken a look at the 232 manifesto signatories, meanwhile, he'd have had trouble identifying more than three, counting generously, actual liberals. The roll is dominated by the likes of Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz, Ronald Radosh and, I kid you not, Iran/contra adventurer Michael Ledeen.
I think three is an undercount, but the point stands. It's very strange for a manifesto calling for a new American liberalism to include so many people whose primary emotional focus is hatred of liberals.
David Shorr reminds us that there's more to be said about Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker article than I'd gotten to previously. For example, Goldberg notes that "Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake--thirty five per cent." Peter Beinart cites a similar poll to likewise make the point that liberals have become crazed peaceniks. Goldberg would, however, do well to provide some analysis of the substantive question.
From where I sit, this comes down to a slightly semantic issue. If by "the war in Afghanistan" we mean something like the general idea of a war aimed at deposing the Taliban leadership and killing or capturing key al-Qaeda figures then, no, the war wasn't a mistake. If, however, by "the war in Afghanistan" we mean the actually existing war in Afghanistan then it clearly does look like a mistake. After all, to a remarkable degree the administration managed not to accomplish its objectives. Most al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders survived, they continue to enjoy safe haven in portions of Afghanistan and Pakistan (albeit smaller portions than they once did), and for a couple of years now the Taliban has been successfully reasserting itself in its core areas while the Karzai government is failing to stabilize or control any substantial portion of the country.
Now, if a pollster ever calls me and asks "was the war in Afghanistan a mistake" I'll say "no" because I understand how these things are interpreted. But I think there's a clear sense in which it was a mistake. Certainly, mistakes were made. I think this Project on Defense Alternatives report on Operation Enduring Freedom ultimately goes too far in terms of pure Monday morning quarterbacking but it certainly raises a lot of good issues and I don't see how anyone could deny that very serious mistakes have been made in Afghanistan that have substantially undermined the rationale for the war.
Jim Webb is really one of the most exciting things to happen to our politics recently; the personification of potentially worthy electoral trends who's managed to pull it off not by embracing militarism but by showing that good sense in national security policy can be fused to personality and cultural attributes other than, say, mine. And so it's good to see him in particular asking the Secretary of State the question of the day: "Is it the position of this administration that it possesses the authority to take unilateral action against Iran in the absence of a direct threat without congressional approval?" Rice's reply:
Senator, I'm really loathe to get into questions of the president's authorities without a rather more clear understanding of what we are actually talking about. So let me answer you, in fact, in writing. I think that would be the best thing to do.
Now, back in the real world, it's clear that this particular administration has never acknowledged any limits to presidential authority. It's also worth saying that most recent administrations have claimed the authority to launch military actions without specific congressional authorization, so a presidential assertion of power in this regard would be less unusual than some of the other claims it's made. What's more, in light of yesterday's consulate attack I think it's pretty clear that Bush feels free to wade into whatever kind of gray areas he likes. Still, it's crucial to get the administration on record here so people can begin considering countermeasures.
The oddity of the emerging GOP presidential field is that it's dominated by candidates -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney -- who are, in one way or another, importantly unorthodox conservatives. Consequently, they need to hew very closely to hawk dogma in national security policy to prove their bona fides even at the moment where political support for the hawkish position is collapsing. Sam Brownback, a distinctly second-tier contender but one who benefits from being a committed social conservative with standard conservative economic views, is taking the chance to be the exception and resist the urge to surge. Ross Douthat comments as do Andrew Sullivan and (with bonus analysis!) Noam Scheiber who indicates that a pretty large number of social conservatives are anti-surge.
Of course, the Republican dove we liberals want to see is Chuck Hagel, but for a whole bunch of reasons Brownback is a more likely contender. The only thing I would add to this analysis is that, as best I can tell, ever since the war began in March 2003 it's been the case that any given dovish position looks better and better as time goes on. When thinking about positioning yourself for primaries that won't be held until a year or more from now, it's worth keeping in mind that things will almost certainly look worse 9-15 months from now than they do today.
Via Klein and Hayes an examination indicates that pundits who were wrong about Iraq have prospered over and above those who got things right. Which is not, of course, a surprise to me. I've felt from time to time that my current anti-war views are an impediment to career objectives, but never that past pro-war views have been a problem.
Jason Zengerle shoots back on the question of the Charlotte Bobcats' draft picks agreeing with many commenters here that Raymond Felton and Sean May are pretty good basketball players. And so they are. The point, however, still stands.
"Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush," but now things have changed, and "Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans."
Thanks, centrists! Not only is Lieberman going to back Bush's crazy Iraq policy, but he's so committed to Bush's war plans that he'll avoid making difficulties for Bush on any other front as well. What's more, this is bigger than Katrina. One can expect any number of document requests to come from the new congress and the White House to try to resist compliance. Insofar as the nominally Democratic chairman of the Senate Government Oversight Committee supports the White House position that there's no need to comply, this will be a powerful GOP-friendly argument in the press.
Rich Lowry sees hypocrisy in Silvestre Reyes' apparent flip-flop on the idea of sending more troops to Iraq. Maybe Reyes had a genuine change of heart after gathering more information. Or maybe not. Either way, or especially in the latter case, this is what we call "party discipline" and the Democrats could use more of it -- wayward members learning that they'd better think three or four times before defy the leadership position on key issues.
Ari Berman describes a clever effort to thread the escalation-halting needle:
When he receives the Bush Administration's $100 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq on February 5, Murtha says "they'll have to justify every cent they want." He'll insist that no money be allocated for an escalation unless the military can meet normal readiness levels. "We should not spend money to send people overseas unless they replenish the strategic reserve," Murtha says. He expects to have one hundred and twenty days to act before the Administration deploys the second phase of additional troops to Iraq. "If he wants to veto the bill," Murtha says of Bush, "he won't have any money."
Seems reasonable to me. The trick, obviously, is that the administration can't meet those standards of readiness consistent with its escalation plan. David Ignatius says Ragm Emannuel's on board as well.
Apparently the congressional Democrats' much-touted plan to have the HHS Department negotiate prices for Medicare's prescription drug purchases is something of a scam. See Robert Reich and Brad DeLong. The problem is that these are negotiations without teeth. As Reich puts it "The Department of Veterans Affairs gets a 25 percent discount on drug prices for veterans because if a drug company won't give a big discount, Veterans Affairs won't include the drug in its plan." Medicare won't be authorized to drop a drug of the manufacturer won't offer a discount, so there's no reason for drug makers to offer any kind of meaningful discounts. One hopes this sham bill may be the start down a slippery slope to something more meaningful, but so far so bad.
I can't fault Rod for his frustration with the war, though I think he comes across as pretty anti-intellectual and unfair in his tirade — as if there was no good faith or no good arguments for the positions he once held and which lots of folks he respects still hold. I should also say that the comparison to Jimmy Carter is really quite weak. Simply because Carter's feckless foreign policy and Bush's over confident foreign policy elicited similar feelings in Rod doesn't mean that they can be glibly equated. Indeed, even if the result of Bush's foreign policy has had the consequence of projecting an image of weakness around the globe as Rod asserts, that doesn't mean they are similar foreign policies. They do come from very different impulses, I think everyone can agree.
Well that's certainly true. The idea, however, that at this moment in history one could still regard a Bush-Carter foreign policy comparison as unflattering to Bush is preposterous. Both arguably "projected an image of weakness." In Carter's case, however, at the very worst this came down to a handful of people being held hostage for a long time. Bush, by contrast, has gotten thousands of American soldiers killed, ten of thousands more maimed, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed all in the course of wars losing multiple simultaneous wars. It's a completely unprecedented fiasco.
UPDATE: Speaking of Carter, I do agree with Jonathan Zasloff about this. It should be noted, however, that while Carter's Afghanistan policy looked bad, it was actually extremely effective.
Talk of a US-sponsored coup in Baghdad seems to be back in the air. "In other words, Nouri al-Maliki could be in trouble unless he delivers," says the utterly ridiculous Wolf Blitzer, before asking John Burns "do you think he has the guts to go stand up against Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army, this Shiite militia in Sadr City?" Burns, fortunately, knows what he's talking about and says "I don't think it's a question of guts." But then Burns continues:
I think one interpretation you can make of the Bush plan is that they've built this assumption in, that Maliki will not fulfill those pledges, he won't meet the benchmarks and the Americans have been working desperately behind the scenes to create a kind of parallel political movement, a moderate political movement based on factions within the existing Iraqi parliament that could be used as a vehicle for a parliamentary coup against Mr. Maliki.
This strikes me as incredibly ill-advised. The saving grace of the Iraq situation has long been that Iraq has a nominally sovereign government that has any number of policy disputes with the US government. The result is a not, big, wide door for the American government to walk through where we proclaim our mission (the removal of Saddam Hussein) accomplished, shake hands with Iraq's prime minister, and head home in an amicable manner. The more we don't just accept US-Iraqi differences as a reason to leave, and instead choose to meddle in Iraqi affairs (note that Maliki only got into power in the first place thanks to Zalmay Khalilzad's machinations against Ibrahim Jafari) the deeper we sink into the combined quicksands of commitment and illegitimacy.
I'm In Ur Think Tank Supporting Ur Opponents' Policeez
Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon, who I'm given to understand would have received a high-level appointment in a Kerry administration, and co-author of a recent book on "what the Democrats need to do" about national security policy, feels the urge to surge. As we've seen previously, O'Hanlon's Brookings colleague Ken Pollack feels much the same way.
My advice to Democrats in congress and hoping to run for president would be to stop listening to these guys.
UPDATE: Elsewhere in the liberal hawk multiverse, Jeffrey Herf explains that the Bush administration's long record of incompetence is a good reason to support the surge.
It's easy, from time to time, for your average Wizards fan who ought to know better to convince himself that this is a pretty solid basketball team we've got ourselves. Then all of a sudden the team finds itself in San Antonio. For the second half of a back-to-back. Then we get reminded of what a good basketball team really looks like. The good news, however, is that this game was one of several over the past few weeks where Andray Blatche has actually started to look to me like a promising young player rather than a bad young player who the PR department wants me to believe is promising. Plus, the dude got shot during his rookie season so he can add some toughness.
I was a little distressed to find Bill Simmons' latest online chat featuring recommendations of Bloc Party and Arcade Fire. Those are both good bands, but a little 2005 at this point if you know what I mean. Which inspired me to offer my own outdated recommendation that various people and impersonal computers have been telling me that I would like Mirah for some time now and it's true -- I do like Mirah, or, at least, Advisory Committee. Will have to examine her other albums. What's more, several readers had recommended The Thermals to me and I get good results with that. Better, however, is The Blow and their album Paper Television a simply awesome, awesome thing. The Clipse record is good, too, but I'm so ignorant of hip-hop I hesitate to speak on these matters.
The Tom Ricks' InBox feature is an interesting idea, but it seems a little misleading to me to publish " a note from Army Reserve Capt. Phillip Carter, a lawyer in Los Angeles who recently returned from a year of training and advising Iraqi police in the city of Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad." This is, presumably, the same Philip Carter who's a well-known blogger and has published in Slate, The Washington Monthly, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc.
UPDATE: I didn't mean to imply any malfeasance here by Carter or Ricks or anyone else, really; it just seemed like an unnatural way to ID a writer in this situation.
This is interesting. Via John Quiggin, ExxonMobil seems to have decided that global warming's real after all and should dedicate its lobbying efforts to designing CO2 control rules that spread the burdens of compliance widely rather than focusing in on energy firms (I think I may agree with this position on the merits and am certainly willing to explain why I agree, but before I do I think I'll hold out for a check from Exxon) narrowly. As part of the flip, Exxon is no longer going to fund the Competitive Enterprise Institute, producers of the hilarious "they call it pollution, we call it life" pro-carbon ads. CEI actually has a very broad pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda so they'll presumably be able to raise money from elsewhere.
No real rationale for linking to this two year-old article except a lot of people don't know it exists. Suffice it to say, however, that the Bush administration wasn't the first one to fib a bit about Iraq's WMD programs.
Here's some more on the American military raid on that Iranian consulate in Kurdistan. Obviously, Iran complaining about violations of diplomatic protocol is a bit rich. By the same toke, Americans complaining that a foreign country's military is meddling in Iraqi affairs is a bit rich.
The arrests of the Iranians "is an illegal act and if such an act took place in another country there would have been grave consequences," said Nouri Talabani, a member of the parliament in Kurdistan.
The Secretary of State's wildly belated trip to the Palestinian territories raises a few questions. First -- what on God's green earth is a "provisional" state? Something like the Irish Free State? I don't know. Why, one wonders, would you bother making this proposal to President Abbas at a time when due to his domestic political weakness he couldn't possibly accept? Well, I suppose I do know the answer to that one, namely that for the next five years suggestions that the US should be aggressively involved in forging an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will be shot down on the theory that "Abbas was offered a state and turned it down." Something like that.
Then we get to the small matter of "State Department proposal for $86 million in 'nonlethal assistance' to enhance the Palestinian security forces directly under his political wing — as opposed to those loyal to Hamas." The distinction between "lethal" and "nonlethal" assistance to security forces escapes me. Perhaps more to the point as you'll recall several years ago the Palestinian Authority was a corrupt and authoritarian structure, ruling undemocratically over the Palestinian people with the aid of its security services. The United States government insisted on reforms, democratic elections, etc. Hamas -- which, to be clear, everyone understood to be the only realistically possible alternative to Fatah -- won the election. And now we're pumping money into those very same Fatah security forces so that they can re-establish the autocracy we insisted they dismantle? Yet another "I don't see any method at all, sir" moment from Team Bush.
Ed Kilgore's note so concerned "that the administration is about to deliberately widen the Iraq war by provoking Tehran and Damascus into armed conflict." After all, "where the hell is the Pentagon going to get the resources for a regional war?" Well, I'd say they'd get them from the Air Force and the Navy, hence the significance of appointing a naval officer to run CENTCOM. Certainly the argument that provoking a military confrontation with Iran isn't going to happen because such a provocation would be a very bad idea in light of the objective constraints on the American military strikes me as unconvincing. Sometimes leaders initiate extremely poor policies. George W. Bush happens to have a history of initiating such policies.
David Sanger at The New York Times, meanwhile, is not in the conspiracy theory business. He notes that while "administration officials say the goal is limited to preventing Iranians from aiding in attacks on American and Iraqi forces inside Iraq." Nevertheless, "in recent interviews and public statements, senior members of the Bush administration have made it clear that their agenda goes significantly further, toward foiling Iran’s dream of emerging as the greatest power in the Middle East." Clearly, I think, for now the hope is that foiling Iran's dreams of regional power can somehow be accomplished by raiding consulates and hoping there are ponies inside. Nevertheless, if the goal is to check Iranian regional power, that means wider war sooner or later.
Ezra's got a post up about (what else?) health care that, among other things, cites answers to the following poll question:
Which of the following approaches for providing health care in the United States would you prefer: replacing the current health care system with a new government run health care system, or maintaining the current system based mostly on private health insurance?
You see a lot of ill-designed polling questions, but this one actually manages to exclude the major alternative to the status quo, namely a system similar to Medicare, or the health systems of many foreign countries, where the government doesn't run the health care system but the government does run a health insurance plan in which everyone is enrolled. The distinction is semantically subtle but absolutely crucial. In the United States, state and local governments actually run school systems much as the federal government runs the Post Office. In England, similarly, the government runs a National Health Service employing doctors, nurses, etc. running hospitals and other clinics throughout the nation as a government agency.
A very different alternative, however, is to simply have the government run an insurance program that will pay (in full or in part) for (some) medical procedures and services, while still leaving health care providers as private for-profit or non-profit institutions. This is, overwhelmingly, what counts as the "left" position on health care in the United States -- government run insurance not government run health care.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion that we shouldn't have massive state-sponsored racial discrimination is sufficiently uncontroversial at this point that I doubt I need to say anything particularly profound about it. A less-discussed point is his influence as a leader of social movements and a tactician. His letter from the Birmingham jail is famous, but in many ways addresses itself to the wrong tactical question. These days, people will find it easy to understand why King and his followers weren't going to far. The pressing question is why didn't they go further. The apartheid system in the old south, after all, was backed up by a massive coercive apparatus that was not shy about using force -- either at the hands of the official security services or else by any number of white supremacist militias and paramilitaries -- to maintain its hold on power.
The only previous episode in American history when the legal condition of African-Americans had improved substantially involved, of course, the liberal application of force. Indeed, the Civil War was -- by far -- the single most violent episode in American history, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and vast portions of Confederate infrastructure in ruins. Those gains had been partially reversed by a post-war white supremacist countermobilization that, again, was unafraid to deploy violence. Under the circumstances, it would have been natural to conclude that the only thing the white south understands is force, that the use of force was eminently justified, and the time had come to launch a massive campaign of violent resistance.
King and other leaders of the civil rights movement apparently took their Christianity more seriously than a lot of people do, however, and, following in part in the political example of Gandhi, set out on a different path. A path that, seemingly, actually generates much more success than do strategies of violent insurgency. Nevertheless, you tend to see all around the world on both sides of various issues, a tendency to massively overstate the utility of force.
Berber comes from the same root as barbarian. But there is nothing barbarian about the Berbers. Their rugs and and especially their vases are so much more subtle than the glimmery ornate of their Arab neighbors.
In all seriousness, yesterday I eschewed my usual supermarket purchase of Tribe of Two Sheiks Hummus in favor of Sabra Hummus and got better results with the fake-Arab product than with the fake-Israeli one. But never an Arab vase!
I just realized that one of my advertisers is apparently one of those outfits that tries to convince people that television is bad. Well, most shows are pretty bad, but fortunately with hundreds of channels there are lots of options. Sports are always a solid one. But the current TV season has also given us the fun-if-a-bit-rambling Heroes along with Friday Night Lights. The latter has, I think, clearly displaced Veronica Mars as the best show on network television since season three of VM has been pretty terrible. The worst thing, to me, about watching season three is recognizing that the show was made bad intentionally. You read a lot before it aired about how the creators were hoping to boost its popularity by making the plots more accessible, more atomic, blah, blah and basically dumbing the show down. And -- guess what? -- they succeeded!
That said, I watched the premiere of Rome last night. I hadn't been looking forward to season two of Rome the way I looked forward to season four of The Wire or season three of Deadwood but it's actually a really good show. The fact that you already know the broad direction of the story if you're familiar with the history and Shakespeare's play makes it less gripping than it might be, but it's still pretty excellent. Some people tell me they find the British accents annoying, but I think it's actually done to good effect since it establishes a class hierarchy among the characters in a way that would be hard to pull off with American idioms.
K-Drum wonders (well, not really, he knows the answer) what Bill Kristol will do now that Bush has started taking his advice: "So if it doesn't work, Bill, what are you going to do? Will you admit that the strategy you endorsed was wrong? Or will you just regroup and blithely insist that it was never implemented the way you wanted?" The latter, obviously. The striking thing is that Kristol is already laying the groundwork for this:
The key is the urgency, the speed and the full bore commitment that the U.S. government, across the board, puts on implementing this. Don't slow-walk the troops in. Front-load the surge. Get Petraeus over there. He's the commander who has to execute it. It's crazy to have Casey execute the first month of the plan and then have a transition then.
Kristol also reveals during the same exchange that he doesn't know the difference between blackjack (where you can double-down) and poker (where you can't) and offers fresh material for the right's inevitable stab in the back narrative. The economy with which all this is achieved is truly impressive; you need to read it for yourself. Victor Davis Hanson would expend 37,000 words making these points.
UPDATE:Even dumber excuses from New York Post columnist and fabricator Amir Taheri. This last, incidentally, is why it doesn't make sense to wonder why hawks don't suffer from being wrong. Rightwing pundits don't suffer under any circumstances -- you can make things up, get busted on drug charges, whatever, and it all works out fine.
I find reports that it's unseasonably chilly in California at least somewhat reassuring. It's really warm here in DC -- "like California," I would say, except that it's cold in California. I was getting concerned that the entire planet was just going to burn up come August, but I guess it's all evening out in some sense. But what's happening? El Nino? I feel like weird weather always gets attributed to El Nino.
New entry for The Weekly Standard's ever-expanding list of regimes that need changing: Eritrea, which "is looking ever more like a state sponsor of terrorism." Eritrea's sin is backing the ICU is Somalia.
All Eritrea's doing in the real world, of course, is trying to prevent its larger, hostile neighbor from growing even more powerful. But this is what happens once you decide that you need to be in the proxy war business. We've decided that backing Ethiopia's bid for regional hegemony in East Africa is identical with fighting terrorism, so any group or state that seeks to check Ethiopian power is now de facto a pro-terrorist enemy of the United States. Since it's the Horn of Africa probably none of this really matters at the end of the day (except, of course, to Africans) but that doesn't make this kind of mucking around advisable.
Well, I don't get to do this very often these days, but this Atrios post offers the opportunity:
[I]t's also true that taking the longer view it's not clear what the Great and Glorious First Gulf War actually accomplished that was positive. Obviously if you're a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family you're a fan. And, obviously, if you think that in the modern world someone should act as a global cop to prevent nations from invading other nations (irony overload causing brain damage here) maybe you're a fan.
The global cop question strikes me as something it's odd to raise and not to state an opinion on. It seems to me to be an excellent thing that the world's major military powers, led by the most major military power of all, supported by the bulk of regional governments and acting under the auspices of the United Nations beat back and punished a clear violation of an extremely basic norm of international law. The "irony overload" factor is real, but much more constitutes a reason for this country to engage in fewer (ideally none whatsoever) ill-motivated invasions in the future, not to become more tolerant of other countries' ill-motivated invasions. Which is all to say, I think Atrios is wrong about this. One can ironize all one likes, but as far as these things go the first Gulf War was a good idea.
And not just because saying otherwise is a damn, dirty hippie kind of thing to say. Some of the best-dressed people I know are skeptical about that kind of global role for the United States. If you're interested, the best analytic case against the Gulf War and the presumptions underlying it is Tucker and Hendrickson's Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose. I would say that whether or not past views on Gulf War I cast doubt on a person's credibility is going to come down (to be a bit banal about it) to what they actually said . . . folks who underestimated America's ability to beat a conventional adversary were obviously wrong, whereas folks who simply think US security could be optimally achieved by reorienting the military to a stricter self-defense mission haven't really been put to the test.
I read Free Darko every day, and readers know I enjoy a good NBA stats debate, but the two don't usually come together. Today, however, SilverBird5000 has a fascinating essay about The Wages of Wins and the political economy of scoring.
I was going to leave James Traub's profile of Abraham Foxman on its own, but James Kirchik's obnoxious Plank post on the subject compels me to write something. Saith Kirchik:
Traub accuses Foxman of frequently (and presumably erroneously) smearing individuals as anti-Semites. Other than Professors John Mearsheimer and Stepehn Walt (who have written of their belief in a Jewish conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of the press and the government), Traub does not once name a supposed victim of Foxman's descriptive wrath other than Jimmy Carter, whom Foxman never labeled anti-Semitic--just "bigoted."
Frankly, I thought Traub soft-pedaled this a bit, but suffice it to say that here's the point. If the head of the ADL refers to a person as "bigoted" that just is an accusation of anti-semitism. And Foxman, as Traub makes clear and as is, frankly, clear to anyone who's paying attention, has decided to start flinging around accusations of anti-semitism against people he has political disagreements with. Check this passage from Traub's profile:
I asked if it was really right to call Carter, the president who negotiated the Camp David accords, an anti-Semite.
“I didn’t call him an anti-Semite.”
“But you said he was bigoted. Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No. ‘Bigoted’ is you have preconceived notions about things.”
The argument that the Israel lobby constricted debate was itself bigoted, he said.
“But several Jewish officials I’ve talked to say just that.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Are they bigoted?”
Foxman didn’t want to go there. He said that he had never heard any serious person make that claim.
Foxman, apparently, would like us to believe that he's some kind of moron. That the head of the Anti-Defamation League doesn't know what the word "bigot" means. That the head of the ADL is unfamiliar with the existence of Jewish critics of the Israel lobby. That all of these groups exist in order to influence the debate over Israel and yet somehow fail to have any degree of success in constricting the range of respectable options. All of that's absurd. Foxman would need to be, as I say, a fool for any of that to be true. Obviously, however, he's no fool. He knows perfectly well what it means to call someone a bigot, knows perfectly well that however wrong Jimmy Carter may be about Israel that he's not motivated by hatred of Jews, knows perfectly well that this is all basically bogus.
The shame of it is that the ADL does a great deal of genuinely important work. Unfortunately, in recent years Foxman has increasingly chosen to focus attention away from that work in favor of a right-wing political agenda that the overwhelming majority of American Jews abhor. Compromising the ADL's historical strong stand on church-state relations (obviously crucial for a religious minority group in America) because Christian right "leaders tended to be strongly pro-Israel" so "Foxman was willing to cut them some slack on issues of social justice, and even of church-state relations, in the name of solidarity toward Israel." He took out a full page ad in The New York Times to support John Bolton's confirmation as UN Ambassador as if the fate of the Jewish people hinged crucially on whether or not a UN-hating goy got to sit in Turtle Bay. And he's decided that everyone who thinks AIPAC has too much power is ananti-semite bigot, and he's engaging in a little national security policy freelancing offering up hawkish thoughts on containing Iran's nuclear program. At the end of the day, however, I think it's clear that equating anti-anti-semitism with support for hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East and getting in bed with Christian conservatives in order to do so is not going to serve the interests of American Jews.
This is pretty Cambridge/Harvard inside baseball, but the notion that Martin Peretz could confuse Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage with Burger King is simply staggering. I wouldn't presume to label Mr. Bartley's burgers the best in the world, but they're certainly the best I've ever had. Burger King, not so much.
NY Times: "For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one." I'm not sure I understand how this conclusion is materially different from the recent finding that married couples are now a minority of all households, but it's probably a good opportunity for someone or other to muse on the Decline of the West or something.
It should be said, however, that a big factor here seems to be that life expectancy, health, and aging trends are increasing the proportion of widows in the general population which is pretty different from the other factors (delayed marriage, more divorces, more never-marrieds) contributing to the relatively decline of married people.
The way you can tell that, fundamentally, the right's Iraq hawk pundits are deeply unserious people is that you'll see things like Reuel Marc Gerecht making this argument: "I can understand--though not appreciate--Americans who don't want to see Americans dying in Iraq because they value American lives more highly than they do Iraqi ones. This sentiment, more common on the right than on the left, inevitably leads to a bigoted isolationism that allows nefarious forces to run amok." The view that American lives are more valuable than Iraqi lives is obviously false. The view that the American government should value American lives more highly than it values Iraqi lives is, I think, quite different, fairly intuitive, and certainly not something that advocates of neoconservative foreign policy deny in anything resembling a consistent manner.
I mean, the consequences of the view that the US government should draw no distinction between its responsibilities to Americans and to non-Americans has far reaching and radical consequences for policy areas far removed from the Iraq withdrawal debate. Immigration, say, or international intellectual property policy. Why not mothball a carrier group and spend the money on mosquito nets? Why not dedicate 3 percent of GDP to direct subsidies to the world's 25 poorest nations? I mean, who knows. Gerecht obviously hasn't given any thought to this position whatsoever. He's a hawk. Since he's a hawk, he against leaving Iraq. Since hes against leaving Iraq, he needs some arguments. He came to a point in the debate when arguing that the US government should value Iraqi and American lives equally was convenient, so he started espousing this position. Does he espouse it consistently? Has he considered its implications? No, no, of course not. He's just bullshitting around.
CNN's Travel and Leisure section says MidCity (the apparently not-fake name for my neighborhood, though nobody seems to use it) is the shit. The New York Times says nobody's buying all these condos that are under construction in the neighborhood. So now's your chance to get a good deal (sort of) on the coolest neighborhood in the universe. Or, at least, in Washington, DC.
A while back, it became clear that one or more squirrels had found a way to gain access to the walls of our house as a means of taking refuge from the cold. Obviously, we had a problem. So we called the management company who sent a guy over to seal up the relevant hole. Only problem: He left a squirrel trapped inside. Thus, it was only a matter of time until Catherine came home to find the squirrel in her room. She fled out of the room, down the stairs, screaming which prompted Wreck to bite her in the leg. The squirrel was dispatched, Catherine took some time to blog, and then she and Kriston went to the emergency room to get the leg checked out. And we all lived happily ever after.
Except! Right before leaving for the hospital Catherine recalled that she hadn't been working at her new job long enough to have health insurance. No problem, said Spencer, it's an emergency room, you don't need to pay. I said I thought that was wrong, you can get emergency service for free if you're indigent, the merely uninsured need to pay. But wait, says Catherine, she thinks the student insurance she had from when she was in the Northwestern Journalism School is still in effect. So she goes upstairs to get the insurance card while Kriston and I have a sidebar discussion about whether or not you need to worry about in-network/out-of-network distinctions when it comes to emergency care. We decide that would be too evil even for insurance companies, and he can probably just take her to whichever emergency room happens to be closest by.
I'm not sure how economists quantify it, but it's this stuff that's surely the craziest thing about the American health care system. I recall during my brief spell as a summer camp counselor standing in front of a counter at the emergency room of a hospital in Augusta, Maine. My head was bleeding and I needed some staples put in so it would stop bleeding. But before I could get that done, I needed to fill out some insurance forms. Unfortunately, I needed my left hand not only to hold the form in place, but also to hold the towel down onto my head so as to prevent blood from dripping into my eyes or onto the paper. Eventually, I settled upon on awkward posture where my left elbow held the paper in place while my left hand held the towel. Consequently, my writing was even less legible than usual, some blood got on the form, and the whole thing took a remarkably long time considering that the doctor wasn't actually busy treaty any other patients at the time.
I always wonder what happens if something really bad happens. What if Catherine's unconscious and not around to remember that her insurance card is somewhere in her bedroom? Would the Augusta people still have made me fill out the form if my whole left arm had been chopped off?
Once I clicked through to the article it had a different headline, but the Post frontpage had this listed as "Lawmaker Angers Blacks, Jews" which sounded super-promising. And the text delivers! Virginia Delegate Frank Hargrove was giving a speech about why the Virginia legislature shouldn't apologize for slavery and said issuing such an apology would be like asking Jews to apologize for killing Christ. Double-whammy! The old alliance between black and Jewish civil rights groups revived in a single swoop.
Obviously, though, if you're inclined to believe, as Hargrove apparently is, that Jews do, in fact, bear collective responsibility for Christ's death, then doesn't it seem like we should apologize?
Here's the scoop on this business -- counterinsurgency campaigns sometimes succeed, normally when you have a state repressing an internal insurgency. Very, very, very rarely you see a foreign power successfully crush an insurgency and then organize a "decent interval"-type pause before departing (see Britain in Kenya, South Africa). You have essentially no instances of foreign power demonstrating an ability to stay put over the long haul.
Stepping back, you need to ask yourself questions about goals. I mean, say we did have a method at our disposal for crushing the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq and entrenching SCIRI or the Sadrists in power in Baghdad -- why would we do that? Would would it accomplish? Just "winning" doesn't do anything unless you've picked a battle worth winning. I'd love to see Iraq become a shining democracy, but (a) it's not going to happen and (b) counterinsurgency has nothing to do with it.
The other thing to be said about counterinsurgency is that times change, and ideas and technology change with them. During the high tide of Victorian imperialism (also the time of America's conquest of the Philipines) the gap in military technology between imperialists and the imperialized was enormous. Britain's colonial service operated on the sensible slogan that "whatever happens we have got / the maxim gun and they have not." Subjugated peoples had an extremely difficult time acquiring firearms, especially top-notch ones, and ammunition. The weapons of the day broke a lot and were difficult for indigenous peoples to repair or replace. The modern insurgent has recourse to the AK-47, which is cheap as shit, and thanks to modern transportation technology easy to get wherever you'd like. It's a perfectly good gun, it's easy to maintain, and you should read all about it in Larry Kahaner's book.
Obviously, something like the modern American military still has large technological advantages, but they're much smaller (for these purposes -- today's Air Force could destroy a whole country with nuclear ICMBs if it was ordered to) than the advantages enjoyed by rich countries today. What's more, literacy is much more widespread and, combined with broadcast media, means you have much deeper and wider levels of political consciousness than you did in the past. Ideas -- western ideas, really -- about nationalism, self-determination, autonomy, etc. have spread past the point where people are wiling to accept foreign domination.
Returning to Reuel Marc Gerecht, the essential thing anyone who wants to justify this war as some kind of nice guy method of helping Iraqis out needs to grapple with is the extraordinary opportunity costs involved in fighting it. David Leonhart writes about this today, here's John Quiggin's take, and here was mine.
It's not a coincidence that the administration's pre-war cost estimates -- anywhere from $0 to $50 billion -- were so badly off-base. Nobody in their right mind would have agreed ex ante to spend over $1 trillion (so far!) in order to take out Saddam Hussein. The venture was sold as something that would be cheap and easy because it only made sense under the theory that it would, in fact, be cheap and easy. Indeed, I assume most of the prime movers behind the war actually believed it would be cheap and easy. This, after all, is the typical failing of the militarist. Diplomacy, compromise, patience, etc., all seem too hard better to reach for the easy answers of the bombs and tanks. In reality, there's nothing easy about it.
I'm not sure the distinction Chris Bowers' post here is about actually tracks the phenomenon Atrios complaints about here. Chris is pointing to the sociological phenomenon among progressive blogs of a division between what Henry Farrell calls the "wonkosphere" and the activism-oriented sites that comprise the "netroots" (see Mark Schmitt's column) with the gap bridged primarily by Atrios' site. This divide strikes me as a natural division of labor sort of thing. If I tried to dedicate this blog primarily to activism and movement building the result would be . . . a really bad job.
When I participate in activism it's by doing stuff like working phone banks or knocking on doors. I'm one of the organized, not one of the organizers. Which is fine. The organizers wouldn't have anything to do if there weren't Indians to organize and make the calls (UPDATE: This was unclear -- I meant you can't have all chiefs and no Indians, too many cooks spoil the soup, that kind of thing), and I lack the capacity to spearhead anything more complicated than a trip to the grocery store. I think, however, that I do a pretty good job of writing a blog that's primarily political punditry with a little pop culture and sports thrown in so that's what I do and I primarily link to people whose blogs are similar to mine in subject matter not because our blogs are "better" than other kinds of blogs, but because it's just in the nature of blogging that your site is going to mostly link to similar sites.
A separate question is whether or not journalists think of themselves as political actors. Overwhelmingly, I think journalists would tell you "no, they shouldn't" and that most liberal (but not conservative) pundits would agree. To me, this is wrong. I could in perfectly good faith spend all my time looking for flawed arguments for conclusions I agree with, finding far-left people with unsound views to denounce them, and mocking the foibles of politicians whose views I agree with on the merits. A blog like that might even be entertaining and perhaps widely read. I wouldn't do a site like that, however, because I think it would be irresponsible. I'm not a political activist by trade, I'm a writer, but hopefully my writing has some kind of impact on the world and I'd like it be a good impact rather than a bad one and that's something I try to take seriously.
. It should not be enough for some other nation to be an enemy, for it to have nuclear weapons, for it to be a tyranny, for there to be idle U.S. troops not engaged in some other war, for it to abuse its subjects or its neighbors, for it to be universally despised, for the U.N. to vote for its demise. My three exceptions would be 1) self-defense (in the face of an imminent, manifest, tangible threat, or act of aggression), naturally; 2) the threat of genocide, or 3) the near-guarantee of very great benefits at very low cost.
Here's a question about this. If aggressive war is wrong (which clearly seems to be an underlying theme here), and wars of self-defense are justified, why isn't it appropriate for a rich and powerful country like the United States to go to war in order to help defend a smaller, less-powerful country against acts of aggression committed by a third country? I'm not saying it's always a good idea for the US to come to the defense of others, but the Sawicky Doctrine seems to hold that it's always wrong to do this. Why would you think that?
UPDATE: In comments Max substantially concedes the point, "As long as that is what occurring, I don't have a problem with that." Obviously, the concept of defending others is open to abuse, particularly on the level of rhetoric. Then again, the concept of self-defense is likewise oft-abused in that virtually every war is soaked in the rhetoric of self-defense, often on absurdly far-fetched theories, but we still don't abandon the concept. I should say that Max's (2) strikes me as too lax in some ways and too strict in others.
I can't say that I really understand the man's economic thought, but he had himself some damn good aphorisms. For example, compare Markos' effort here ("Here's my take on the whole matter -- 'intellectuals' who'd rather read books and measure purity are next-to-useless. I prefer people of action, not of elitist academics") to Marx's brilliant original eleventh thesis on Feuerbach "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
Mik Awake, a blogger whose parents are from Ethiopia and whose spent some time there, emails drawing attention to his take on President Meles Zenawi and the divide between Ethiopia's largest Christian government and half Muslim -- some of it ill-treated Somalis -- population. Suffice it to say that Ethiopia's a diverse country with over 70 million residents so presumably one could find a wide divergence of views on these and other subjects. But, of course, one of the costs of these kind of proxy wars is that Bush has married us not just to Ethiopia, but to a particular Ethiopian faction and thereby gotten us involved in all manner of issues and controversies your average American -- even your average American foreign policy professional -- doesn't really understand or care about.
Via Kevin Drum, Robert Novak's view is that if America stays in Iraq the GOP is facing disaster in 2008. Frankly, I don't think you need to be an ace political reporter to see the case in favor of that view. Predictions, however, are difficult.
I think the real question is when more Republicans will start seriously breaking with the White House over the war. Will Chuck Hagel move out of the "sounds smart, acts useless" camp and actually collaborate with anti-war Democrats on bringing this farce to an end? Does someone in the GOP presidential field decide to differentiate themselves by calling for an end to the madness? I think you have to assume that someone will try it. What stake does, say, Mike Huckabee have in this war?
Lauding someone for their style on Capitol Hill is a lot like celebrating the best surfer on Florida’s Gulf Coast — it’s all relative, and some would argue irrelevant. Washington has never embraced fashion (nor, for that matter, has the fashion world embraced Washington), and for understandable reasons. In political circles, fashion is a loaded term, smacking of frivolity and vanity. . . .
But with the ascent of Nancy Pelosi, 66, widely recognized and admired for her Armani and easy fashion savvy, the days of the dowdy Washington dress code may be numbered. At least that is the hope of a number of women on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats, who see Mrs. Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, as a fashion leader, too.
It's almost shocking how openly anti-feminist the press feels free to be about this kind of thing -- I recall the intensive coverage of Condoleezza Rice's footwear choices during her early days at Foggy Bottom ("look -- a girl Secretary of State! what'll be next?) with much this same tone. And, no, the knowing irony several paragraphs down doesn't make it better.
Marc Stein observes of the big Indiana/Golden State trade that "To be swayed back in Indiana's direction would require knowing that Diogu will definitely turn out to be a player." I'm not sure I understand exactly why Diogu changed so quickly from "untouchable" (when the Pacers wanted him in exchange for Ron Artest) to "throw-in" in Golden State's mind. The emergence of Andris Biedrins presumably has something to do with it, but just because he's playing well doesn't actually alter Diogu's value as a prospect.
What's more, as best I can tell Diogu's a good player right now -- 7.2 points and 3.7 rebounds doesn't sound like much, but it's all coming in 13 minutes per game. Dude's got a .530 field goal percentage and shoots almost 80 percent from the free throw line. Those aren't "prospect" numbers, he could be a 20/10 guy if he played serious minutes and he's only 23 years old. Maybe the Warriors have some secret information that made them willing to part with the guy. Heck, maybe they had some reason for limiting him to 13 mpg. It's certainly not obvious, though. It certainly looks to me, though, like Diogu is pretty definitely a player.
It's awesome. Best movie of 2007! Well, it's early yet. But, seriously, a great film; close to flawless, gripping from the very beginning almost all the way through to the end where it hits a brief weak point before picking up again. Stellar cast, great script, laugh-out-loud funny when it's supposed to be but also profoundly sad. Go see it.
Fred Kagan seeks to explain away the differences between his earlier surge-advocacy and the Bush surge he got. There are a couple of twists and turns, but it finally comes down to this:
Brigade sizes range based on the type of unit, but average around 3,500 soldiers each. The administration's figures are based on that estimate.
In reality, the U.S. Army does not simply deploy brigades into combat, but instead sends Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs). A BCT includes a brigade as described above, but also additional support elements such as engineers, military police, additional logistics elements, and so on, which are necessary to the functioning of the brigade in combat. In a counter-insurgency operation such as Iraq, these additional forces are fully as important to the overall success of the mission as the combat troops. Sizes of BCTs also vary, of course, but they average more like 5,000 soldiers. Since these are the formations that will actually be deployed to Iraq and used there, I have been estimating deployments on this basis: five brigade combat teams include around 25,000 soldiers; one Marine Regimental Combat Team (RCTs are somewhat smaller than Army brigades) includes perhaps 4,000. So the surge being briefed by the Bush administration now is much more likely to be around 29,000 troops than 22,000--in other words, close to the number of combat troops the IPG recommended, and, when necessary support troops are added, close to the overall numbers I had estimated before the IPG met.
In short, Kagan says we can like the surge because Bush is lying when he says it's a surge of 22,000 troops.
It's a great song. But not only is "America's Mayor" obviously doomed as a candidate for the Republican nomination, I'm hugely puzzled as to why Stuart Rothenberg would even concede that "the former mayor might make a terrific general election candidate." At this particular moment in history what's the constituency for gay rights, small government, and more war? Does that sound like the sort of ideological package you'd want to bundle up in an individual who has no experience whatsoever with any federal issues other than racketeering? People still have generally warm and fuzzy feelings about Giuliani (heck, I have somewhat warm and fuzzy feelings about it) but if it came down to an actual campaign the realty that almost nobody actually wants someone with Giuliani-esque views to be president.
With all due respect to both Scott Lemieux and Al Gore himself, I don't actually think Gore's Commonwealth Club speech before the war was all that prescient. Frankly, I think expecting people to accurately forecast exactly how a war is going to go south is an unreasonable bar to set, so I don't take anything away from Gore (he certainly didn't deserve this) but re-reading the speech isn't like looking into a crystal ball.
By contrast, given the objective difficulty of the task, I think the Iraq section of Howard Dean's February 12, 2003 speech at Drake University is strikingly spot-on. It's notable, in particular, because Dean, has never really acquired a reputation as a national security thinker, even among his fans. The Dean speech is also noteworthy for containing a perfectly good proposal for, even at the late date, extricating the USA from the situation in a favorable manner.
John Judis details the sweet deal foreign oil companies are about to get in Iraq. Opening the Iraqi oil industry up to foreign investment is a perfectly reasonable idea, but the clearly correct way to do this would be to have different firms offer competing bids so the Iraqi state gets the best deal possible. Instead, the Bush administration just had BearingPoint devise some arbitrary terms that -- surprise! -- are super-favorable to oil companies.
China successfully tests an anti-satellite weapon, joining the United States and Russia in the "we can blow up satellites" club. I would suggest that a US-China outer space arms race is going to ill-serve the population of either China, the United States, or the other nations of the world. The bonanza for defense contractors is obvious, but what the world could really use is for such a race to not happen and for the current demilitarization of outer space to continue. Obviously since this is an issue, and the Bush administration is the Bush administration, it's mishandled the issue:
Arms control experts called the test, in which the weapon destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow an antisatellite arms race. Alternatively, however, some experts speculated that it could precede a diplomatic effort by China to prod the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban. . . .
White House officials said the United States and other nations, which they did not identify, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese.” Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space.
As ever in these situation, good faith negotiations for a treaty might fail. Or a treaty might come into place and the disarmament regime it creates might crumble in the future. But then again, negotiations might succeed. The Chinese have always maintained that they want to see demilitarization, and the United States says it doesn't want to see Chinese space weapons, so the obvious solution would be to negotiate a more rigorous treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in outer space.
I'd sort of tuned out of the big netroots navel-gazing fracas at TPM Cafe because things were getting ugly, but Matt Stoller's essay is actually quite good and mostly things I agree with, and Mark Schmitt adds some very valuable further nuance to that story. In keeping with brother Sawicky's injunction that we all become more theoretically informed, I suppose the somewhat different spin I would put on this story is to make it a bit less idea-centric and focus, Marx-style, on material causes. One of Schmitt's points is that a lot of netroots-type activity echoes the organizing of Citizen Action and other goings on in the late 1970s and the 1980s. What's more, institutions with origins in that era have tended to play a role in most of the efforts that one associated with the netroots. Finally, as Schmitt observes "these organizations never reached anything approaching the scale they aspired to . . . only in recent years have some of these organizations really stepped up and lived up to the promises made for them in the 1970s and 1980s."
The question, obviously, is why would that be? The answer, it seems to me, is a combination of demographics, economic change, and technology. Over time, the ranks of the professional class have grown and professionals have more and more seen their interests as no longer aligned with those of the managerial class. Thus, the kind of people who were the demographic base of these earlier organizations are both more numerous and more inclined to get involved than they were twenty years ago. What's more, you're talking about a type of person who's intrinsically difficult to mobilize.
The easiest way to mobilize or organize people is to find that they're already organized -- into a union local, into a rotary club, into a church, into a VFW brance, etc. -- and then you simply try to mobilize the existing organization. The progressive white professional class, however, has suffered from notable lack belong to things (bowling alone so to speak) and here's where the internet comes in. By lowering communications costs, information technology has made it much, much easier for people to get in touch with one another, to feel some sense of common purpose alongside other people, generally speaking, easier to mobilize. So suddenly you're seeing a sort of agenda and a sort of approach to things that's been around for a while and that's had some success historically, start to develop more success and to see the prospect of even more successes in the future.
George Scialabba reviews a bunch of books about contemporary politics and comes up with a terrible idea:
How to accomplish it? I don't know. Perhaps population exchanges or year-abroad programs between blue and red states. Perhaps The Nation should offer free subscriptions to registered Republicans. Perhaps Katha Pollitt and Ann Coulter (or Thomas Frank and David Brooks, or Greg Palast and Matt Drudge) should barnstorm the country, the way Stanley Fish and Dinesh D'Souza did in the 1990s. Perhaps all secular liberals should sign a pledge: Every time one evangelical reads a nonreligious book, one of us will go to church. Somehow or other, someone must sow a healthy appetite for informed, discriminating political argument across large swaths of the electorate where it now appears lacking. Otherwise, public life will become wholly (what it now is largely) a marketing competition, and nothing more.
Upon reflection, probably the Republican Party should consider offering free Nation subscriptions to conservative-minded voters who've grown disgruntled with the party's current leadership -- dissenters would run scrambling back to the reservation. More to the point, as Sam Rosenfeld points out the underlying presumption here -- that political progress depends on massively increasing the general populations knowledge of American politics and public policy -- is dead wrong. "Informed, discriminating political argument" is never going to be popular "across large swaths of the electorate" because most people simply don't care very much about politics. This is a fact of political life -- of human nature -- that successful movements seek to deal with, not something to sit around pining over while the world passes everyone by.
As you're recall, Bush is going to fix the Iraq War by firing George Casey and listening to Fred Kagan instead. Kagan said we should send 50,000 additional troops to Iraq for at least 18 months. Bush agreed. Which is why he's sending 20,000 troops and now has general Casey saying they're home by summer. Or, rather, that they "could begin to be withdrawn by late summer" but only "if security conditions improve in Baghdad." A classic Iraq War formulation. As I recall the baseline occupation force was going to begin withdrawing in late 2003 if security conditions improve. The whole thing has, at this point, become an exceptionally cruel farce. Meanwhile, Iranian efforts to defend their tanks against our airplanes are "offensive" actions that the United States needs to worry about.
Jon Chait has a great piece on Alan Reynolds' "research" into inequality, noting that the main point here isn't to convince anyone that Reynolds is right (the work would need to be less amateurish than that), but simply to convince ordinary people that there's a big, complicated, confusing controversy among the experts on this subject so who's to say:
For example, [Reynolds] argues that Piketty and Saez's data does not account for the massive rise of tax-sheltered pensions, such as 401(k) plans, which are "invisible in tax return data." Because 401(k) plans are now common among middle-class earners, tax returns miss a huge source of their wealth and thus make them look misleadingly poor. This sounds sensible enough, but it is wrong on several levels. 401(k)s didn't just appear out of nowhere; they mostly replaced defined benefit pensions. And, like the old pensions, 401(k)s do appear on tax returns when the accounts are withdrawn. On top of that, economists think most taxfavored assets are concentrated in the hands of the rich anyway, so, even if Reynolds were right about tax returns, it would very likely make inequality look even worse.
But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.
Reynolds also turns out to be what you might call a fake economist. Obviously, there's a somewhat difficult asymmetry here. If you're an egalitarian liberal, you'll want to see the government implement anti-inequality policy insofar as you think a troubling level of inequality actually exists. So I would not, for example, urge Iceland to adopt new anti-inequality policies because Iceland's income distribution already is highly egalitarian. In the American context, however, new pro-equality policies are needed. Deciding what you want to do, in short, requires you to actually know something about the structure of wealth and income distribution. This, in turn, requires a certain level of analytic caution and modesty that makes it hard to write bombastic screeds on the subject.
Reynolds and his ideological fellow-travelers, by contrast, don't think we should try to reduce inequality and their commitment to that position is completely independent of their assessment of the empirical facts regarding the extent of inequality. So if Reynolds is getting all his data wrong, nobody on his side is really going to care about that, since, from the right-wing point of view, the question Reynolds is asking doesn't actually matter except as a tool in public debate.
By the way, next week or the week after, we are running an article by Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi on Iran's nuclear capacity, and what should be done about it. We already know what Clinton thinks should be done: wear a yellow ribbon.
Gee, what could Oren and Halevi possibly propose in the pages of The New Republic? Will it be that Israel should bomb with America's diplomatic support, or that America should bomb ourselves? I expect a "ruthlessly serious" proposal one way or the other. Meanwhile, why are hawkish American magazines literally outsourcing their Iran coverage to Israeli pundits? It's like Pat Buchanan is secretly controlling their editors' minds or something.
According to Rep. John Dingell (D-Car companies) a special congressional committee on climate change would be "as relevant and useful as feathers on a fish." Fish, obviously, don't have feathers but it's not clear to me that this is because fish feathers would be irrelevant or useless. Scales, after all, are hardly necessary for the aquatic lifestyle as the many familiar examples of sea-faring mammals -- whales, dolphins, seals -- will clarify. And, of course, the penguin is a sort-of "feathered fish," a bird extremely well-designed for swimming. Dingell can also refer to the case of the duck, the swan, etc.
Meaningful short-term action on climate change doesn't appear to be forthcoming, but the point here is that it'll never be forthcoming if Dingell gets his way. The committee Nancy Pelosi is proposing would have the authority to call and hold hearings and thus possibly (let's be optimistic) further build public support for action.
The good news, in terms of foreign policy, about Democrats winning elections is that they're not Republicans. The bad news is that some Democrats are Tom Lantos, chair of our House Foreign Affairs Committee, so you wind up with congressional Democrats attacking Iraq Study Group members from the right, coming out firmly against negotiating with Syria or Iran. Democratic hawks are probably sensible enough to not actually want to see a bigger regional war, but they're certainly not going to do anything to stop it from happening.
Operation Iraqi Freedom is not the type of folly that one can fix by staying the course. Nor can it be fixed by putting more shoulders to the wheel. Indeed, we cannot truly fix this disaster at all -- not without recourse to time travel. However, we can begin to repair the damage. And it is worth remembering that the United States and its armed forces rebounded relatively quickly from the Vietnam War debacle.
Read the whole report here from the Project on Defense Alternatives. They wind up endorsing a rather ambitious effort to get the Security Council and "a consortium of Iraq's neighbors" to try and guide the country to stability in the wake of American withdrawal rather than a simpler plan where one simply gives up on Iraq and looks to regional diplomacy as a means of containing the damage elsewhere. I'd love to debate these fine distinctions, but since the actual Bush administration plan is to escalate military involvement in Iraq and perhaps widen the war to include Iran, there hardly seems to be a point.
As plenty of others have noted (see this TNR Online piece), Ahmadinejad isn't exactly the only member of the Iranian regime who would like to see Israel destroyed. Even a so-called moderate, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, famously said, of a nuclear attack against Israel, "It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." So maybe it's true that Khamenei is taking power back from Ahmadinejad.
I wonder whether or not Just is deliberately trying to mislead his readers about this. Anyways, here's what Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller wrote about Rafsanjani:
>The next year, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, widely regarded as a pragmatist, noted that Israel was more vulnerable to nuclear attack than Muslim countries "because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." Then he added, "It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."
The fact of the matter is that no matter how many times The New Republic truncates that Rafsanjani quotation, it's still the case that he was talking about deterring Israel's nuclear arsenal and not launching an Iranian first strike.
Be that as it may, at the end of the day, I do not only the Iranian nuclear program as such, but also the larger issue of the slow disintegration of the global nonproliferation regime, extremely seriously as a policy problem. Which is precisely why it's so crucial to combat the horribly misguided "counterproliferation" school that was behind the Iraq War, and to fight against the view that sporadic unilateral military strikes are anything but counterproductive in achieving nonproliferation goals. Peter Scoblic's 2005 New Republic article "Moral Hazard" is probably the best relatively brief statement of why the "bombs away!" approach to dealing with these problems only makes the problems worse and worse.
So, for some reason the "c" and "g" keys on my omputer have de*ided they don't feel like fun*tionin* anymore. Worst of all, it's hard to even *opy and paste under the *irumstan*es so I'm just leavin* the letters off. That may work in the *ontext of a blo* but I don't think one *an really do a book manus*ript this way.
Textual interpretation of statements by former president Rafsanjani aside, other things to keep in mind regarding the Iran issue:
There is overwhelming theoretical and historical reason to believe that no country would mount an unprovoked nuclear first strike against a country with a credible second-strike nuclear deterrent.
There is no particular reason to believe that Iran is especially close to obtaining a workable nuclear weapon.
There is very little reason to believe that an unprovoked unilateral military attack on Iran will substantially delay the date at which Iran may or may not be in a position to build a nuclear weapon.
The phrase "point of no return," though often heard in this debate, has no real practical meaning and, in particular, it's worth pointing out that many nations have passed this point without constructing nuclear weapons.
Nothing is more likely to convince future Iranian governments that they should engage in unprovoked "preventative" attacks on other nations in the region than a history of said other nations launching unprovoked "preventative" attacks on Iran.
There is substantial empirical and theoretic reason to believe that the Iranian nuclear program is substantially defensive (though probably not "peaceful") in nature.
The very administration currently pushing toward a military confrontation with Iran has, in the past, rebuffed Iranian peace overtures and consistently refused to attempt good-faith negotiations aimed at resolving outstanding bilateral disputes between the United States and Iran.
But one has to assume Fidel Castro doesn't have much longer at this point. The prospect of Castro's death is always covered with the sort of baited breath that suggests people are anticipating some kind of dramatic change to follow from it. That could happen, of course, but it seems equally likely -- indeed, somewhat more likely -- to me that nothing in particular will happen. Cuba could just plug along, dictatorial, sanctioned, poor for a good long time just as the death of the DPRK's founder didn't fundamentally alter anything.
Let me recommend Neil Sinhababu's critique of this Mark Penn memo about how Hillary Clinton is a super-strong candidate. Obviously, Clinton pays Penn money to produce this kind of analysis, so it's not surprising that it isn't especially sound. Still, it's almost insultingly unsound. Virtually everything Penn says about Clinton vis-a-vis other Democrats is clearly attributable to name recognition, a concept Penn would evidently like you to believe he's unfamiliar with.
I don't really understand how releasing this kind of thing is supposed to actually help Clinton's chances -- it's just sort of making me mildly annoyed.
Mark Kleiman comparesSam Brownback's view that we should have "term limits for judges" to Alberto Gonzalez's belief that the constitution's guarantee of habeas corpus doesn't guarantee anyone in particular that right as examples of conservatives "shredding the constitution."
I think that's grossly unfair. Brownback is proposing changing a procedural element of our constitution. He's not asserting that the president has some general right to fire judges he thinks have been on the bench for too long. He's not even proposing to alter any of the rights-granting portions of the constitution -- he's proposing a procedural change. And not, I might add, a silly procedural change. Life tenure for federal judges seems like a bad idea to me -- something that probably made more sense during the Founding generation when people didn't live as long. But even if you think Brownback's proposed modification is a bad idea, there's clearly a world of difference between wanting to alter the structure of the constitution through legitimate means, and Bush/Gonzalez-style run-amok illegality.
Speaking of Sam Brownback, he's running for president. My guess is that he's going to prove to be a much stronger primary challenger than he's currently given credit for -- he makes much more sense as a GOP nominee than John McCain or Rudy Giuliani or some such. Also getting in the race is Bill Richardson. Nobody seems excited about his candidacy, but on rough outline a popular governor of a Southwestern state who also has foreign policy experience sounds an awful lot like a solid presidential candidate.
What better way to follow up a Friday evening birthday celebration than by hosting a Saturday night birthday party for your roommates. Then you wake up the next day to one of the great sports Sundays of the year -- Sunday NBA on ABC premieres, followed by Conference Championship games.
Nevertheless, the AFC championship is just hours away and I still don't know what to do. With Pat Riley "on leave" from the Miami Heat, the Colts and the Patriots are now the two most loathsome teams in professional sports. I desperately want them both to lose. If New England wins, we'll need to hear once again about how quarterback/superhuman Tom Brady "knows how to win the big games." If Indianapolis wins, the one strike against Peyton Manning's career will be lifted and his insufferable face will no doubt be smeared across my television screen even more frequently. I'm hoping for injuries. Many, many injuries.
UPDATE: Let me also note that watching a full week of NFC coverage focusing on how nice it would be for those nice football players from New Orleans to win after their city's gone through so much what with that flood and all has given me a powerful hatred for the Saints -- go Grossman go! The Bears just hit N.O. like a category six football storm: Woo!
4th and 1 on the New Orleans four, and the Bears decide to go for it. Naturally, I approve. Neither of the announcers on TV agree with me. Interestingly, both announcers seemed to assert that the fact that this was an NFC Championship game increased the case for kicking the field goal rather than playing for the touchdown. But why would that be? I'm genuinely asking . . . thinking about it the relevant considerations in going for it seem to be simply the score, the time remaining, the yardage to the end zone, and the yardage needed for the first down. Are the playoffs different?
One thing I found myself thinking about last week was how quickly lots of liberals -- myself included, really -- have tended to be willing to accept the notion that John Kerry was some kind of uniquely unappealing candidate for national office in terms of his personal qualities. But of course before Kerry was super-lame, there was Al Gore and he was . . . super lame. And now here I am catching up on my Corner reading and look how personally unappealing Hillary Clinton turns out to be. And Nancy Pelosi, too! It's no surprise that conservatives try to turn every leading Democrat into not only an ideologically objectionable figure but a personally mock-worthy one as well. It is surprising how willing people are to internalize this stuff.
No matter who it is the Democrats nominate, that person is going to wind up mocked as obviously the wrong the choice; obviously just an absurd person who absurd primary voters picked over dozens of more appealing choices. Even Bill Clinton, you'll recall, was supposed to be some kind of gross "slick willy" figure.
Jeff Stein, a CQ reporter who used to be an intelligence officer in Vietnam, recounts how back during that war he had a daily routine to see if his spy had new information for him: "I’d drive by a soccer stadium in Danang, the large coastal city where I lived, and I’d look for a particular mark on the wall. If it was there, I’d go to a prearranged place at a set time for a clandestine meeting with a go-between." Danang wasn't the capital of South Vietnam, and "The war was raging in the jungles and rice paddies less than 10 miles away, and communist agents were everywhere in the city," nevertheless "security was good enough that they weren’t likely to risk exposing themselves by kidnapping or killing me." Even under those conditions, however, the US government never really got a grip on the situation and, of course, the American military effort was doomed to failure.
In Iraq, our intelligence is fantastically worse than that and "according to several well informed intelligence sources, hundreds of CIA operatives have become virtual prisoners in the Green Zone, the sprawling American enclave whose high walls and guards separate the U.S. embassy, military command and related civilian agencies from the raging sectarian violence in Baghdad’s streets." Stein quotes a former CIA Operations official as saying Agency personnel in Baghdad "spend their days playing cards and watching DVDs" because the insecurity makes it impossible for them to do their jobs. But, obviously, the military can't provide security without intelligence. Nevertheless, soldiers and spies alike keep being sent to Iraq to, in essence, wander in circles. Except they're wandering in circles in potentially lethal situations, dying and being gravely injured, inflicting serious wounds on others and destroying their property in attempts to defend themselves -- killing and dying for a clearly hopeless mission.
Prescription drugs: D. While they were the opposition, Democrats fulminated that the Republicans were so deep in the pockets of Big Pharma that they wouldn’t even let the government negotiate lower drug prices. But governing is harder than kvetching, and the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the Democratic plan would have a negligible effect on prices for the elderly.
The plan allows the government to negotiate, but doesn’t take the politically difficult step of giving it any leverage to actually lower prices. A symbolic gesture.
I agree with that. But am I to infer from this that Brooks would favor a toothier measure? The de facto price controls the right's economists have warned us about? I sort of doubt it, but I'd be interested to know.
In a true profiles in courage moment, John McCain announces that he'll stand tall against our failed national security policies by raking General George Casey over the coals at the hearings on his forthcoming appointment as Chief of Staff of the United States Army. I have no particular brief for Casey, who obviously did not bring this country fabulous successes in Iraq and who carried more than his share of water for George W. Bush over the years. Nevertheless, this is a raw deal in the extreme.
Highly-ranked career Army officers aren't like you and me and presumably Casey will just stand willingly and let the right scapegoat him in exchange for which he'll serve out his career and retire with little fuss. And if Casey's happy with that well then on some level it's no concern of mine. The larger political game, however, is perfectly clear -- we're supposed to believe that there was nothing wrong with the war except the bungling of the fool Casey and that the Great Leader Petraeus will save us all. It's probably the best play the war's supporters have left, but one did tend to believe that on some level McCain would have more respect for our armed forces and the officers who serve in them than to personally spearhead this sort of tawdry smear.
Victor Davis Hanson espies signs of progress all the world 'round and notes that "If the administration could get their proverbial rock of Sisyphus finally over the top, they would be surprised at how many Middle Eastern governments might profess newfound and opportunistic support, and, at home, how many pundits will readjust and now profess sorta, kinda, maybe not to have been so critical all along."
Um . . . I think Hanson may want to reacquaint himself with the Sisyphus character. If I could only square the circle, I'd be recognized as a major mathematician. Seems like as good a time as any to relink to Julian Sanchez's old Prospect satire imagining Bush pondering Camus.
Richard Just remains convinced that Iran is, in fact, likely to launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike on Israel, and at the same time disclaims possession of any knowledge about Iran or Iranian affairs and denies having a view as to the appropriate policy remedy for this threat. Frankly, I'm confused and don't really know what kind of argument one can mount under those circumstances.
UPDATE: I mean, really, anyone who doesn't think Iran is going to launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike on Israel isn't taking this issue seriously? Kenneth Pollack? Ray Takeyh? Really? Are there any real experts on Iran who agree with the Halevi/Oren/Just position on this? In my experience, stoking paranoia about an Iranian nuclear first strike has been an idiosyncratic project of The New Republic that not even The Weekly Standard has gone in for.
Okay, time for an informal survey. How many people know what The Voyage of the Mimi -- the classic 1980s-vintage educational series starring a young Ben Affleck -- is? I and many acquaintances regard it as a critical Generation Y cultural landmark, like Thundercats or the Oregon Trail, but a frighteningly large number of people don't seem to know anything about it and think it's weird that I know the theme song.
We watched it in my school in, I think, fourth grade and while I'm not sure I recall any of the core whale-related knowledge it was seeking to impart, I'm fairly certain that to this day I understand the basic principles underlying the construction of a solar still to collect condensation and provide drinking water in case you're ever stranded in the wilderness.
I'm afraid I don't have a very interesting answer to the question of why I'm pro-choice, but suffice it to say that since fetuses lack the cognitive functions that are constitutive of moral personhood, it's not wrong to kill them. One can introduce some additional complications into the equation but it's basically that simple. That legal abortion encourages premarital sex is feature, not a bug.
I try on this blog to always refer to New York's junior senator as either "Hillary Clinton," "Senator Clinton," or "Clinton," and never "Hillary." I'd thought about blogging on this question of nomenclature and labeling the "Hillary" alternative sexist, but I suppose that's complicated by the fact that Clinton and her aides encourage the "Hillary" usage (a less ambiguous case is referring to the Secretary of State as "Condi") but now that J. Goodrich and Mark Schmitt mention it, I may as well chime in as well -- unless you make a habit of being on a first-name basis with US Senators, don't call her "Hillary."
I'm not much of a "goo-goo," but I think it's hard to deny that our country would be much better served by a real system of public financing for campaigns. Along with reducing the power of big donors of the political system, a public financing situation would great mitigate the problem of uncompetitive elections. Gerrymandering has attracted a lot of indignation recently, and to some extent rightly, but realistically that's only a small piece of the puzzle. Any district of any shape or size has a median voter and it should be possible to run a competitive campaign in even a very conservative or a very liberal district. The problem, usually, is money -- there's only so much to go around, and it naturally tends to focus on a relatively small number of "winnable" seats. Public financing would guarantee that for every real candidate there was real money for a real campaign and incumbents everywhere would need to be on their toes.
That, of course, is exactly what incumbents don't like about public financing. I wish Zach Roth had been a bit clearer on that point in his otherwise excellent article on how public financing could really kill the GOP machine. To get it done, Democratic leaders would need to decide that they care more about the health of their political movement than they do about their personal job security, and that's naturally a hard sell. Meanwhile, the vague gesture in the direction of public financing that we already have -- the voluntary checkbox scheme for funding presidential elections -- is going deeper into collapse with every passing cycle.
I think you've got to give this controversy to the Bush administration. After all, Maher Arar is an innocent man who we had kidnapped and shipped off to be tortured -- I'd put him on the terrorism watch list, too, as this is clearly a guy with some legitimate beef.
The specifics of the Arar case aside, the perplexing irony here is that the Bush administration's partner in torture in this case was none other than the nation of Syria. Yes, that Syria, the country too dastardly for us to conduct diplomatic talks with regarding the future of Iraq. The country whose government we keep issuing vague verbal threats to overthrow. One of the key dominoes on the board of the neocons' crazy game. I think it requires a genuinely sick group of individuals to have such a strong and robust opposition to attempts at diplomacy and international cooperation, especially with "bad" regimes, that can nonetheless be overcoming not in the interests of avoiding war but solely and exclusively for the cause of promoting the torture of innocent people.
UPDATE: See MJ Rosenberg for another side of the ened for engagement with Syria.
Trying to think of something novel to say about last night's debut of the Melo-Iverson Supernuggets, what I've got is that insofar as this team proves successful (beating Memphis is neither here nor there) it'll be because you're really looking at a three-headed monster here, not a duo. Marcus Camby is, when healthy, a very good true center in an era when true centers are in short supply. Last night he offered 17 points on 6-11 shooting. He pulled down 17 boards. He blocked three shots, had two steals, three assists, and zero turnovers. And he's the anchor of the defense. And defense is crucial to Denver's success. They rank high on points scored and points allowed measures because they play at a super-fast pace, but at least up until the debut of the superstar duo they've been better at defensive efficiency than offensive efficiency.
The point, at any rate, is that not only is that a lot of production, but it's production very few guys in this league can offer. Only Dikembe Mutombo in limited minutes and acknowledged star Dwight Howard have higher rebound rates, Camby's better than Howard on the defense end, and while he's not a stellar scorer he's not an offensive liability either.
Petey draws my attention to this example of the Bush administration appearing to do something clever in the Horn of Africa by arranging for the safe passage of Sheik Sharif Ahmed formerly of the Islamic Courts Union to Kenya and encouraging the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia to work with him. Ahmed was one of the more moderate figures inside the ICU but also a very high-ranking official with perhaps a large following among the ICU rank-and-file. Clearly, I think, the Bush administration's instincts are correct here. The question is whether it will work.
Worst op-ed of the (admittedly still young) year? Liz Cheney's Hannity-esque effort on Iraq in today's WaPo. It's a really thing of wonder.
And it really is a sucky op-ed. That said, I'm not sure how it differs in substance from what I believe is The New Republic's most recent editorial on Iraq from November just after the election:
Many Democrats have embraced a proposal called "phased redeployment," a politically expedient way of saying immediate withdrawal. Their proposal, which calls for departures beginning in four to six months, doesn't allow the time and space for the arduous work that a political settlement requires--the kind of agreement that will ultimately allow us to leave with the least damage to the Iraqi people and our own interests. Proponents of "redeployment" might argue that the president will enact any new course as ineptly as he did before--a very reasonable fear. But, having achieved new majorities, the Democrats must use their oversight capability to ensure that this does not happen. This can no longer be a one-party war.
Obviously, this is written with a more TNR-style sneer than a Hannity-style one, and those are different brands of sneer. The substantive points, however, strike me as very similar. And more important, the policy objective -- supporting Bush and his open-ended military commitment to Iraq -- are actually identical.
Speaking of which, I have a new column defending Wesley Clark against the Lobby That Shall Not Be Named and I'm going to be on Washington Post Radio at 12:10 today to talk Iran.
Much like the Iranian exiles Anne Applebaum praises today, I think the Holocaust did, in fact, take place and that Holocaust deniers are bad people. The lead of Applebaum's column, however, is fairly strange. She analogizes these Iranian exiles to the exiled Bolsheviks of pre-WWI Russia, and criticizes those who doubted the Bolsheviks could bring revolution to Russia. The German government eventually decided that since Lenin and his party supported surrender in the first world war, that Germany should sponsor the Bolsheviks, and provided transportation for Lenin to return to Russia along with funds and other forms of support in the very early days of the revolution. Lenin took over Russia, signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, and managed to set into motion in Russia a series of incredibly horrifying events that Applebaum herself has documented.
Nevertheless, she appears to be arguing that this German policy toward Russia should serve as a model for America's approach to Iran. Why not count on exiles? After all, they might turn out to be just like the Bolsheviks! An odd, odd woman.
Still the best campaign slogan ever, from back when he was running for Massachusetts state senate the first time. You've probably never heard of him, but Jarrett Barrios is going to be president one day. And now he has a blog. This comes via Matt Stoller who remarks "Barrios was always a favorite MA legislator." I don't know much about his legislative career, but he has crazy charisma, and I think that's primarily what counts in politics.
So far, Barrios is most famous for his involvement in the effort to legislate against Fluff sandwhiches. This struck many as extreme at the time, but with smoking restrictions and trans fat bans spreading across the nation like wildfire, you'll be surprised by what sort of public health measures count as mainstream by the time of the 2032 presidential election. Demolition Man here we come.
Fires at scores of barricades sent billowing black smoke against a pale blue sky. Across the capital, only mopeds, some carrying Hezbollah cadres with walkie talkies, navigated the roadblocks along usually clogged streets that were empty. On the airport highway, a half-dozen barricades blocked traffic, forcing some travelers to drag their luggage by foot. Government supporters and foes squared off across the barricades, hurling rocks, sticks and insults in clashes that sometimes lasted hours.
GatewayPundit rounds up right blogistan's reactions -- shockingly this wave of protests isn't being wildly celebrated by hawks and civil disobedience is no longer equivalent to the dawning of democracy. Hezbollah's protest babes aren't hot enough I guess?
Paul Krugman offers a good run-down of the two major schools of thought on health care, and then concludes with his take on where Bush's proposals are going:
Now here's the thing: in the name of consumer-directed health care theory, Bush is proposing changes that would essentially encourage people to move into the individual market — which wastes a lot of money, and doesn't and can't work for those most in need — while undermining the employer-based system, which isn't wonderful but is still essential. In particular, healthy high-income people would be encouraged to drop out of employment-based plans, leaving behind a sicker risk pool, driving up rates, and pushing employer-based care in the direction of an adverse selection death spiral. The plan we're supposed to learn about tomorrow doesn't sound big enough to have catastrophic effects, but it's a step in the wrong direction.
I can't get that worked up about Bush's plans. I agree with Krugman and liberals everywhere that consumer-directed health care won't work. But suppose it does? Well, that'd be a pleasant surprise. And if it doesn't, it'll be easier to build a rational universal system on the ashes of a wrecked employer-based system than it'll be to cobble one together using employer-based health care as a foundation. On most topics, I think there's very good reason to be skeptical of "things have to get worse before they get better" kind of thinking, but there are, I think, good reasons to make an exception on the health care front.
George W. Bush is a very bad president. He manages to screw up the simplest things. For example, he gave a big speech last night in praise of Houston Rockets backup center Dikembe Mutombo, formerly a star with the Denver Nuggets and the Atlanta Hawks and an integral component of the Philadelphia 76ers team that made it to the NBA Finals back in the day. It was a good move since Mutombo is, obviously, more than worthy of praise. Somehow, though, Bush managed to miss the most salient facts. Mutombo is actually leading the league in rebound rate, pulling down an insane 23.6 percent of missed shots while on the floor.
This while he's forty years old. The shocking thing is that the stellar performances this season of Mutombo and fellow ex-star turned backup Alonzo Mourning could arguably be dragooned into an argument about the need to raise the Social Security retirement age. Alternatively, one could simply contemplate the unfairness of Mutombo and Mourning being allocated to two of the very few teams who actually have top-notch starting centers. Certainly after watching Brendan Haywood repeatedly fail to throw it down during the Wizards sorry, sorry first quarter tonight, I'm wishing we had either of those guys.
UPDATE: If I were president, I would have taken the opportunity to note that whatever shotcomings Dwane Casey may have as a coach firing him is hardly going to get at the root -- cough, McHale, cough -- of Minnesota's problems. Indeed, I think Bush ought to call for the Wolves-Bulls trade that would give Kevin Garnett the shot at championship contention he so richly deserves.
Wesley Clark raises the role of wealthy right-wing Jews in pushing toward a military confrontation with Iran and get smeared as an anti-semite. I defend Clark. Jon Chait in the virtual pages of The New Republicattacks me. But, obviously, rich right-wing Jews like the owners of The New Republic have nothing to do with the drive toward a military confrontation with Iran, right?
I will grant Chait this, insofar as Clark was trying to say that rich rightwing Jews could cause a war with Iran all on their own he's clearly overstating things. We're talking about an influential group of people, but not an all-powerful one. That said, Chait's being willfully naive if he thinks the groups I cited as pushing for military actions against Iran aren't actually pushing for such action. It's true that one can be concerned about the prospect of a nuclear Iran and also concerned about the prospect of American or Israeli military strikes. I put myself in that category. What you need to do to get into that category is express concern about both things. That's not what JINSA or AIPAC or the rest of them are doing -- they're laying the groundwork for the initiation of war.
Inspired by Josh Marshall, I've created a video response to the State of Union, focusing on Iran rather than the NBA-related issues also raised by the speech.
Because I was super-lazy, I recorded this in low resolution on my iSight rather than going upstairs to recover my better digital video camera. I'm also wearing an Adidas hoodie because that's what I put on when I came home from the gym, and I'm actually wearing the hood for no good reason other than sheer eccentricity.
This actually seems like a promising endeavor. How to close the gap between the 16 percent of GDP that the GOP is willing to take in in taxes and the 25 percent of GDP that the country needs in spending? Mark Schmitt says you need higher taxes than that, but this is desperately inside the box thinking. Figure the government can run a deficit of, say, four percent of GDP safely on a sustainable basis. Then all you need is an additional 5 percent of GDP in product placements. It's not just State of the Unions, it's those backdrops for normal presidential speeches, it's that seal on the podium, the wings of Air Force One, the sides of USPS trucks, everything. If public transportation authorities can sell advertising, why not the whole federal government?
I know Petey thinks monomania is an unattractive quality in a blogger, but it does seem to me that somebody should pay attention as the Iran war drums keep beating. Here's Amir Taheri in The New York Post and here's Benny Morris in The New York Sun (see Robert Farley's refutation) and here's New Republic editor Martin Peretz's endorsement of the latter.
UPDATE:Here's moderate warmonger Patrick Clawson from WINEP writing in the World Jewish Digest. Clawson, to his credit, recognizes that the international blowback from unilateral Israel or American strikes would, at this point, be extremely severe and advocates not bombing but rather laying the diplomatic and logistical groundwork for future bombing.
Kate Zernicke had an interesting article in last weekend's NY Times week in review on the demographics of contemporary American marriage, updating some of our stereotypes for the brave new world in which most people are unmarried.
The well-known fact is that college educated people marry later than do the less-schooled. The big counterintuitive fact is that college educated women are substantially more likely to get married than are less-educated women. Among young men you don't see a schooling gap, but it emerges as men get older and takes the same shape. Educated people marry other educated people which, among other things, contributes to inequality. It would be interesting to see more about race here. Zernicke writes, "black women are significantly less likely to marry than white women, but among blacks, women with a college education are more likely to marry than those who do not." But how much of the lower marriage rate among less educated women is due the fact that there's a disproportionately large number of African-American women in that pool.
The junior senator from Massachusetts says he won't run for president. I know that everyone, myself included, has sort of treated Kerry's 2008 aspirations as a bit absurd and under the circumstances it's probably better that he spare himself the humiliation. That said, it seems to me that there's no reason whatsoever to believe that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, or Mark Warner would actually do a better job of being president and at least a some reason to think Kerry (who, after all, has dramatically more experience in governing) would be better than any of them.
Obviously, though, very little about our presidential nomination process is designed to generate nominees who are likely to make good presidents.
Mike Tomasky balance a ticket nicely if the nominee is Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I did another half-assed video saying it's a bad idea!
As you'll see, no hoodie. I only have the one and I can't wear it everyday, so if you want more hoods you'll need to get me that Christmas present you meant to send back in December.
You might think there was nothing left to be said about Ruth Marcus' crazy SOTU column (see Klein, Drum, Cohn, etc.) but you'd be wrong. Marcus argues that "Democrats -- if they care more about addressing health-care needs than scoring political points -- ought to be finding ways to improve and build on the Bush proposal, not condemning and mischaracterizing it." As others have noted, there's really no reason to think that's true.
The deeper point -- one that cuts closer to the unique dementia of the permanent pundit class in Washington -- is that even were Democrats to genuinely face a zero-sum choice on this issue scoring political points would be the right choice. Most Americans, like virtually all Democrats, define the "health insurance problem" in the United States as consisting of the fact that many Americans have no health insurance, others have too little health insurance, and others find paying for their health insurance to be extremely burdensome. The Bush administration, by contrast, defines the problem as many Americans having too much health insurance and therefore using too many health resources.
Under the circumstances, insofar as you agree with Democrats about what the health insurance problem is, a big part of the problem is the Bush administration. The only way to make progress on the problem is to replace the Bush administration with one that has the correct view of what the problem is. Scoring political points is the way to do that.
Here's the Financial Times's Gideon Rachman on high-level Israeli officials, American hawks, and John Edwards getting together at the shop and here's his take on the Israeli view of things: "they clearly think that it is most likely that Israel and the United States will soon be faced by the decision over whether to take military action. They hope the US will do it. But the strong implication is that Israel will take action alone if necessary. But they are far from sanguine about the potential regional consequences, in terms of a wider war, terrorism and so on." Well, I'm not sanguine either, which seems like one of several good reasons not to do it.
Here's what John Edwards told the audience. It's not quite as bad a talk as I was initially led to believe. That said, with the United States and Israel drifting in the direction of a disastrous Iran policy Edwards is rather clearly choosing not to push against the drift. How much of this is political expediency and how much is convictions?
UPDATE: Stoller is harsh but fair: "The issue for John Edwards has always been credibility. Why should we trust a man who sold us out on the war vote? His answer is that he's changed. But has he?" I agree. I understand the political realities here, but I'd be much more inclined to give Edwards slack on this had he shown better judgment in the past.
Matt Stoller says the netroots have a deep-seated loathing of Hillary Clinton and her elitist triangulating ways. Atrios says the foundation of the netroots worldview has to do with outrage at press coverage of Whitewater and a separate post complaining about Fox News and the "Clinton rules of journalism."
All of which reminds me that I meant to link to Ed Kilgore's post on the netroots and Clintonism, though not to answer his questions which seem to me to have been phrased in a loaded way. The thing of it is, however, that both the Stoller post and the Atrios posts speak to important strands of netroots thinking. You can find a ton of mean stuff written about Bill and Hillary Clinton on the blogs, but it's still the case that the progressive internet movement substantially has its roots in endeavors (MoveOn, MediaWhoresOnline, the Daily Howler) whose original purposes were to defend the Clinton/Gore administration and their DLCish policy agenda from the right-wing's attacks. And, indeed, since this started with looking at Stoller in contradistinction to Atrios, it's worth revisiting this section of Matt's big recent essay:
Beginning with the Clinton impeachment in 1998, identity liberals who had voted but not really gone beyond that in their direct political activity began to sign petitions, give money, and engage in activism. As the shocks not only got worse – the impeachment was followed by what was essentially a legal coup in 2000, the attacks of 9/11, and then the disgraceful Democratic complacency during the Iraq debate in 2002 – liberals began to not only vote but use innovative political strategies to take and institutionalize power.
9/11 and Iraq are today's signature issues, but the origins institutionally and emotionally are the battles in defense of Clinton (1998) and Gore (2000) and I don't think the implications and meaning of this are well understood.
Well, it's hard to say. Maybe we just need classicists with better political judgment. But Victor Davis Hanson's continuing inability to see the parallels between Iraq and the Athenian campaign in Sicily is pretty damn weird. I mean, clearly, there are differences -- we have airplanes, they spoke Greek, etc., etc,. etc. but it's still pretty freaking obvious.
This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion!
January 25, 2007:
Iraq is at the beginning of a civil war fought using the tactics of genocide, and it has all the conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek correspondent, Christian Caryl, wrote recently from Baghdad, “What’s clear is that we’re far closer to the beginning of this cycle of violence than to its end.” As John Burns of The Times said on “Charlie Rose” last night, “Friends of mine who are Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — all foresee a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that would absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now.”
September 18, 2004:
As we saw in El Salvador and as Iraqi insurgents understand, elections suck the oxygen from a rebel army. They refute the claim that violence is the best way to change things. Moreover, they produce democratic leaders who are much better equipped to win an insurgency war.
January 25, 2007:
The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through.
So having heaped scorn a few years ago on doves who were later proven right -- not necessarily shown to be all-wise, all-knowing sages on all subjects, but who certainly demonstrated a greater degree of understanding of the nation of Iraq and the dynamics of the war there -- does Brooks have a less scornful view of those same people and their ideas today? Of course not: "The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb — simply get out of Iraq 'in short order' — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences."
I've written several times about the enigmatic figure of Chuck Hagel, a guy who seems to have a better grasp on foreign affairs than many of our Democrats but who's much longer on good talk than useful action. Brent Budowsky urges him to leave the GOP, saying "if Senator Hagel leaves the Republican Party and becomes a Democrat or political independent, he changes the course of American history."
I doubt that's true on several levels, but it's worth saying that the timing is wrong. Switching parties wouldn't have any particular impact at this point beyond what voting for some pieces of Democratic legislation would have. And more to the point, Hagel actually isn't a "maverick" and never really has been; he's a quite orthodox conservative (beyond social issues I've heard him discuss, e.g., Social Security in precisely the manner one would expect from a somewhat informed rightwinger) who simply has foreign policy views at odds with the current madness. What he ought to do is run for president. He'd probably lose (duh) but with so many hawks in the GOP field you never know, and at a minimum it would force some thinking in conservative circles as to what, exactly, the conservative commitment to this kind of run-amok adventurism is supposed to be.
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz manages simultaneously demonstrate ignorance of widely known historical facts and achieve the impressive feat of making Tom Friedman look smart:
Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they'd break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished.
Imagine that! A society where a figure like King could be imprisoned or even killed! Those Muslims sure are vicious and evil.
I wonder if Jon Chait and others concerned about Wesley Clark's alleged anti-semitism feel it's a problem that one of America's leading political magazines is owned and operated by a man whose political opinions appear to be primarily driven by bigotry against Arabs and Muslims; keep your eyes on The Plank for a response.
With Pau Gasol apparently on the market and Kevin Garnett apparently not, it seems logical for the Chicago Bulls to contemplate moving some of the assets oft-mentioned in a Garnett context for Pau instead. Thus, Chris Sheridan: "The Bulls are currently puttering along at five games over .500 and sitting fifth in the weak Eastern Conference, needing a capable low-post scorer like humans need oxygen." It's true, of course, that Chicago lacks low-post scoring, but it's not obvious to me that this is a requirement for being a good team. Look at the league in order of offensive efficiency and you'll see that the second-best team is the Wizards, who have no interior offense whatsoever (they lack interior defense but Chicago has that). Number three is Dallas, which doesn't really have a low-post scorer either. Then you get the Lakers, where Andrew Bynum provides some low-post scoring along with much promise, but is hardly a dominant presence at this point. Then it's San Antonio, then Utah, then Detroit, then Milwaukee, then Seattle, and then the Knicks round out the top ten.
There's not an obvious pattern here -- some top-notch offensive teams have major low-post threats, some of so-so low-post games, some have none whatsoever. Chicago's offense isn't middling because it's all from the perimeter, it's middling just because it's middling -- Ben Gordon is no Gilbert Arenas. Which isn't to say that Chicago shouldn't make a deal for Gasol if they can get a goo
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