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January 14, 2007 - January 20, 2007 Archives
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.
Think Positive
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.
Random Recommendations
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 Which inspired me to offer my own outdated recommendation that various people and impersonal computers have been telling me that I would like Mirah for some time now and it's true -- I do like Mirah,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.
InBox
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.
Exxon Flips
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.
Clinton Lied!
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.
Lurching Toward War
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.
Is this Nouri Talabani related to Jalal Talabani?
Questions on Palestine
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.
Foiled Dreams
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.
The Excluded Middle
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.
King and Nonviolence
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.
Better Hummus, Too
Martin Peretz's 1,027th reason why Arabs are teh suck:
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!
TV on the Television
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.
Excuses 2.0
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.
Weather Inversion
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.
Etc., Etc., Etc.
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.
Waxing Hawkish
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.
From an Unlikely Source
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.
Foxman in a Henhouse
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.
Mr. Bartley
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.
UPDATE: Link here.
Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
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 Value of a Life
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.
Neighborhood News
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.
Only in America
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?
Classy
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?
Counterinsurgency
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.
Somalia
Here's my column on America's late December proxy war adventure in the Horn of Africa. John Judis in fantastic column gets much shriller about this.
Times Change
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.
The Price of War
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.
The Fray
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.
Defense of Others
The Sawicky doctrine of war-fighting:
. 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.
Marxism
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."
More Horn
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.
Apocalypse 18 Months From Now?
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?
Maybe She'll Teach the Country to Bake
Oy. This is truly unfortunate:
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.
The Big Deal
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.
Notes on a Scandal
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.
It's Okay: They're Lying
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.
Another Rudy Can't Fail Joke
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.
In Retrospect
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.
Regulatory Conquest
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.
Die Satellite, Die
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.
The Material Basis of the Netroots
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.
Not Helpful
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.
Mini-Surge
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.
FUDing Inequality
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.
Could It Be...
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz offers us a preview of the remix:
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.
Feathers on a Fish
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.
Ah, Democrats...
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.
Wise Words
Carl Conetta:
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.
Cavalier
Richard Just at The New Republic is "a little disturbed by the cavalier attitude some liberals have taken towards the prospect of a nuclear Iran". Ah, good, I'm incredibly disturbed by the cavalier attitude warmongers have taken to the truth. Just writes:
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.
A Problem
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.
The Gospel on Iran
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.
Not Dead Yet
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.
Hey! Name Recognition!
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.
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Heads in the Sand
