As you see, the Chapter VII UN Sanctioning process can be made to work just fine as long as the United States continues drawing its evidence of Iranian misbehavior from credible international sources. That our diplomats have been working diligently to get foreigners to ratchet-up the pressure is all to the good. It's crucial that we not do anything crazy -- bombing, say -- that would puncture this international consensus. And, of course, you've got to be able to take "yes" for an answer if the Iranians decide they'd rather rejoin the world than build a nuclear bomb.
Team Bush's once formidable message discipline seems to be breaking down. Watch and see as aides to Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates tell all about their bosses efforts to get the Gitmo detention facilities shut down, and the ways Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney stymied those efforts. They even say explicitly that Gonzalez' political weakness is a reason for raising the issue again.
It had been my understanding that Jonathan Chait wasn't doing his column for The Los Angeles Times anymore, but this looks a lot like an insightful Jon Chait column about the right's bizarre approach to global warming:
National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is "Planet Gore." The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.
Yes, right. Gore aside, it's genuinely striking how much of conservative thinking about global warming seems to be driven purely by hatred of environmentalists. I can't even say how often I think I've read the following sort of "logic" deployed in response to an environmentalist making some point about curbing carbon emissions.
Environmentalists say global warming is a serious problem.
Increased use of nuclear power plants could help curb global warming.
Geoengineering could help curb global warming.
Environmentalists dislike both global warming and nuclear power.
Therefore, environmentalists hate capitalism and modern society and I'll ignore this issue!
I'm not a scientist; I'm not a science journalist; I don't specialize in environmental issues. Based on what I know about how the world works, I think it's perfectly plausible that environmentalists are understating the role that nuclear power and geoengineering/adaptation should play in dealing with climate change. Still, it's absolutely clear that the solution involves reducing aggregate global carbon emissions to some level lower than the current one, that the current trends project emissions to rise indefinitely, and that changing the trend will be politically difficult. Whether or not environmentalists hate capitalism (some probably do!) just doesn't make a real difference.
I have to say, I think Brad DeLong's being kind of unfair to Karen Tumulty. The people who cover political campaigns for a living haven't done a ton to earn the benefit of the doubt, but the fact remains that the SEIU/CAP health care event was boring. Nothing happened, no news was broken, and we learned basically nothing about the candidates. I would be interested in hearing about Barack Obama's health care plan except he . . . doesn't have one. I see no particular reason to hear about the fact that he doesn't have one. Everyone thinks he'll produce one soon enough, and it would be good to hear about it when it happens.
Dennis Kucinich's health care proposal actually deserves some serious coverage, but placing in the context of a presidential campaign in which he's not a serious factor just ensures that this won't happen. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson who are somewhere between Edwards and Obama on the spectrum of releasing detailed plans managed to clarify nothing. Edwards' plan remains Edwards' plan and listening to him speak about it in this format is less enlightening than just reading about it in detail. All in all it was dull. Less because it was, in The Politico's headline to a pretty good summary, "More Than You Wanted to Know About Health Care" than that it was considerably less than someone genuinely curious about this would want to know, while also being much more than those who don't really care about the issue will want to know.
The New York Timestakes a look and vanishing "working waterfront" spaces in Maine. The state has a very long coastline, but apparently only a small proportion of it is suitable for the docks and so forth that fishermen need and more and more of that is getting bought up for real estate development. That trend's been going on for a while, but the Times reports that it's now pushing all the way into the remote parts of the state east of Bar Habor.
My family has a summer home on the coast in Brooklin, Maine so I guess we're part of the problem. This kind of thing ends up being somewhat more paradoxical than your urban gentrification scenarios since the working fishing operations and so forth are, at least in my opinion, an integral part of coastal Maine's considerable charm. On the other hand, that reality may create a reasonable policy rationale for taking action to protect the industry.
Since Plotz penned his piece, Princeton's system has been adopted by a long list of teams across the country. In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings, New Jersey Nets, and Washington Wizards have used versions of the offense. Meanwhile, the system has spread throughout the college ranks--to N.C. State, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Air Force, Richmond, and Arizona State, among other schools.
I'm not sure I fully recall the offenses Eddie Jordan ran when he was an assistant coach for the Nets, but no matter how many times what the Wizards do gets described as a "Princeton offense" I just can't see it. Is that the part where Agent Zero takes outrageously long threes, or the part where Jamison hits those runners in the paint? Wikipedia says to run the offense "all five players in the offense-- including the center-- should be competent at making a three point attempt, further spreading the floor." That doesn't sound like Brendan Haywood or even Caron Butler. It also states that "the offense is a very slow developing one . . . often used by teams facing opponents with superior athletic talent, to maintain a low-scoring game." That doesn't sound at all like the Wizards, who have the league's #4 pace. On the other hand, this really is what everyone says, so I'm genuinely curious. At the same time, Jason Kidd and Gilbert Arenas seem like radically different star points guards, and I'm baffled as to how there could be a single offensive system that was built around both of them.
Carl Connetta notes that for the first time since 1993, we now have a poll indicating that a plurality of people think we spend too much on the military and the department of defense.
Perhaps Michael Kinsley will agree that this isn't kosher: "Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove's political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates." The irony in all this, at some level, is that if the Bush administration had spent less time thinking about ways to abuse their power for electoral gain and more time thinking about ways to govern the country in a non-disastrous manner, they probably would have done much better in the midterms. At some level, there's no substitute for knowing how to do your job properly.
I think it's a little depressing on several levels that it requires a long and brilliant article to make the point, but as Michael Crowley notes in a long and brilliant article on the subject the reason Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq authorizing resolution appears to be that she thought it was the right thing to do; it appears that she won't apologize for it because she doesn't think she was wrong; and, last, it appears that her views on both these things are connected to a larger worldview that's more militaristic than your average liberal's.
I say it's depressing because it winds up simultaneously being unfair to her opponents. She's so stuck with the "calculating" tag that even in the face of all the evidence, Clinton's views on Iraq get read exclusively through the lense of political calculation (like any pol, of course, she does in fact do some calculating) without any consideration of the possibility that there are real views her. Conversely, her opponents deserve a chance at a real debate over what kind of foreign policy the voters want, and not one in which we pretend that everyone agrees and this is all just a game of gotcha and who said what when.
I have to admit that the side of me that follows politics sort of as a spectator sport can't help but want to see Michael Bloomber launch his much-rumored independent presidential campaign. A three-way race would have more wide upen contours and a much more dynamic electoral map. John Kerry got 40 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 2004 and the state's 37 percent black so you've got to figure Bloomberg couldn't push that down very far. Maybe he'd take enough GOP votes to render Democrats competitive in the deep south.
On the other hand, the larger impact would almost certainly be to siphon votes off in the northeast and turn those solidly blue states competitive. I'm not a fan of third party concepts in general, and what makes them appealing from a spectator point-of-view is a big part of the problem with them -- when you have more than two candidates in the race, the American electoral system starts delivering some truly odd results. The combination of first past the post with the electoral college means that, in principle, you could become president while finishing third out of three in the popular vote. The other thing is that a solid billionaire challenge could be exactly the thing to light a fire under the assess of incumbent politicians and get them interested in political reform. Bloomberg has over $5.5 billion. He could comfortably live until the end of his days with a mere $1 billion in savings, and spend $4.5 billion on a presidential campaign, at which point all bets would be off. The established party candidates need to consider themselves lucky that he seems to be contemplating something more along the lines of "only" $500 million.
I'm not a DC hater. Indeed, the main thing I hate about DC are all the DC haters. That said, this is too good to pass up:
Civic leaders say they are looking for more than just a snappy line. Tourism accounts for $5 billion in direct spending each year (and $550 million a year into the city's general fund.) The District needs a new brand, as they call it, as distinctive as that of Nike or Apple, that will get to the heart of what's appealing about the area.
Hm . . . the heart of the appeal . . . how about: "Washington, DC: I Moved Here for Work." I like it.
It's too bad Michael Crowley's excellent article about Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views (hawkish!) isn't available to non-subscribers. Here's an excerpt telling you that of Bill Clinton's top foreign policy aides, many of the less militaristic ones (Anthony Lake, Susan Rice) have signed up with Barack Obama, while Clinton is extremely close to the very hawkish Richard Holbrooke (see the brief Holbrooke section of Ari Berman's old article about Dem advisors) and hired a former WINEP guy onto her Senate foreign policy staff. And then, of course, there's Clinton himself:
[A]s the war drums grew louder, he grew increasingly supportive. While he stressed the importance of diplomacy and arms inspections, he seemed to value them more as a way to legitimate an invasion than to avoid one. On October 27, for instance, Clinton said in another speech that "I do think it would be better if we can go through the U.N. and try the inspections, even though if past is prologue, they'll fail." Though he regularly warned against acting without broad support, this, too, seemed less a critique of Bush administration aggressiveness than of U.N. timidity. In a mid-February speech, he told a Texas audience that Bush "deserves a lot of credit for saying we can't just ignore [Iraq] forever; it's time to deal with this again," before going on to argue that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake and urging recalcitrant European countries to show that they were serious about Iraq.
More strikingly, Clinton even seemed to embrace the neocon notion that, by toppling Saddam, the United States might reshape the Middle East. "[I]t's going to take years to rebuild Iraq," he said. "If we do this, we want it to be a secular democracy. We want it to be a shared model for other Middle Eastern countries. We want to do what a lot of people in the administration honestly want, which is to have it shake the foundations of autocracy in the Middle East and promote more freedom and decency. You've got to spend money and work hard and send people there to work over a long period of time." These could have been the words of Paul Wolfowitz. But, to Bill Clinton, this wasn't a blinkered fantasy--it was a legitimate and realistic U.S. foreign policy objective.
This is what makes the Clinton camp's continued efforts to dissemble about Barack Obama's record unfortunate. As best one can tell, Clinton and Obama not only took a different view of the October 2002 Iraq authorizing resolution vote, but have different instincts and views about the larger questions in this area and have, for that reason, come to attract different groups of associates. For the record, in addition to whichever of the big name people Edwards talks to his primary national security associates (to the best of my knowledge) are Derek Chollet and Michael Signer. Signer, conveniently, has published a foreign policy manifesto that I'm not super-excited about. I know less about Chollet's views (this seems right) though I can say that his book The Road to the Dayton Accords, a rare foreign policy book that eschews doctrine in favor of looking at how these decisions actually get made, is pretty fascinating.
Speaking of John Edwards (of which I've done too little) and his views on national security (of which I think he's done too little), does anyone know if John Edwards still favors creating a domestic intelligence agency? It was kind of his signature national security proposal just 3-4 years ago. I think this idea could have some merit to it. The absence of a domestic spying agencies doesn't mean we don't have domestic spying, it means that domestic spying is either done illegallly (as in the NSA wiretapping affair) or else ineptly by the FBI which, appropriately, is primarily focused on its core law enforcement mission. I don't take the view that we should be dramatically expanding the quantiyt or scope of domestic intelligence activities in the United States, but I think it makes perfect sense to locate them in a designated agency.
That said, the org chart for intelligence and law enforcement in the United States is so messy that it may not make a difference. The whole thing, though, could really use an overhaul since it's path dependence run amok. One way or another, the Edwards camp should address this subject since a lot of news has been broken about domestic intelligence abuses since he first made the proposal and things look different in that light.
Didn't President Bush promise to ban this sort of thing a few years back? I mean, seriously, a sheep with human organs? Admittedly, only 15 percent human, but still.
I wonder from time to time what's become of Kenan Makiya, the liberal Iraqi exile intellectual who sold a lot of people on the notion that invading Iraq was a moral obligation. Via Justin Logan here's Edward Wong's profile for The New York Times Magazine. Regarding people who say Hillary Clinton should apologize for backing the war, Makiya says “People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?" He also seems to have cooked up an idiosyncratic brand of incompetence dodge:
“There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences. . . .
Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. “The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.”
He thinks we should have, what? Invaded, sent our tanks into Baghdad, pulled down the statue, and then just left the country in a state of total chaos and somehow democracy was going to emerge from that? I agree that the occupation was a mistake, but that's just to say that the invasion itself was a mistake. The one follows from the other.
I believe this link to Michael Crowley's article on Hillary Clinton's national security views should work for non-subscribers and I encourage everyone to read it. It's not some kind of hit-job on Clinton and, frankly, I have no real idea what Crowley thinks about foreign policy (TNR doesn't seem deeply invested in the concept of attacking Democrats for being too hawkish as an editorial stance) and he certainly doesn't say in the article.
Obviously, on some level I'm just jealous because Clinton came to Peter Beinart's book party and I doubt I can get her for mine. Nor, I think, will Mark Penn be willing to play host.
. . . has the progressive blogosphere not been inundated by posts mocking this absurd Victory Caucus website featuring Hugh Hewitt, Frank Gaffney, and other people who manage the astounding feat of being less credible than Hewitt or Gaffney! They have a blog of course and seem to have been up and running for some time. Recently, Jed Babbin asked the sensible question "what is victory?" in the context of Iraq, which produced a level of huffing and puffing that's simply astounding. It's like classic Steven Den Beste from 2002 except, you know, five years later and on a group blog. I'm impressed. See also this plan for Iran:
Pro ejemplo, we could send China a telegram:
Hi, China. STOP It’s been awhile. STOP Hey, last time I was in Bejing I noticed a lot of Audi A6s. STOP We would like Iran to end activities with regards to Iraq. STOP We know that you have an interest in Iran. STOP Because, um, we’re about to drop a nuke on the Iranian oil fields. STOP Just thought you should know. STOP Hope the wife and kids are good. STOP Don’t be a stranger. STOP
Yes. It really says that. Hilariously, the next line is "That process must be combined with a strategy in order to defeat the radical Islamic ideology." The genius behind the strategic masterstroke that is pressuring China to pressure Iran by threatening to nuke Iranian oil fields and thereby raise the price of gasoline (Chinese people being, as is well known, more auto-dependent than Americans) sounds like just the guy to figure this one out.
Matt Stoller rages against Hillary Clinton's plan to end the war in Iraq while maintaining American military forces in Iraq. Ed Kilgore remarks that "There's one big problem with Matt's anathema: it would also apply to Barack Obama, John Edwards, and quite a few other Democrats generally considered to be unimpeachably anti-war."
Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan explicity calls for a "residual force" to stay in the country to fight terrorists and deter foreign intervention. John Edwards, who has emphasized the need for immediately withdrawing half the current troop deployment, has also talked about a continuing if limited military commitment. And even such withdrawal hardliners as John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha have supported the same kind of commitment through an "over the horizon" force prepared to re-intervene at a moment's notice, and even a "minimal" force, presumably special ops counter-terrorism units, operating within Iraq.
I think it's a mistake to elide the difference between an over-the-horizon force (meaning you want it to be logistically possible to re-re-deploy into Iraq if circumstances warrant) and an in-country force (meaning you've prejudged that there should be a continuing presence in Iraq) but that this is largely correct. Now, in a big picture sense, what this emphasizes is the extent to which it would be good to have a president you trusted. A provision that allows for some troops to continue being in Iraq even as combat forces are withdrawn could be prudence or it could be a loophole. To me, what separates Clinton from Obama and Edwards on this front is that Clinton appeared to be saying that one mission of her proposed continuing presence in Iraq would be trying to intimidate Iran which sounds more like loophole territory than prudence territory to me.
That said, as readers know I have ex ante suspicion of Clinton's national security instincts and I don't actually think this gives me any new grounds for doubt -- it just emphasizes that one wants a president whose instincts one trusts. The upshot is that none of the big three are offering ironclad get out of Iraq promises. I do think the Kerry/Feingold/Murtha plans are qualitatively different. If, however, you want the United States to more-or-less entirely abandon the project of projecting military power in the Middle East you really do need to back Kucinich (and I'm sort of surprised by Kucinich's lack of netroots support; I don't share his view, but a lot of people I read on the internet seem to and they may as well support him).
This article by Patrick Healy nicely demonstrates the political dynamics that make Hillary Clinton so unappealing to me. She has such a strong and not-especially-deserved reputation for liberalism, that her primary political task must always be trying to run away from progressive politics in order to broaden her appeal rather than using her personal qualities to broaden the appeal of progressive politics. It's also, however, an infuriating example of journalism that simply equates the concepts of support for the military, knowledge of military affairs, and right-wing positions about the use of force.
There's no indication, however, that the war clowns at the Victory Caucus have any actual knowledge whereof they speak. Nor is it "anti-military" to suggest it's not a good idea to stick the United States Army with the task of performing an impossible job in Iraq.
Five minutes into this exchange with Garance Franke-Ruta, Ann Althouse absolutely blows up at GFR for having the temerity to mention "the Jessica Valenti breast incident." Finally, BloggingHeadsTV has arrived as a medium.
If George W. Bush vetos the Iraq supplemental the Democrats passed, isn't that him cutting off funding for the troops in the field? I mean, here's congress, appropriating some funds for the troops, and instead of letting the troops get the funds Bush is saying, no, he'll hold their well-being hostage to advance his own perogatives and ego.
I myself have noted how pathetic the current field of GOP presidential candidates is, but like a lot of liberals I'm scratching my head over the Fred Thompson concept. Yes, Thompson has the advantage of being a conservative Republican. But once we expand the field to include not just senators and governors but former senators and governors as well -- ones who've never accomplished anything in public life, to boot -- then the field looks very wide indeed. Where's Tommy Thompson? Why not Larry Craig? Why not embalm Ronald Reagan's corpse Lenin-style and run it? There's lots of conservatives out there.
At any rate, I hope Thompson does get in the race and it somehow leads to The Hunt for Red October being on television more. His stint on Law and Order was terrible, but I love me a good submarine movie.
I can't even express to you how upsetting it is that the Pew Center has decided to label people roughly my age as "Generation Next." Generation Next, you say, wasn't that a Pepsi campaign in the nineties? Why, yes it was:
Perhaps my campaign to bring handgun ownership back to DC will get a boost from Jim Webb. As Lindsay Gibson explains at DCist:
As we noted yesterday, Phillip Thompson, a top aide for Sen. Jim Webb, was arrested carrying a loaded pistol into the Russel Senate Office Building. Sources now confirm that the pistol belongs to Webb, who gave the gun to Thompson when he dropped the senator off at the airport. The story left us scratching our heads about the legalities of congressmen carrying loaded weapons in the District, where such a practice is illegal -- at least for now. Apparently, senators can bring a registered gun onto congressional property as long as its unloaded and "securely wrapped", whatever that means. Webb and Thompson will appear in a D.C. court today to explain the matter to a judge.
Why not let Senators pack heat as they roam the corridors? Then, next time Dick Cheney tells Pat Leahy to go fuck himself, Leahy can pull out his piece and fill Cheney's belly with lead. Even better, if Cheney tries to shoot back, he'll probably wind up missing and taking out half the Republican caucus.
Fred Thompson does, of course, have some assets in his quest for the White House -- he's divorced, for example, like all good Republicans. And more to the point, he's a good television performer especially in the context of Senate hearings. He got his start in the public eye as minority counsel on the Watergate committee and his major role in the GOP caucus was to preside over the endless, pointless investigations of the Clinton administration and to show up on cable shows. He's pretty good at it. That said, presidential candidates don't actually spend much time on television in that way. He'll almost certainly have the best Meet The Press performance of everyone in the race, but his setpiece oratory is nothing to write home about.
More to the point, though, the generic conservative Republican the GOP wants to nominate is a generic conservative Republican governor. A 1990s-vintage generic conservative Republican Senator like Thompson is going to have a poisonous voting record, chock full of efforts to take grandma's health care away and dump toxic sewage into your backyard. It is absolutely, vitally crucial to the Republican Party's electoral prospects to obscure its basic slash-and-burn mentality, and that means people with a Gingrich-era voting record are no good. An unconventional Republican like John McCain might be able to wriggle away from his roll call votes and be defined by something else, but Thompson managed to be in the Senate for decent stretch of time without developing any signature issues or anything -- there's nothing to define him but his voting record.
Stanley Kurtz unleashes a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care: "Iran no doubt remembers how it sent the hostages home at the start of Ronald Reagan’s new presidency. It greatly feared Reagan’s combination of toughness and fresh political capital. That’s part of why Iran is racing so hard right now to get the bomb." Alternatively, Iran released the hostages in exchange for a series of concessions by the United States, including a relaxation of sanctions, the unfreezing of financial assets, an America pledge of non-interference in Iranian affairs, etc.
I'd thought that Ronald Reagan freed the hostages through an illegal arms for hostages swap, but that was actually a different batch of hostages. In fact, the original hostages were freed in exchange for concessions through Algeria-sponsored negotiations conducted by Warren Christopher on behalf of Jimmy Carter's outgoing administration.
It sometimes seems like the political consultants who run the Democratic Party are unbelievably stupid. When you bore down into the details, though, it looks less like the problem is that they're too dumb then that they're too smart. As Brad Plumer notes here their contracts are structured in such a way as to create massive inherent conflicts of interest between developing a smart campaign strategy and making money. And, of course, having your candidates do poorly is no obstacle to continuing to be employed since any candidate who declines to hire the same tiny circle of corrupt, ineffective political strategy firms will be locked out of DSCC/DCCC funds which, in turn, sends a negative signal to big money donors, etc.
See this 2005 article from Amy Sullivan for more. In one of its "doesn't actually have anything to do with blogs" moments, Crashing the Gates also has an insightful discussion of this issue. And, yes, the GOP operates differently and, not coincidentally, get better results.
In today's TAP Online column I praise Condoleezza Rice for her late-breaking realization that working toward an Israel-Palestine peace agreement would be a good thing. Meanwhile, The New York Sunreports that "Israeli officials have spoken to a top White House official in recent days, using friendly Washington contacts to go 'over Condi's head' to describe several of her new ideas as unrealistic, a Jerusalem source, who declined to be identified, told The New York Sun."
Perhaps the strangest element of the Iran debate has been the tendency for it to prompt people to call for war without quite calling for war. We can see, for example, The New Republic's successive exhortations for the United States to "move ruthlessly" against Iran and "get ruthlessly serious" about Iran back in July 2006. Now, National Reviewis editorializing that "Israel was placed in this dilemma last summer, when Iranian agents — the Hezbollah of Lebanon — crossed the border, killed some soldiers, and took two others hostage. Israel treated this aggression as a declaration of war, and its repeat in the Gulf waters has to be met with the same firmness."
As Andrew Sullivan remarks that appears to be a recommendation that we go to war with Iran, but somehow the editorialists can't quite bring themselves to write the words. But Israel, you know, bombed and invaded Lebanon in response to the events in question. It seems to me that if National Review wants us to bomb and invade Iran, they should say so. It's not a small question.
Lurking in this video segment, Jonah Goldberg makes a not so serious, completely unthoughtful argument that, to his credit, really has never been made in such detail or with such care, namely that "our defeat in Vietnam extended the Cold War probably two decades." We recall, of course, that it was Bill Clinton's weak handling of the Soviet threat that led to the big GOP congressional wins in 1994. Newt Gingrich's bold leadership then led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1995. By 1998, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed.
It looks like the Iraq supplemental will pass the Senate with strings attached, laying the groundwork for a furious spinning battle once Bush vetoes the supplemental. It's interesting that as best I can tell both parties think the veto battle will help them. Brian Beutler helps explain what happens legislatively after a veto.
Let me just say that while I think the legislative tactics in play here are clearly very important to the future of the country, political gamesmanship of this kind isn't something I feel I can make especially enlightened judgments about so I may write less about this question than its objective importance in some sense merits.
UPDATE: Santamonicamr notes in comments that this appears to have been the long-awaited moment when Chuck Hagel stops complaining and actually does something -- breaking with the GOP and voting the right way on the amendment.
To really speak on a topic where I have no authority, let me say that unlike Scott Lemieux, I see no particular reason to be glad that the Québec separatist party finished third. If the secessionists don't take first place, then there's not going to be any secession, and the secessionists also happen to have appealingly social democratic views on non-secession issues. The ADQ, by contrast, strikes me as a party genuinely without merit, complete with its very vague notions about sovereignty.
Incidentally, I sort of feel that US liberals should welcome Québec secession. It would create an ideal opportunity for the United States to conquer the maritime provinces and the right would be so blinded by jingoism that they'd fail to notice that they've just created a bunch of new liberal senators.
For a while, I was of the "let's stop coddling Musharraf and get serious about democracy!" school of thought with regard to Pakistan. Then that came to seem a little silly and naive to me. More recently, my internal pendulum is swinging the other way. Blake Hounshell has an article on this that, I think, nicely spells out the biggest problem here:
[Rep. Gary] Ackerman worries that if Musharraf is forced out, be it by politicking military generals or via genuine elections, the United States will be left friendless. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a visiting scholar at John Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, has a different concern. With the United States being seen as supporting Musharraf's actions, "any anti-Musharraf agitation also takes on an anti-American shape," even among groups not especially opposed to U.S. policies in the past.
Of course it's both/and, not either/or. And this, really, is what went awry in Iran. Having decided that any alternative to the Shah was likely to be worse for us than the Shah, we backed the Shah, which had the effect of making us even more dependent on the Shah as we had no other points of entry into Iran and all other political currents became increasingly hostile to the United States. But nothing lasts forever. America's policy to Pakistan can't just be one man; and especially not when unvarnished support for that man cuts us off from any ability to work with other potential leaders -- some of whom are essentially destined to become more important in the future. We don't even really need to support democracy, as such, though democracy is a good thing. The point, rather, is that we need to orient our Pakistan policy around Pakistani policies -- enduring ways in which we'd like Pakistan to help us, and enduring ways in which we are prepared to help Pakistan in exchange rather than around transient personalities.
Huh. Bob Barr the terrible congressman who's been reinventing himself as a fairly admirable civil libertarian is now getting on board for some marijuana law reform. Good for him.
Britain steps up the pressure on Iran and releases some fairly convincing evidence for the claim that its sailors were in Iraqi waters when the Iranians seized them. I've learned, of course, to treat these sort of official claims with some skepticism, but that applies to Iran's counter-claims as well, so I don't really know where it leaves you.
I hadn't realized that Zbigniew Brzezinski had a new book out. It did, however, spark a great David Ignatius column noting that "Brzezinski was right about Iraq, warning early and emphatically of the dangers of an American invasion at a time when most foreign policy pundits (including this one) were, with whatever quibbles, supporting President Bush's decision to go to war."
Brzezinski paid a price for being outspoken -- he was excluded from some of the inner circles frequented by former national security advisers who don't rock the boat. In this respect, Brzezinski's cranky outsider status served him well (and the uber-insider status of his life rival, Henry Kissinger, proved something of a hindrance for the former secretary of state). So on matters of foreign policy, we should listen especially carefully to what Brzezinski has to say.
James Lindsay is somewhat less impressed but still offers some serious praise. "What Second Chance does offer is a wise insight that should guide any effort to fashion a strategy to restore American leadership . . . if the United States is to avoid becoming the target of their resentment, its foreign policy must be seen as serving their interests as well as its own. That means exercising self-restraint rather than pressing every advantage that comes to a superpower; it means listening to others and not just working to preserve our own peace and prosperity but helping others to build their own."
This sounds very bad. Apparently, unless we appropriate much more money to repair sewer pipes, the country will soon be awash in deadly sinkholes. There is, indeed, a looming sinkhole crisis. The author of the op-ed, conveniently, "is president and chief executive of a large sewer, water and oil pipe repair company." Big Pipe Repair Strikes Again!
I believe him, though. As a general matter, the United States underinvests in basic infrastructure. We especially under invest in all elements of basic infrastructure that that don't involve building new highways. In any given year, you can get away with it easily (which is why it keeps happening) but as the decades pass, it gets worse and worse.
Greg Sargent does some worthy pushback against the growing media spin that Barack Obama may be "all style and no substance." The grain of truth that this lie is spun out of is, of course, that as of March 28, 2007 Barack Obama does not have anything resembling a detailed plan for national health care policy. Sargent notes that he has, however, given two major speeches on foreign policy issues.
I would also note that the education section of his issues page contains two substantive and somewhat distinctive policy ideas along with a fairly commonplace-for-a-Democrat higher ed proposal. Obama's "health for hybrids" plan is certainly a policy idea. Obama's been working on the Senate on some dull homeland security topics and while one hopes that nobody ever gets credit for having sponsored the legislation that made a terrorist attack on a chemical plant something that killed dozens rather than thousands, I'm glad someone's minding this topic.
Returning to health care, the relevant section of his website is thin on what you'd traditionally call health care policies. To fill it out, they had to shoehorn in something about fighting the problem of AIDS in the developed world and of protecting children from lead poisoning. Those are, however, real issues and Obama has real policies on them. Meanwhile, for the core health topics let's just note that it's late March 2007; all of the candidates have some issue-areas they haven't yet addressed.
I sometimes think the blogosphere might be more influential if it had less indiosyncratic jargon. See, e.g., Karen Tumulty's "please clue me: What is a 'concern troll'?" Most people hearing similarly unfamiliar terminology flung at them in the course of a criticism wouldn't think to ask, would just leap to the conclusion that they were debating with crazy people. On the other hand, I really do enjoy all the blogosphere in-jokes and so forth and would miss them if they went away, so maybe the only thing to do is educate, educate, educate. So have at it, what's an authoritative definition of "concern troll" we can offer up to Time's crack team of political reporters.
Readers alerted me to this Zbigniew Brzezinski appearance on The Daily Show which I found both amusing and informative, like a fake news segment should be.
His arguments are by no means entirely original, but they're ones that have gotten stunningly little purchase within the realm of establishment figures who get taken seriously by politicians looking for advisors, staff, etc. A former National Security Advisor ought to carry some weight and credibility in this town, but to a shocking extent the mere possession of relevant credentials and good ideas doesn't actually get you very far in terms of being able to influence the establishment in question.
A small complaint, but I'll make it anyway. The Wall Street Journalreports:
Starting today, Democratic presidential hopefuls have a new contest to vie for: the endorsement of MoveOn.org. The influential progressive interest group, which boosts of having 3.2 million members, plans to hold three “virtual town hall” meetings with the candidates starting next month. At the first, on April 10, the candidates will answer questions from MoveOn members about Iraq; sessions later this year will focus on health care and energy policy.
In what sense is MoveOn an "interest group"? An interest group, classically, is something like a business consortium or a labor union -- an organization with a financial interest in legislative outcomes. The term's been expanded, somewhat abusively I think, to include your narrower ideological groups like NARAL or the NRA. But MoveOn isn't that, either. It's just a group. An effort of somewhat likeminded people to band together in order to obtain some voice in the process.
I'd heard this study mentioned before, but now here's the link, courtesy of Brian Beutler. It shows that "the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops."
To state what I guess isn't clear to much of the national press corps, this is the scandal behind the scandal of the US Attorney firings. The issue isn't merely that a handful of US Attorneys seem to have lost jobs they shouldn't have lost -- they'll be okay all things consider -- but that if a handful of US Attorneys get fired for refusing to mal-administer justice, what does that tell us about the ones who aren't getting fired? The linked study is one strong piece of circumstantial evidence that something very fishy is up, and the firings are a second such piece.
My previous effort at Québec-blogging got bogged down in a discussion of conquering Atlantic Canada, so I didn't get to return to my core point which was not to be an apologist for the Parti Québécois but simply to note that the ADQ, not the PQ, is the worst of the province's three parties. I stand with John on this:
It's so rare for Canadian politics to make it out of the Canadian-blogging ghetto, so let me grasp this moment while I can... I have to say, I'm not nearly as optimistic as Scott Lemieux when he says "Ah, you always have to like it when the ethnic nationalist secessionists finish third." The ADQ -- the party that pushed the overtly-secessionist Parti Quebecois in to third place -- is actually chock full of ethnic nationalists (and plenty of other nasty characters besides) and has more than one secessionist in its ranks, though I'm not sure if any one member actually combines both sides. In contrast, the PQ in this election was actually led by a gay man whose aim was to try and present a more multicultural, tolerant view of Quebec's traditionally racist separatist movement.* He lost votes to a party with a candidate who denied the Rwandan Genocide took place. So yes, ethnic nationalism in Quebec -- from which the secessionist impulse flows -- did very well this week, at the expense of a more progressive vision of Quebec society.
One much-commented-upon aspect of the Bush administration has been its proclivity for appointing large numbers of ideologues and party hacks to important administrative positions. Nearing the end of a long post dedicated to the subject Mark Kleiman observes:
Now, it is the case that all presidential administrations depend on having a certain number of "true believers" scattered through the bureaucracy, in order to ensure a certain level of fidelity to the president's objectives. On the other hand, if you get too much of this, you get an administration that is likely to have a high, systemic level of administrative incompetence. I think this is a reasonable account of where we are now.
He then, however, begins to treat the Bush administration as a problem of trying in the future to "ensure that the executive branch does not overweight its political strata with ideological hacks." From my perspective, the issue with Team Bush is likely to be less that there's been a quantitative jump in the hack factor than that there's been a qualitative change in the nature of the ideological hackery. It's generally ceased to be the case that a person can qualify as both a serious member of the conservative movement and also someone who's genuinely interested in the effective design and operation of government social policy. If you believe that the correct way to improve policy in any area is anything other than "deregulate it" or "tax cuts" you no longer count as a good conservative. As a consequence, insofar as its not feasible to simply dismantle the entire apparatus of government (and it isn't) it just becomes a playground for partisanship.
To have any substantive view about how the government could or should deliver services to its citizens is, as such, a sign of liberalism nowadays. And, obviously, Bush doesn't want to staff his administration with liberals. Which is to say he doesn't staff it with people who care about how the government should deliver services to its citizens. Not surprisingly, they don't do it very well.
UPDATE: Sorry, that's a Steve Teles post I'm quoting.
Richard Bush and Michael O'Hanlon offer the following guidelines "that should inform Chinese and American leaders if they found themselves in the early stages of a military conflict" over Taiwan in their forthcoming book, A War Like No Other: The Truth About China's Challenge to America:
Not to expand the geographic scope of any U.S.-PRC fight beyond Taiwan's immediate vicinity, with a particular effort to avoid attacks on mainland China, Japan, and Guam (or the territorial waters surrounding them).
Not to escalate to general conventional war (with possible attacks on command and control sites or other facilities near Beijing, Honolulu, San Diego, and so on).
Not to fire (even conventionally) upon the other major power's nuclear forces.
Not to ready nuclear weapons for use.
Not to use nuclear weapons in any way, even against ships or isolated land bases or (via high-altidude bursts) against electronics.
As should be clear from the nature of the discussion, the authors, despite the title, don't actually believe that China's "challenge to America" is especially profound. Rather, they worry that China might "challenge" America by seeking to exercize de facto control over the entire extent of China's de jure territory.
UPDATE: I'm not saying it's a bad idea to try to preserve Taiwanese autonomy from the PRC, which is certainly a complicated issue (see here for the case for abandonmnet). Nevertheless, this simply isn't an instance of a Chinese challenge to America (we derive no tangible benefits whatsoever from Taiwanese autonomy). There's a Chinese challenge to Taiwan and the possibility of an American challenge to Beijing on behalf of Taiwan.
Go read this Spine item. Am I wrong or is Martin Peretz citing as his primary objection to giving Bill Shaheen a role in Middle East diplomacy that Shaheen's family comes from Lebanon? Fascinatingly, his wife Jeanne Shaheen's 2002 Senate campaign got a lot of backing from "pro-Israel" groups (I went up one weekend to volunteer and the woman coordinating the volunteers was on loan from AIPAC) and this site indicates she got a bunch of money because her GOP then-opponent, John Sununu, is, like her husband, an Arab Christian.
