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.
Robin Toner: "[Congressional Democrats'] aggressiveness and unity on a major foreign-policy challenge to the president is a striking change for a party that has, on many occasions over many years, seemed to be on the defensive on national security issues."
To me, this is huge. National security is like trying to get a date: confidence matters. A political party that often looked scared of talking about national security ("but what if Rove says we're weak?!?!") looked like people who certainly weren't going to handle any potentially scary problems. It's a lot easier to seem like a tough, confident political movement in possession of some good ideas when your people are out there saying things they seem to actually believe, instead of offering up a lot of hemming and hawing.
What to do if Bush vetos the supplemental that includes a withdrawal deadline? I don't think it'll be viable for the Democrats to just get into a game of chicken with the White House over this issue at this time. So I'd say congress should pass a "clean" supplemental that Bush'll feel compelled to sign, but one designed to last a lot less than a full year. Three months, as proposed by Reps. Cardoza and Ross, seems like a good choice to me. That way in three months time, with public opinion even more against Bush and against the war, he needs to come back and ask for more money. Then Democrats pass another supplemental with a withdrawal provision. If Bush vetos again, then give him another three months eventually.
The point is to try to generate as many votes on this as possible. Either at some point we'll start seeing significant GOP defections (which is the best hope for ending the war while Bush is still president) or else at a minimum GOP incumbents will need to keep casting votes for perpetual war and set themselves up for defeat in 2008.
"There is an argument floating around Republican circles that in order to win again, the G.O.P. has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days," writes David Brooks, "This is folly. It’s the wrong diagnosis of current realities and so the wrong prescription for the future." He's right. He's also right about this:
The sad thing is that President Bush sensed this shift in public consciousness back in 1999. Compassionate conservatism was an attempt to move beyond the “liberty vs. power” paradigm. But because it was never fleshed out and because the Congressional G.O.P. rejected the implant, a new Republican governing philosophy did not emerge.
The missing piece, as a wise man has remarked to me already today, is that an at least nominal commitment to rolling back the state is required by the GOP's real-life commitment to tax cuts. Obviously, as we've seen, you can slash taxes without actually cutting spending. But if you want to cut taxes you do at least need to say that the plan is to roll back the state. Or, at a minimum, you can't engage in the sort of creative governance Brooks mentions here aimed at tackling "Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation" if the government isn't going to have any funds.
My first instinct was to laugh, but when you think about it he's going to be the Republican nominee. He's precisely the generic conservative Republican the GOP base is looking for. And, I mean, it's an outcome I can live with. I'm really fearing Rudy Giuliani who I think will probably be the worst president on the merits of the people currently in the field, but also quite possibly the Republican with the broadest political appeal.
The broader question is whether the war forges an enduring change in the Democratic Party, its stance and its credibility on national security. Many strategists are already warning that over the long haul, it is not enough to be antiwar: the Democrats need a strong, affirmative vision of foreign policy.
“If getting out of Iraq defines entirely who the Democrats are on national security, then over the long run, it will be a disaster,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. Rather, Iraq needs to be part “of a larger strategy aimed at showing how to protect America’s national security interests,” he said.
Bennett's right. But here's the thing. If Toner had called me up and asked for my view on this question, I might have said something about the Democrats' larger national security mission instead of talking about how someone should talk about this. Who's going to talk about it if not those Democrats who the newspapers deign to quote? I can talk about it. I can even link to Matt Bennett's press release about his group's "constriction" strategy against al-Qaeda. But the only way for Democrats not to be defined entirely by opposition to the war is for the Bennett's of the world to say the things they think need to be said instead of saying that someone should say those things. If not Bennett, who? If not now, when? Quotations in major newspapers are a precious commodity; there's no point in wasting that space on not-very-original meta talk.
UPDATE: Audio recording of Wallace Stevens reading the poem available here.
Jim Vandehei, Jonathan Martin, and Mike Allen team up to report on Republican pessimism about 2008. Candidate recruitment looks bad, fundraising looks bad, and, of course, the poll numbers look bad. It's hard for me to know whether one should put more weight on this big set of macro-trends that all seem to favor the Democrats and the inconvenient truth that head-to-head presidential polling gives the GOP persistent leads and the Democrats seem determined to nominate a woman whom half the country says they won't consider voting for.
I continue to be slightly astounded by Rudy Giuliani's GOP opponents' inability to make more hay out of his record on social issues. His website, for example, contains an effort to convince us that even though he's pro-choice he'll get abortions banned anyway by saying: "Rudy Giuliani served as the third highest ranking official in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, worked as a US Attorney, and argued cases before the Supreme Court. He understands the responsibility the President has to appoint and nominate federal judges. The kind of judges he has said he would appoint are strict constructionists like Justices Scalia, Roberts and Alito – principled individuals who can be trusted to respect the Constitution as it is written, rather than attempting to legislate from the bench."
And, indeed, Giuliani did serve as Associate Attorney General from 1981-1983, during which time Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. Can't John McCain point this out? Mitt Romney? Ponnuru, maybe?
All while watching the Wizards' closer than it should have been win over the 76ers, I kept wondering when the last time neither Arenas nor Jamison nor Butler led the Wizards in scoring had been (and was it just Larry Hughes from back when Arenas-Jamison-Hughes were the big three?). I was sort of hoping the morning-after coverage would mention this but the focus is all on Caron Butler's return rather than DeShawn Stevenson's 28 points.
2 oz gin 1 tbsp dry vermouth 2 tbsp motor oil 2 steel ball bearings
The man himself, however, already described his beverage of choice in The Futurist Manifesto, namely "Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!"
Marinetti, interestingly, also seems to have a piece of Apple IIGS software named after him. More futurism can be found here. Marinetti and the Belgian surrealist Renée Magritte share the crucial distinction of being the only two artists I actually know anything about. A friend once described them as both doing "art for people who don't like art" which I suppose might be true.
To add to Kevin Drum's point realistically, the very most dangerous thing your typical middle-class child is likely to do is to . . . be driven in a car somewhere by his parents. Obviously, fatal car wrecks are reasonably rare -- tons of people drive every single day and the overwhelming majority survive. But people are still much more likely to be killed in car wrecks than by criminals. Exercise issues aside, there's absolutely no safety value to living a hermetically sealed building-car-building lifestyle.
Looking to get a start in the high-stakes world of professional political punditry? Consider applying to be Associate Editor of Campus Progress. PDF job description here. Previous occupants of the job have gone on to fame and/or glory, but have not yet achieved fortune.
Andrew Sullivan attempts a rebuttal of David Brooks' column. I agree with Ross Douthat that Sullivan's engaging in some wishful thinking about politics here. Lots of people, for example, would like a candidate to take on farm subsidies but the only people who are going to make it a voting issue are the farmers, and no such proposal would ever get out of committee no matter what the president said, since the Agriculture Committees are dominated by . . . the beneficiaries of the subsidies.
On the merits, though, I think the argument founders on the view that "it is simply true that every dollar taken by the government is one dollar less for you and me to spend on what we decide is best." The overall size of the economic pie is not irrelevant here. It's possible for taxes as a percent of GDP to go up, while after-tax income also goes up. It all depends on how your policies impact growth. These are, of course, controversial issues. But if liberals are right that a move to a national health care system would be a boon to the economy, then implementing such a system -- even if it meant a tax increase -- would be fine for freedom. Conversely, insofar as conservatives are right that their agenda will boost growth, more growth will mean more resources available to be taxed and spent on services. It all does depend, on some level, on the actual content and merits of the policies in question.
At last, some reporting on Rudy Giuliani's ties to mobbed-up incompetent Bernard Kerik. Kerik's ties to Giuliani, and Giuliani's post-9/11 semi-mythical status almost got this joker a cabinet job.
Sam notes some bad framing by John Boehner. It also involved a lie that's become so common I didn't even think to remark on it. But, no, failing to extend Bush's tax cuts is not "the largest tax increase in history" in any reasonable sense. Thanks, national media, for letting the GOP get away with it! That's why you earn the big bucks.
Noam Scheiber worries that Freakonomicsis ruining economics -- people are finding cute methodological tricks to answer cute questions instead of doing slow, difficult work on the the big issues. Certainly, I wish I didn't need to read things like Brad DeLong saying "Global outsourcing seems to me at least as likely to improve as to worsen the distribution of income." We're talking here about the fabled offshore outsources of IT and other kinds of professional work. I, not an economist, can see two takes here. One says that unlike with earlier phases of trade, this new phase involves jobs with higher-than-average salaries. Thus, while trade has in the past tended to expand the pie at the expense of mostly working class Americans the future of trade will tend to expand the pie at the expense of mostly professional class Americans. The older scenario was a mixed bag, while the second scenario is much more positive.
On the other hand, I can also imagine it being the case that the opening of very large global labor markets plus a techology-driven massive increase in the scope of things that can be traded will simply lead to a structural increase in the income share that goes to capital. Thus, the distributional consequences would be bad. Not being an economist, I have no real idea which of these stories is right. But I sure would like to know! I'd like to think economists are working on understanding this issue better instead of working on funny results about baby names.
Tyler Cowen explains that because some labor unions have, in the past, been deeply implicated in organized crime activities that we should embrace a labor law regime that clearly has the country headed toward the total extinction of private sector unions. Presumably, the same logic applies to the publicly traded business corporation, right? If it can be shown that entities organized in this model have ever in the past engaged in criminal behavior that we should simply eliminate the model? Nor do I think Cowen is about to become an immigration restrictionist even though organized crime is heavily associated with immigrant "ethnic" neighborhoods.
And, of course, plenty of countries have had union-friendly legal climates and high levels of unionization without ever developing the union-mob links that were, in fact, a fairly idiosyncratic Americanism.
I've gone back and forth on this a bit, but John Judis has me convinced that Hillary Clinton's forward-looking position on the Iraq War is worse than the alternatives. First, her position:
As she recounts in her interview, her solution to Iraq rests partly on a "very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front." This would include "a track with Syria and a track with Iran." But the main part of the strategy would be its military dimension. While Clinton does not favor having U.S troops intervene in an Iraqi civil war, she would retain a significant force in Iraq. This force would try to "contain the extremists," "help the Kurds manage their various problems in the north," "provide logistical support, air support, training support" to the Iraqi government, and try "to prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq."
Clinton's idea of a residual occupying force goes well beyond that of the recent Senate resolution. The resolution provides for a "limited number" of troops after the pullout date, which would be devoted to training and to "targeted counterterrorism operations." By contrast, Clinton's force would have larger geopolitical responsibilities, including the restraint of Iranian power. Clinton says she doesn't know how many U.S. troops her plan would require, or how many military bases would be required to house them. But Michael Gordon and Patrick Healy, who conducted the interview, noted that former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, who has developed a strikingly similar plan, estimates that 75,000 American troops would be needed to carry his plan out. That's about half of the current force stationed in Iraq.
Initially, Clinton's plan differs from what Bush is doing. While Bush is still seeking victory over Iraqi insurgents, Clinton would withdraw from urban centers and from the civil war that is raging. But in its broader objectives, Clinton's plan is not dramatically different from that of the Bush administration. The White House certainly isn't expecting to maintain 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, but it is planning a long-term occupation anchored in what the Pentagon has described as "enduring bases." As Spencer Ackerman has shown, it continues to construct these huge, imposing bases. Clinton's residual army, like Bush's, would not merely provide training to the Iraqis in the manner, say, that some European countries have done. The remaining force would have a larger geopolitical mission of keeping Iraq in the American orbit and away from either Al Qaeda or Iran. Their presence in bases would be reminiscent to that of the forces that the United States stationed in Cuba after 1901 or the British stationed in Iraq after 1921-- after they had abandoned colonialism for an informal imperial approach.
I think the right thing to say is that the consensus Democratic plan, and variants on it like Barack Obama's proposal, are consistent with Clinton's more-spelled-out vision, but not the same as it. The literal text of Obama's proposal, in short, doesn't rule out something as grandiose as what Clinton's proposed, but it also doesn't commit him to it and there's no particular reason to think that he or Edwards or anyone else means the same thing that Clinton means. The alternative:
Similarly, if the United States wants to bring stability to Iraq and to the region, it will have to forego any hint of an imperial ambition inside Iraq . This means dismantling its military bases and allowing the Iraqis to develop their own oil industry. It will have to subordinate its military to its diplomatic policy and focus on getting Iraq's neighbors to take responsibility for stability in the region and for marginalizing Al Qaeda--an objective on which Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia should be able to agree. It's not clear if the U.S. will be able to assemble a multinational force that could carry out training and combat terrorism. But as American experience has already shown, a necessary condition of assembling such a force will be a commitment by the United States to cease playing the role of a dominant occupying power.
Many policy experts in Washington, including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, favor this kind of approach. It enjoys adherents at most of the left-center think tanks. But it has not been embraced by Capitol Hill and the White House. Only two presidential hopefuls, retired General Wesley Clark and Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, clearly support it, and neither of them are declared candidates. The leading Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, favors an even more extreme version of Bush's policy. (If Clinton is Bush lite, McCain is Bush heavy.)
Right. Edwards and Obama right now are pretty light on where they stand as to these questions, but I'd sure like to know.
Matt Stoller is quite right on the issue of James Carville. What's astound here, however, is less Carville than CNN. CNN is a prestigious television network. They have a lot of money. If they wanted to find a Democratic analyst to comment on the primary race who wasn't invested in any particular outcome, they surely could do so without much trouble. I know a lot of people in this town with genuinely agnostic views on the subject. Carville, who's doing fundraising letters for Hillary Clinton and more broadly is all tied in with their camp, is clearly an inappropriate choice. So why's CNN doing it? Probably for no reason. Or, rather, just because they're CNN "the most trusted name in news" and don't think it matters what they do. They're the professionals and everyone knows it, so thy're under no particular obligation to act like professionals.
Abusive gerrymandering is bad, and all else being equal I'm all for efforts to reduce it. It is, however, a bit hard to know exactly what the non-gerrymandered district ideal is supposed to be. Should districts be as compact as possible? Should you maximize the number of evenly split districts? Should districts generally approximate statewide opinion? It's not clear to me that there's a "right answer" though there certainly are some wrong answers.
As you can probably guess, however, I think indignation about this is overblown. The real issue is simply that incumbency provides such enormous advantages given the current campaign climate. If every congressional district faced one well-funded Democrat and one well-funded Republican every cycle, that would do a lot more for political competitiveness. You could recruit a higher caliber of challenges if the funds were guaranteed to be forthcoming for a challenge, you could be sure that any incumbent who made a major misstep would be fighting for his political life, and you'd probably have more ideological diversity within the parties since you'd have more incentive for Republicans to find candidates well-suited to very liberal districts and vice versa. This world would require, of course, some form of public financing which is even harder to get than serious districting reform. Still, at the end of the day it's a much more worthwhile goal.
"Second, McCain and Giuliani's broader appeal is due in large part because stand out as different kind of Republicans -- they are not known first as conservatives or party guys but as independent-minded reformers." This is, I think, basically true. It's also written by Dan Gerstein, erstwhile Democratic strategist. Thus, the next sentence isn't something like, "thus, the task of Democratic operatives like me is to find ways of persuading voters that this bullshit is bullshit." Rather, he meekly notes that "it stands to reason they would be more immune to the taint of Bush's incompetence and hard-partisanship or for the corruption scandals in the Republican Congress." Gerstein also asserts that Giuliani has "commander-in-chief credentials." He doesn't observe that Giuliani is seen as having such credentials. Rather, he just concedes that Giuliani, who lacks commander-in-chief credentials, has commander-in-chief credentials.
Thus, Gerstein concludes, it will be hard for Democrats to win in 2008. And, indeed, it may be hard. But I think it would be easier for Democrats to win elections if the party's elite consultants were more interested in finding ways to win than in finding excuses for losing and searching for explanations of why any hint of progressivism is doomed.
Bill Pennington of The New York Timesbrings us the word that cheerleaders suffer far more injuries than do female athletes in any other sport. “They make you sign a medical release when you join a cheerleading team,” one Jessica Smith told Pennington, “They ought to tell the girls that they are signing a death waiver.” This seems like a somewhat perverse consequence of the effort to turn cheerleading into a "real" sport, incorporating less simple chanting and more athleticism. It turns out that what was created was a really dangerous sport that still has the fluffy image of the cheering of yore.
Ramesh Ponnuru reports that Sam Brownback "unveiled his Social Security plan here at the Club for Growth meeting. The plan is heavy on personal accounts and light on benefit cuts." Can I do a plan that's heavy on benefit increases but light on tax hikes? Maybe everyone gets a free personal account they can invest in my perpetual motion machine firm. It's seriously pathetic what passes for conservative "thinking" about domestic policy these days; the ideas aren't so much bad ideas as they are obviously nonsensical ones. And yet, nobody seems to notice.
A joke from Joe Klein: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is testing the limits of the possible: in a recent poll by a local television station, he had a favorable rating of 3%. Given the poll's margin of error, it was possible Olmert had no support beyond his extended family." I've had that thought before when I see polls with extreme results. I assume that it's not literally true. But I don't understand the right way to interpret a result like that is. If your sample size gives you an MOE of four percent and Olmert has a 3 percent approval rating, how do you interpret the possibility of negative popularity?
There's also some substantive point here about the prospects for an Israel-Syria peace deal and the Bush administration's absolutely bizarre desire to prevent that from happening.
As you'll recall, back in December, the government of Ethiopia made conservatives across the land happy by proving that if you put aside liberal qualms, it's easy for foreign invaders to crush a domestic Islamist movement. Or something: "Artillery fire rocked Mogadishu on Saturday as Ethiopian and Somali troops launched a third day of a major offensive against Islamist insurgents and clan militiamen that has killed scores of civilians." Alternatively, nobody likes a foreign invader.
Well, so, I had tickets to this here Wizards-Raptors fiasco but I wound up swapping the tickets with someone else so as to be free to have dinner with some extended family types (can someone explain why Michael Ruffin was even in the game? He should be the 11th man on the team after Arenas, Butler, Jamison, Stevenson, Haywood, Thomas, Daniels, Songaila, Blatche, and Hayes) but then I got home with my brother and we settled in to watch some Lakers-Rockets action. By the end of the third quarter, though, I was too damn tired and went to bed thinking to myself "this'll probably turn into an overtime thriller or something" and, hey, waddaya know.
The recaps of the game out West should remind us that while certain stat-heads seem to overrate pure shooting efficiency, conventional approaches to basketball continue to significantly underrate it. It seems to me that 53 points on 44 field goal attempts (Kobe's line), while certainly a lot of points, is distinctly less useful performance to your team than something like Yao Ming's 39 points on 18 shots.
I was turned on the other day to the fact that Time Magazine's Tony Karon has a blog about foreign affairs, Rootless Cosmopolitan. It's really good. Good enough that a ten day old post on the subject "What's Iraq Actually About Now?" is very much worth your time. It's an excellent question to ponder when you hear debate about whether or not the surge is "working" -- working to do what? And why?
At any rate, if Time were smart they'd incorporate this content into their Middle East blog, though I think you could safely classify a lot of Karon's posts as "Too Hot for Time."
Steve Erlanger in Tel Aviv: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews published Friday that Israel would not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to what is now Israel, and that the country bore no responsibility for the refugees because their plight resulted from an attack by Arab nations on Israel when it was a fledgling state." Not a single refugee? Really? This is such an absurd position that I think I have to take it as a good sign. Given an otherwise favorable peace deal, Olmert would really reject it over the inclusion of, say, seven Palestinians? Really? Of course not. That's dumb. Just as the Palestinian counterproposal to have millions of Arabs who've never even lived there "return" to Israel's side of the Green Line is dumb.
The refugee issue, however, is eminently resolvable by negotiations, and when you see people staking out negotiating positions (as opposed to simple posturing "we're ready for peace; we just need a partner for peace") that means negotiations may be next. Unless I'm mistaken, Ehud Barak solemnly promised never to agree to a division of Jerusalem just before agreeing to a division of Jerusalem.
Assuming Jonathan Rauch doesn't have his facts all wrong, this man -- convicted of a series of charges stemming from an arrest for alleged violations of Honduran lobster-catching law that weren't actually illegal -- certainly seems to deserve a little of the old presidential clemency. The presidential pardon power doesn't, in my opinion, make a ton of institutional sense. It does, however, give the president some opportunity to do some good. Instead, in practice, it mostly seems to get used to help facilitate either petty graft (Marc Rich) or else Republican efforts to cover up serious abuses of power.
Ankush, I'm afraid, is a bit confued. The reason James Kirchik's inane posts wind up on The Plank is that he isn't "the assistant to TNR's editor, Franklin Foer." He's Martin Peretz's assistant, so (low) quality of work is not a bar to publication.
My family was celebrating an early passover (so much more convenient to just do it on the weekend) today and somehow my little brother got to talking smack about video-blogging. "Tell it to the camera," I said. And so we did -- Web 2.0 rules:
Apologies for the lack of hoodie. Congratulations to Ohio State.
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Heads in the Sand
