"One month from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America," says Stu Bykofsky, conservative columnist.
I think Ross is right and Henry Farrell wrong about the best way to interpret the Kristol/Kagan argument for a "Neo-Reaganite" foreign policy -- the argument about this helping the Republican Party is probably offered in a pundit's fallacy spirit. The dark truth is probably closer to what Bykofsky expressed, something like national greatness conservatism icon Teddy Roosevelt's sense that war was, as such, a good thing because of its influence on the national character. Strains of this kind of thinking were definitely discernable post-9/11 on both the right and in the more hawkish precincts of the left -- a kind of genuine enthusiasm for violence, the sense that war is a force that gives us meaning, and that it's only by having giant disasters occur that our true national spirit is revealed.
Photo by Flickr user Beija used under a Creative Commons license
With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”
“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.” [...]
The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.
Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.
Just about the only place in the United States where you saw substantial opposition to the Afghanistan War back in the day was on college campuses. That, conveniently enough, is exactly where I was at the time, so I got to participate in a lot of arguments on this subject. One thing I'm fairly sure absolutely nobody ever pitched to me was "well, don't you see that if we invade Afghanistan we're just going to wind up failing to achieve any of our key strategic objectives because the administration will divert crucial resources and attention to invade Iraq instead?"
That, after all, would just be ridiculous. And yet it appears to be exactly what's happened.
To me, one of the most sad/funny aspects of contemporary conservatism is that Newt Gingrich seems to count as some kind of towering intellectual figure. Garance Franke-Ruta reports that she saw him speaking at the Ames Straw Poll where he proclaimed that "Real change is going to require real change." And I suppose it will.
McClatchy's Matt Stearns writes that "Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush's threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq." You'd like to think that starting a second war would rather than could set Bush on a collision course with congress.
That said, considering that congress was willing to cave to Bush on FISA and, eventually, on Iraq funding I don't think Bush seriously needs to worry that congress would stop him from starting a war with Iran or, for that matter, Venezuela. The Democratic majorities aren't large ones, and plenty of Democrats still seem to think the appropriate response to Bush yelling "Boo! National security! Here's my plan to make everything much worse!" is surrender.
Official Iranian news sources report on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit to Teheran:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said Baghdad in its ties with other countries only acts based on the interests and demands of the Iraqi nation. The office of the Iraqi Prime Minister on Saturday in response to a warning by the US President George W. Bush against Baghdad’s development of ties with Tehran announced in a statement: The groundless warning was issued with the aim of overshadowing the successful achievements of Mr Al-Maliki in his recent visit to Tehran.The Iraqi Prime Minister’s office further announced: If the US President assumes that the level of Iraq’s ties with other countries would be determined according to his views, then he is wrong.George W. Bush on Thursday on the second day of Maliki's visit to Iran repeated his baseless claims that Iran interferes in the internal affairs of Iraq. This is while Nuri Al-Maliki on the same day appreciated Iran for helping Iraq establish security and stability, calling for expansion of ties with Iran.
It seems obvious to me that the takeaway here is that we should stop expending vast amounts of resources mucking around in Iraq, but I suppose one could take the Ken Pollack view that this means we need to sink deeper into the muck by deposing (but by no means ousting) Maliki's government and trying to find a more helpful client.
Ron Brownstein focuses some attention on the much-neglected subject of hard-right opposition to any hints of reasonableness on the part of Republican Party politicians. When Joe Lieberman faced a primary challenge for the sin of relentlessly supporting a catastrophically failed policy, the political establishment reacted as if this was the End Times. Now that Chuck Hagel is facing a primary challenge for the sin of mildly gesturing toward the idea that maybe we should avoid catastrophically failed policy, nobody seems to care.
For the record, I did get my Manny's pastrami sandwich while in Chicago. I was, however, a bit disturbed to learn that the place is open on Saturday but closed on Sunday, which is just absurdly un-authentic. The food, however, is great.
This is the sort of thing where my utter lack of personal, familial, or social ties to the American intolerance belt makes me a bit useless as a pundit, but I wonder about the Democrats' efforts to position themselves on the gay marriage issue. They're against equal civil marriage rights because that's unpopular. At the same time, they can't completely alienate their equality-supporting backers, so they're essentially all in favor of everything else on the gay rights agenda.
Under the circumstances, I can't help but wonder who it is who's supposed to be fooled by this. After all, if someone emailed me and said "it's very important to me that gay and lesbian couples not be allowed to marry -- who should I vote for?" it would be malpractice for me to respond by saying "oh, it doesn't matter, all the candidates have the same view on this." On the contrary, any of the major Democratic contenders is much more likely to wind up appointing judges who look sympathetically on legal arguments against marriage discrimination, and all support enacting an array of anti-discrimination laws that will undermine the idea that the government has a "rational basis" for marriage discrimination.
Clearly, these points are subtle enough that someone might overlook them. But surely any cultural conservatives who place a lot of emphasis on these questions is aware of the importance of judicial nominations. Similarly, anyone driven by gut-level dislike of gays and lesbians is bound to notice that the Democratic Party is a poor vehicle for such sentiments.
Kevin Drum says those of us who like to complain about the trouble with objectivity need to check ourselves:
The problem with the convention of objectivity isn't that no one recognizes that it's a problem. Everyone recognizes that it's a problem. Entire tank cars of ink have been spilled discussing it. The real problem is that so far no one has come up with a solution — a practical, functional, real-world solution — that's broadly acceptable. Any ideas?
One observation is that I think it's simply false that everyone recognizes it's a problem. Everyone pays lip service to the idea of recognizing that there's a problem here, but I think your average major American news organization believes it is doing an excellent job of covering US politics when it is not, in fact, doing an excellent job.
The solution, at any rate, is pretty clear to me: market competition. There isn't a procedural rule that will correctly identify the right level of editorializing and the correct person to write the stories. Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer. Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he'll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy. It's an intriguing story, but if you ask an economist about the optimal strategy for a media organization in a market with few competitors, he'll tell you that the important thing is to be bland and inoffensive, like television before there was cable. Not coincidentally, America's newspapers have, secure in their possession of local monopolies, gotten really good at being bland and inoffensive. I'm reasonably optimistic that in the emerging, more-competitive world, new approaches will emerge.
The Iowa straw poll is a more-or-less meaningless exercise, but it still seems to be the case that Ames winner Mitt Romney is on track to win the nomination. Somewhat curiously, I don't see this reality reflected all that much in the national coverage of the GOP race, but he has the most money and he's leading in the early primary states. Obviously, nothing's in the bag for him (or anyone) yet, but I feel like his third place status the last time I checked Tradesports is badly underselling his odds.
I've got him rated as a must buy at 22 cents on the dollar, but I don't want to open myself up to charges that I'm puffing Romney up (he's already won the crucial Yglesias Endorsement in the GOP primary) for financial gain.
It seems that NASA made an error in its series of US average annual surface temperature data that, while not materially relevant arguments about global warming (the differences are small and global warming is global) were nonetheless wrong. When the error was pointed out, NASA corrected it. The conservative blogosphere, naturally, went crazy is misunderstanding everything and can't understand why the MSM is covering up the big scoop that global warming is a hoax.
Eric Kleefeld is shocked to see 47.1 percent of the vote in the Iowa Straw Poll going to avowed creationists: "And we trust these same Republican activists to run the Iowa caucus, where they'll pick the man who could be the next president?"
I'm consistently taken aback by how unaware people are of the popularity of creationism. The data is a murky, but Wikipedia has a good discussion of the subject and all evidence indicates that there are tons of creationists in the United States: "A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 70 percent of evangelical Christians felt that living organisms have not changed since their creation, but only 31% of Catholics and 32 percent of mainline Protestants had the same opinion. A 2005 Harris Poll estimated that 63 percent of liberals and 37 percent of conservatives agreed that humans and other primates have a common ancestry."
Gallup polled on this in June 2007 and asked how people felt about "Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." 39 percent said it was "definitely true" with a further 27 percent volunteering that it's probably true. You just need to remember that a majority of people believe in ESP and in UFO coverups. Thanks to Google, one can spend hours freaking oneself out about this sort of thing, but we mostly seem to muddle through.
I'm not sure I really understand Tyler Cowen's idea here, but I think you have to respect it. In the meantime, if you like his blog, his book -- Discover Your Inner Economist -- won't disappoint. It manages to hit that sweet spot of being like the blog, but not in a way that makes you feel like you've already read it all.
Jane Hamsher wonders if Karl Rove's pending resignation mightn't have been prompted by one of several legal investigations that seem to have been lingering in his neighborhood for some time now. Maybe it was thought important to get Rove out of the West Wing before the cops come? And perhaps so. But perhaps the president just finished reading Josh Green's Rove takedown in The Atlantic and came to the conclusion that the Architect wasn't that smart after all.
At any rate, you need to subscribe to The Atlantic to read the story and you really should. I will, however, note that what I found most fascinating about it was Josh's evidence that Rove's talk of masterminding an electoral realignment wasn't just bluster, but played an actual causal role in his thinking about the administration's political and policy choices. Maybe, then, Rove will be able to take advantage of his new, more relaxed schedule, to sit down and digest David Mayhew's Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre which argues convincingly that so-called realignments are a product of statistical naiveté and the human penchant for hyperactive pattern detection rather than a real phenomenon of American politics.
The Onionhas the latest on the depredations of No Child Left Behind: "teachers at Washington Street Elementary School were scrambling Monday to deal with a new round of budget cuts that slashed funding for the pipe cleaners and googly eyes they say are the cornerstone of a humanities-based education."
An excellent Washington Postop-ed by Paul Saunders makes the key point against fashionable schemes for a Concert of Democracies: "Moreover, trying to create a 'Concert of Democracies' inevitably invites a 'Concert of Non-Democracies,' which could be very damaging to American interests and values." Indeed, I would say that it would not just invite but in many ways force the leading non-members to form an alternative club. The nominal rationale for doing this is that autocratic UN members can block humanitarian action, but as Saunders writes:
Nor would the world be safer for democracy. In fact, it would be far harder to promote economic development, political change or human rights in an increasingly divided and unstable world. The great global advance of democracy occurred during the relative peace and prosperity after the end of the Cold War -- not during the struggle between the U.S. and Soviet blocs.
Exactly. It's wildly underappreciated, but far and away the best thing we can do for the spread of democracy and human rights around the world is to do what we can to avoid a return to a situation where developing countries were perennially finding themselves playing the role of staging-ground for superpower proxy wars. For the US and China, or the US and Russia to shift from the current mode of wary peace to actual hostility would be a fiasco much, much greater than any sin of omission that might be caused by deference to international law.
To follow up on Karl Rove and the phantom realignment, in general I think everyone needs to be much more cautious in their theorizing about political trends and the deep causal origins of electoral outcomes. It's fairly easy to construct a little narrative about postwar electoral politics that fits the data in a plausible way. So easy, in fact, that you should begin to get suspicious -- several different narratives seem to fit the bill.
What should really trouble you, however, is that if you look at presidential elections from 1948-2004, Democrats have won the popular vote seven times and Republicans have won it eight times. This means that on the list of plausible narratives about post-war electoral politics is that the outcomes are completely random and that DRRDDRRDRRRDDDR is just a sequence like you might get from flipping a coin. Which isn't to commit myself to the view that the outcomes really are random (who knows?), but merely that one ought to be very cautious about embracing some Grand Narrative or another.
Math From the Man Who Brought You Social Security Privatization
Peter Wehner, whose job in the White House seemed to specifically entail overseeing Karl Rove's more grandiose and doomed schemes, writes of his boss:
Karl is sui generis; no other White House aide in modern times has played the indispensable role he has. His political achievements are by now well-known. "The architect" played a key role in all of George W. Bush's election wins, including Bush's defeat of a popular Democratic incumbent, Texas Governor Ann Richards, and then his winning re-election by a record margin.
I'm tripping over the idea that helping a Republican win an election in Texas in a GOP landslide year is a great accomplishment to such an extent that I'm having trouble trying to process the question of what kind of "record" Bush is supposed to have set with his margin over John Kerry. I assume he means it was a record in terms of something meaningless like raw vote total when, in any relevant sense, the margin was, in fact, unusually small. This tends to support one of the things I took away from Josh Green's article, namely the idea that this crew might be too clever by half.
After all, why is Wehner using misleading statistics in this context? What does he have to gain? It's like he can't break the reflex and genuinely can't tell up from down anymore.
UPDATE: Alternative hypothesis: I'm too wedded to my view here and ignoring the more charitable interpretation that Wehner is claiming a record margin for Bush's re-election as governor in 1998. Indeed, that's almost certainly what happened here. Apologies to readers, Wehner, etc.
Dave Berri makes the case that the Bobcats are likely to improve up to a level of solid mediocrity next season, and it doesn't even involve any wildly unorthodox statistical claims. Have I mentioned how demoralizing the Wizards' lack of offseason moves has been? I can easily imagine not making the playoffs now. I'm not sure there were any brilliant moves left on the table, but the team could have used something.
Great column from the deeply unserious Nicholas Kristof:
At the end of the day, we have only so much money and so much energy. One option is to continue to devote $10 billion a month and countless lives to Iraq in hopes that our luck will somehow turn. Or we could devote those sums to health care at home and humanitarian programs all around the world — because in the long run, the best hope to defeat the jihadis worldwide isn’t to drop bombs but to build schools.
With the caveat that I actually think the schools-jihadism connection is widely misunderstood, this is precisely right. When I read something like Anthony Cordesman's report on Iraq I doubt not so much his analysis of Iraq, as his Policy Analysis 101 skills: "there is still a tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq . . . strategic patience is a high risk strategy . . . trends are uncertain . . . there is a window of opportunity that could significantly improve the chances of US success in Iraq if the Iraqi government acts upon it."
None of that actually sounds like a properly assembled case for strategic patience to me. One doesn't, ordinarily, advocate extremely costly courses of action with low odds of success merely on the grounds that expending gargantuan sums of resources "could significantly improve the chances" of the policy working. By that standard, you could justify doing anything at all.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Summer M. Anderson
I'm a "wait for the trade paper" kind of guy, so I only recently managed to complete the Ultimates 2 series when the second collection came out. I feel like this book continues to put the other mainstream superhero titles to shame with awesome art and compelling storylines. One keeps hearing complaints about the irregular publishing schedule, but I feel like that should probably be read the other way 'round -- it turns out (no surprise) that one can do much better work if one doesn't slavishly adhere to schedule and, instead, turns out a new story if and only if the new story is actually done in a satisfactory manner.
The financial rationale for regular publication of issues seems clear enough, but I wonder if we aren't moving to a point in time when that may change and it makes more sense to drop the whole "issues" concept and just publish complete storylines as trade paperbacks if and when an entire story is done. More to the point, the book also illustrates key liberal views about international relations, namely about the importance of doing nuclear non-proliferation policy through legitimate international institutions rather than coalitions of the willing and/or random superhero teams.
Stuart Taylor points out that while nobody sure's exactly how many innocent people are serving time in American prisons, the number appears to run into the thousands. He argues that there are many relatively simple things -- taping interrogations, organizing lineups properly, disciplining prosecutors who are guilty of serious misconduct, etc -- we could do to reduce this.
I'll observe that in both the criminal justice and counterterrorism fields, there seems to be a tendency among policymakers to treat punishing the innocent as a kind of close second-best to punishing the guilty. And, of course, in bureaucratic terms it is -- a conviction is a conviction and a clearance is a clearance, whether or not you've got the right guy. In crime control terms, though, it's a terrible error to be wasting resources (prison space, prosecutors' and judges' time) on punishing people who aren't criminals. It's also a terrible injustice, of course, but it's not a tradeoff between justice and effective crime control -- punishing the innocent is counterproductive, just like torturing innocent people and wasting your time chasing down their "leads."
Chris Hayes reports on the nationwide grassroots movement to stop the construction of the NAFTA Superhighway, a Mexico City to Toronto corridor "four football fields wide" where "equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts."
The story of the activists mobilizing against this highway is sort of inspiring except there are no plans for any such highway. It's all made up. The resulting article is a fascinating look at the populist backlash.
And you can't take it out of foreign policy, either, as Moira Whelan argues. The idea that national security issues can or should exist in some pristine universe beyong the petty cut-and-thrust of actually existing American politics is dumb and counterproductive.
Belle Waring hailsThe New York Times' patient explanation that it's mathematically impossible for men and women to have different numbers of sex partners. Ezra Klein, too, lauds the story for debunking gender stereotypes whereby "Men are relatively promiscuous, women relatively chaste."
Here's the only problem. When I got my Patriarchal Master Narrative card, I was taught that while men are promiscuous, women come in two types -- virgins and whores. This is perfectly consistent with the basic math saying men and women have to have the same mean number of sex partners. The story just as to be that men have a higher median number of sex partners than do women, and it's a handful of sluts who are making up the difference. Is that accurate? Perhaps not. But these stereotypes are a bit more robust than a simple mathematical screw-up.
Amnesty International called some months ago "for the US, UK and other states contributing troops to the Multi-National Force (MNF) in Iraq to follow the lead of the Danish government and provide for the resettlement of Iraqis whose lives are now at risk because they are seen to have assisted the foreign forces, as interpreters, drivers and in other roles." It's a topic that I've mentioned here before and that's been treated in The New Yorker and elsewhere to seemingly little avail.
Daniel Davies brings people up to date with the state of play in the UK. I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the main impediment to doing something sensible and humane about this is simply that organizing it correctly would require the organizing governments to concede that their mission in Iraq has basically failed. In the alternate reality where the surge is working (or we need to wait and see) and all the country needs is strategic patience or a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, there's no room for something like a refugee crisis and, therefore, no possibility of special concern for those Iraqis we owe the most and who we've done the most to endanger.
Whoever David Gardner is, I don't think I've ever read him before. Judging by this Financial Times column, I probably should start:
It turns out those Kalashnikovs went missing on his previous watch, as trainer-in-chief of the still barely existent Iraqi army. Gen Petraeus, a student of counterinsurgency with a PhD from Princeton and a gift for PR, had been lionised for his command of the 101st Airborne division in 2003-04, and especially his “hearts and minds” campaign in the north. After his withdrawal, however, two-thirds of Mosul’s security forces defected to the insurgency and the rest went down like fairground ducks. His forces appear not to have noticed, moreover, that Saudi-inspired jihadis had established a bridgehead in Mosul before the war had even started.
But US commanders seem to have no trouble detecting the hand of Tehran everywhere. This largely evidence-free blaming of serial setbacks on Iranian forces is a bad case of denial. First, the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni, built around a new generation of jihadis created by the US invasion. Second, to the extent foreign fighters are involved these have come mostly from US-allied and Sunni Saudi Arabia, not Shia Iran. Third, the lethal roadside bombs with shaped charges that US officials have coated with a spurious veneer of sophistication to prove Iranian provenance are mostly made by Iraqi army-trained engineers – from high explosive looted from those unsecured arms dumps.
Shia Iran has backed a lot of horses in Iraq. If it wished to bring what remains of the country down around US ears it could. It has not done so. The plain fact is that Tehran’s main clients in Iraq are the same as Washington’s: Mr Maliki’s Da’wa and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq led by Abdelaziz al-Hakim. Iran has bet less on the unpredictable Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, which has, in any case, largely stood aside during the present troop surge.
Well-said. One worries, however, that the relentless blaming of things on Iran is more than a bad case of denial. Justin Logan, for example, notes Max Boot saying of Syria and Iran "Why we're not at war with them is a little bit of a mystery." Boot, obtained a position as a Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations on the strength of his work for the legendarily rigorous Wall Street Journal editorial page, so he must be a person we should take very seriously.
DoD photo by Master Sgt. Robert W. Valenca, U.S. Air Force.
I was watching a little of the cold cable news and saw Bill Kristol try to claim Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon as "war skeptics" whose surge enthusiasm should lend credibility to his own. Fortunately, the host of the show pushed back against Kristol's claims.
The host, of course, was John Stewart. You don't get that sort of rigor on a news program.
Kingdaddy wonders why there's an active duty two star Air Force general who's running around to various publications saying we should bomb Iran as a key element of our counterinsurgency toolkit. In my non-expert view, this probably has something to do with the fact that the Air Force as an institutions seems very friendly to crazy people. Any organization that Thomas McInerney could have a successful career in has some problems.
(Or, to put this more fairly, the classic American strategic error of the contemporary era is having too much faith in firepower in general and in air power in particular; in some sense, Air Force personnel are the ones who are best-positioned to see the problem here, but anyone who sees the situation accurately is unlikely to succeed in the Air Force's professional context which is going to be biased in favor of individuals who are strong believers in the utility of air power)
Several years ago I think it was common in the press to overpraise Karl Rove as a genius, and these days the backlash has probably gone too far in the other direction. Adam Nagourney does, however, note the interesting wrinkle that among people who need to put their money where their mouths are -- candidates for office -- there are Rove protégés to be found scattered about all the major GOP campaigns. I suppose some of that could just be efforts to curry favor with the White House, but mostly it seems like a sincere judgment that whatever problems arose in 2006, and despite the small matter of the popular vote in 2000, that Team Rove really did have some prodigious skills.
Norm Podhoretz thinks the United States ought to launch a preventive military strike on Iran. He's also one of Rudy Giuliani's official national security advisers. He also, apparently, thinks Rudy agrees with him about the need to launch a preventing military strike on Iran but "hasn't asked him directly, because he doesn't want to damage Giuliani's candidacy with the inevitable controversy that an affirmative answer might arouse."
As Sam Boyd points out, you'd really think one of the journalists covering the Giuliani campaign would want to dig into this a bit. Does Giuliani agree with Podhoretz? If not, why not? Does he think Podhoretz gives bad advice? And if Podhoretz's advice is bad, what's he doing advising the campaign?
Kal Raustiala & Christopher Sprigman have a great piece on the TNR website about what a disaster Chuck Schumer's bill to bring copyright to the world of fashion design would be.
On a loosely related note, if you've been to a bookstore lately at all you'll notice there's a remarkable vibrancy in the cookbook section as the popularity of things like the Food Network, Top Chef, etc., seems to be driving more chef-types into the public consciousness. Cookbooks, of course, can be copyrighted. But the actual recipes they contain can't be. And one suspects that this non-copyrightable nature of the recipes is integral to the cookbook industry's vibrancy. Without it, the bulk of the market would already be locked-down by older cookbooks, and to publish anything new you'd have to be prepared to lawyer up and fight off a thousand lawsuits alleging that your recipes are too derivative.
One underappreciated subject that came up researching my book was the extent to which segments of "liberal hawk" opinion not only endorsed the invasion of Iraq, but also some of the "incompetent" approach to occupation-management, that they tended to later portray as Bush's blunders, responsible for screwing up the glorious wars that existed in their head. Here, for example, is the DLC's Steve Nider on the brilliance of Don Rumsfeld's light, small force theory of warfare:
The swift three-week victory in Iraq was a vindication of a vision of military transformation that began with pioneers like former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Owens, was picked up and championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and is now being taken up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. What we witnessed was a new kind of warfare based on lightning speed, precise targeting, total information dominance and the adaptability and flexibility to react quickly to changing realities on the ground. [...]
The United States should accelerate the transformation it has pioneered. With the world's most powerful industrial-age military, we have a buffer of capability that allows us the freedom to change. Even with an accelerated transformation, we could easily sustain and support enough old-era tactics to deal with any conceivable military challenge that might emerge during the transition. And, as the war in Iraq has shown, transformation brings more capability, not less. It might mean somewhat higher defense budgets in the near future to kick the defense establishment into a higher transformational gear. But once acceleration began, savings would emerge that are inherent in transforming a massive, slow-moving institution designed for attrition warfare into a smaller, faster, more agile force designed for quicker, decisive warfare -- as we saw in Iraq.
I promise you that there's nothing in there about how Bush obviously needs to send more troops to Iraq. Ken Pollack and Daniel Bynum, also writing for the DLC, envisioned "as many as 200,000 troops" that "should be replaced by a multinational force of 50,000 to 100,000 troops, including American and foreign forces" within one or two years.
This business, in short, short, about how maintaining security in an Iraq-sized country requires 450,000-550,000 troops, while it was something you could tell from the historical evidence, was ignored not just by Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, and George W. Bush, but by essentially all war proponents across the political spectrum. The reason is pretty clear -- there would have been no war had its advocates made accurate forecasts about the levels of resources required. Among other things, someone might have noted that the US Army doesn't have enough soldiers to deploy several hundred thousands troops to Iraq on anything resembling a sustained basis.
I, for one, continue to find the scope and nature of the administration's failures in Afghanistan rather shocking even if, at this point, nothing surprises me. One can indulge one's morbid fascination with this by reading NYU professor and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin's take on the recent New York Times feature on the subject. His "Saving Afghanistan" article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs from earlier this year is also relevant and here on page six offers a rare instance of thoughts on US policy toward Pakistan that seems to go beyond wishful thinking.
Weird, wacky stuff. I used to be a serious geography nerd, but the last time I went head-to-head on world capitals I was taken to school by a true master who nailed me with something like a Togo-Zambia one-two punch at which point I had to concede that I was past my prime and since then I've only grown rustier.
It became fashionable at some point to deride people who ever supposed that the rise of modern information technology would reduce the quantity of paper floating about. And, indeed, some predictions on this score were naive. Still, it's always astounding to me to read an actual description of how administrative tasks used to be performed. Here, for example, is Peter Hart in Mich: The Real Michael Collins describing the Post Office Savings Bank office where Collins had his first job:
Here, 1,600 or so women and 500 boy clerks kept track of every single deposit and withdrawal in the United Kingdon. The daily flow of paper was astonishing and intricate. Notices of withdrawal and deposits arrived from account-holders and postmasters all over the country, by post and telegram. Every change had to be individually checked and noted in the ledgers (Hannie's job for many years), which were themselves checked every quarter against the Postmaster Returns. Deposit books -- all 8 million of them -- were sent in once a year for double-checking. Withdrawals were sorted and counted in the Sorting Branch, wherre they were then divided into sixty warrant divisions and divided again into large and small amounts. The senior sorters would enter them on lists and pass them on to the Warrant Brance. Here declarations corresponding to the notices would be taken out form lockers, and the two together would be forwarded on in branches of sixty in special pouches. Deposit dockets hit the Sorting Branch just after the withdrawals departed, to be stamped with the date, passed to the Daily Balance Branch, noted, and passed back to the sorters, who sorted them to Book Office order and rerouted them to the Paying Office, which gave them back to the sorters, who stamped each docket with its division number before handing them on to the Acknowledgement Inquiry section, which would write them up and, of course, ship them all back to the beleaguered Sorting Branch, where they were released again into the world. Every move was timed, and everything had to move on time or the whole machine would fail. The pressure was intense: to begin with, withdrawal notices had to be out of the Sorting Branch by 9:47 AM.
Collins' job was to address envelopes. At least seventy an hour (on average), seven hours a day, five and a half days a week. My mother, meanwhile, used to have a job at Newsweek that I think involved, among other things, physically cutting photgraphs with her collection of extremely sharp knives and sundry straight-edges.
I find that it's sometimes hard to criticize excessive partisanship because the alternative, "bipartisanship" is very bad. But by the same token, it's hard to deride the fetishization of bipartisanship because "partisanship" also denotes something that really is bad.
The problem, though, is that both sentiments -- when problematic -- are basically problematic for the same reason, they reflect an unwillingness to consider questions on the merits. Thanks to the psychology of partisanship, for example, I'm much more acutely aware of how Bush's curtailments of civil liberties than I was of the earlier steps in Bush's direction pioneered by Bill Clinton. Similarly, I think the psychology of partisanship sometimes leads people to overestimate the role of "incompetence" (as opposed to the simple impossibility of the mission) in the failures in Iraq. But the bipartisan tick is no better, and basically just amounts to the reverse sin -- assuming that if both sides can be made to agree that X is the solution, then X really will solve the problem. So we need a "bipartisan approach" to Iraq like the Baker-Hamilton Commission whether or not that approach makes sense. We need a bipartisan approach to entitlements rather than a correct one.
In practice, both approaches wind up narrowing the conversation to either a tiny "bipartisan consensus" or else a slightly larger patch of partisan trench warfare. What the country really needs, however, is a widening of the conversation to include various kinds of currently outré ideas. That's why I'm glad whenever Ron Paul gets some attention, even though he's not someone who, all things considered, I think has very sound ideas. And its also why I try to link to stuff from the Project for Defense Alternatives -- they're to my left on their core issues, but the status quo where debates ranges from AEI to Brookings isn't working at all.
Mark Kleiman points to a real problem, noting the contrast between the attention paid to "Markos Moulitsas's unpremeditated, quickly-retracted dismissal of the deaths of four contract fighters in Iraq" and Stu Bykofsky's publication of a column calling for the deaths of thousands of Americans in a massive terrorist attack in a "large-circulation big-city newspaper and then featured on Drudge and Fox News." Just like Mark, "I don't really wish that we behaved like our wingnut opponents, but their capacity to work up and sustain outrage has to be counted among their structural advantages."
This is what I've referred to as the "hack gap" and it seems to me that it's very important. The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.
As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.
Late last week, Josh Marshall was noting some rhetorical switcheroos taking place on the right. Mitt Romney, for example, correctly notes that "There's not a global war on terror" before adding "There's a global war being waged by the terrorists and if I am president, there will be a global war waged on the terrorists and we will win." Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, has taken to referring to "the terrorists war on us."
This is totally backwards. War is a kind of organized, socially sanctioned violence. The people who destroyed the World Trade Center weren't soldiers fighting a war against the United States, they were mass murderers. In response, yes, we went to war against their patrons in Afghanistan which the Bush administration proceeded to transmogrify into a horribly misguided "war on terror" but either way we were the side with the soldiers fighting a war. Guys blowing up train stations aren't warriors. Shadowy networks that don't control territory don't prosecute wars.
James Fallows' article on the need to declare victory in the war on terror (see also this and this) makes the point brilliantly -- this habit of blowing things out of proportion for domestic consumption has a way of ennobling and glamorizing the terrorists' actions. It's important to keep some focus on the fact that what these people are doing is trying to kill unarmed people as they go about their lives and that whatever complaints one may have about U.S. foreign policy, what Osama bin Laden is simply encouraging random murder of the innocent, not masterminded a war.
I can't believe I forgot my official review. Well, here goes: I love Set Yourself on Fire more than you can imagine and its come to be one of my very favorite albums out there. Stars' newer effort, In Our Bedroom After the War doesn't have anything like that status. On the other hand, it's still really, really good and you should buy it. Okay, I suck as a music writer. But don't blame the band for my sins.
I sort of feel like saying you probably shouldn't buy Jonathan Chait's book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hikacked by Crackpot Economics because the parts of the book that deal with the media are positively infuriating. Becoming enraged about newspaper and magazine articles than ran years ago is probably an unhealthy impulse. But it's vitally important, and Chait brilliant dissects the moronic manner in which economic issues get covered and the horrible damage it does. Here's a lengthy example:
The unveiling of the Bush tax cut stood out for its devious ingenuity. The Bush campaign had been advertising its approach to tax cuts as a dramatic break from the old GOP practice of giving the rich the biggest breaks. To quote Time once again:
Though Bush won't unveil his plan until the fall, team member Martin Anderson, who helped craft Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in 1981, told TIME last week that Bush's plan "is going to be significantly different from what the Republicans are doing now." Of course, the Texas Governor wants to cut taxes for the middle and upper classes, but sources tell TIME his plan will feature a series of proposals aimed at lowering the tax burden on families earning between $12,500 and $30,000 a year. . . . A tax plan that helps low-income Americans goes deep into Democratic territory and sounds like the perfect policy component to fit Bush's centrist rhetoric
Laudatory coverage like this kept up for months on end, through the summer of 1999 and into the fall. [...] In point of fact, Bush's tax plan was no less regressive than previous Republican plans -- it gave an even higher percentage of its benefits to the top 1 percent than the Republican plan veroed by Clinton in 1999, and it did virtually nothing for families earning under $20,000 a year. So, in December, they hit on the solution of preempting the release of the plan by showing it a day early to a handful of major newspaper reporters. There was one catch: those reporters could not share its details with any outside analysts -- such as, say, economists who could run numbers disproving its core claims. Astonishingly, reputable newspapers agreed to this arrangement.
The result was a triumph of propaganda. The Washington Post breathlessly reported that Bush's plan would "focus its deepest reductions on the working poor and middle class" and would thus "mark a clear departure from more traditional conservative GOP tax policy." The Wall Street Journal noted that Bush was "seeking to steer more benefits to working-poor taxpayers."
The book details the ways in which the cranks first took over the Republican Party and then the entire country, and notes correctly that mere electoral defeat won't resolve the problem. Republicans have, after all, faced electoral setbacks in 1982, 1986, 1992, and 1998 only to come back crazier than ever after wins in 1984, 1994, and 2000. The book can be ordered here, it's coming out in September and I'll probably encourage you to buy it again between now and then.
The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing by Stefan Harper and Jonathan Clarke is kind of a mixed bag, much weaker than their previous book America Alone, which I think never got as much attention as it deserves. Still, it's discussion of the behavior of the think tank establishment during the run-up to the war is fascinating and directly relevant to recent blog conversations about the "foreign policy community":
Brookings, for example, can certainly not be described as reflexively acquiescent to the Administration. The organization contains a spectrum of views. Yet the bulk of material specifically on Iraq being produced at Brookings in this period was coming from those, like Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack and others, whose international views had steadily evolved to accept neoconservative solutions.
In late 2001, for instace, O'Hanlon and Phillip Gordon, another Brookings scholar, had been writing cautiously about Iraq, noting that "for now, the costs and risks of Containment appear lower than those of attempting to overthrow Mr. Saddam." [here] As it became clear that the United States was moving toward war, the same two scholars, now joined by Martin Indyk, a former Ambassador to Israel, seemingly underwent a change of heart: "with sufficient American leadership, commitment, and sacrifice, the military, diplomatic and nation-building challenges involved in regime-change in Iraq can all be met." [PDF here] As the administration's line grew harder, so did Brookings's. Speaking about the fall of Saddam, Indyk said: "Wednesday, April 9, 2003, will be a day that will go down in history. You will probably remember and even tell your grandchildren what you did on this day." A year later his tune had changed: "failure is not only an option but a likelihood.
In sum, they observe that the "post-9/11 period indicates that institutions such as Brookings are as much a product of the public space as their are a mechanism for its quality control." This is, really, about the reverse of what elite institutions should be doing. Instead of shading commentary to align with the prevailing political wisdom, one looks to elites of this sort to provide a check on the fashions of the day. Instead, they tended to re-enforce it. Most skeptics kept quiet, those who didn't tended to be ignored by the mass media.
Whole institutions just ducked and covered. "In 2002, for example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found time in its eighty-six events to discuss China six times, India four times, and Nepal and Kyrgystan twice each." Iraq? One event in November 2002 where the "discussion was largely technical, concerning the possible ramifications of the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq." They next discussed Iraq "on February 3, 2003, when its main conclusion was that war seemed likely."
CSIS did not hold a single event on Iraq in 2002. In January 2003, CSIS published a long analysis "A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for Post-Conflict Iraq," which, while it anticipated many of the problems which in fact occurred, included the point that "it takes no position on whether there should be a war." A month later, open-mindedness was gone. At a time of intense public consternation about the unfolding course of American policy, CSIS provided a forum for Senator John McCain to make the case for war.
They observe that between the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003, Foreign Affairs didn't see fit to publish "a single article that raises moderate skepticism, let along fundamental questions, about the looming decisions." Last, they say that "Scholars did not fail to notice that certain institutions, like Carnegie, engineered the departure of internal critics; others, such as Cato, which stood out against the war, had to deal with sharp questions from their supporters" which is something I wish they had said more about.
Justin Logan strolls through the archives of The Washington Quarterly to find Pollack & Bynum arguing that "a multinational force of initially at least 100,000 troops" would suffice to "reassure Iraq’s Shi‘a and Kurdish communities that repression at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis is at an end" and also "reassure Iraqi Sunnis that the end of their monopoly on power does not mean their persecution and repression, minimizing their incentives to oppose the process." No insurgency, no sectarian violence. If only we'd listened to them!
I'll offer a fuller reaction to Rudy Giualiani's Foreign Affairs manifesto (short version: this man is batshit insane) tomorrow, but for now let me observe that I hadn't quite realized the extent to which he intends to replace the War on Terror with a War on Usage: "We have responded forcefully to the Terrorists' War on Us, abandoning a decadelong -- and counterproductive -- strategy of defensive reaction in favor of a vigorous offense."
I'd known, of course, about the "terrorists' war on us" but are the capital letters really necessary? Preventing the emergence of a world where this is a phrase we need to read regularly in our newspapers seems like reason enough to hope for Giuliani to be defeated.
You've probably noticed that the blog looks a bit different (or maybe you're one of those RSS goons) and if so I hope that you, like me, find the redesign aesthetically appealing. The change, though, was less about making the "Atlantic Voices" blogs look better than it was about integrating their look with the new redesign of TheAtlantic.com which, I think, now gives the home page a stunning-yet-useful quality worthy of the magazine. The home page now integrates content from the latest issue of the magazine, from the past 150 years worth of archives, and various different sorts of Web-only content, making it the sort of constantly-changing, internet-speed site that's worth checking frequently, even as the magazine itself continues at its more dignified pace.
Via Brian Beutler, Michael Gerson isn't making me feel any better about his character by publishing a post-White House column on how global warming is a serious problem, a well-designed cap-and-trade program could seriously mitigate the problem, and China and Russia shouldn't be used as excuses for inaction. I, too, believe all that stuff. Inconveniently for me, I've never been a top aide to the President of the United States, which is always a good situation to be in when you'd like to see action taken on a cause.
Meanwhile, Gerson somehow manages to parcel blame out evenly between conservative Republicans like Gerson, Gerson's boss, every boss Gerson has ever had in his career, Gerson's colleagues, and Gerson's subordinates all of whom have been fighting serious action on global warming tooth-and-nail and unspecified liberals whose unspecified "hysteria" has contributed to the problem in an unspecified way.
In case you were wondering if it's really true that "war on terror" is a pernicious concept, here comes the Bush administration's decision to relabel Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "specially designated global terrorist" organization. It's taken a few years, but we've managed to move now from a situation in the winter 2001-2002 where the US and Iran were cooperating against our mutual deadly foe -- al-Qaeda -- to one where Iran is officially one of the enemies in an open-ended struggle against God knows whom.
I suppose if I ever want to join Young Ezra Klein on Chris Matthews' prestigious guest list, I probably shouldn't draw attention to Chris Matthews' odd bout of on-air sexual harassment here:
It's hard to understand what must be going through Matthews' head as he decides this is a good way to behave while on the air. He's been doing the show for years now; he's no novice to the genre. One can only assume he's just become so accustomed to the accountability-free zone that is being a cable news host -- after all, listening to Matthews talk has never been a knowledge-enhancing activity, and yet he has this successful TV career -- that his mental filters have atrophied or something. It's not the first sexist episode we've seen from Matthews by any means, but it's possible the most bizarre.
In yesterday's post on the silence of the think tanks I was relying on an account I read in a book, which can sometimes be a problem since books tend not to be fact-checked especially rigorously. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for example, turns out not to have been as silent on this issue as the post implied. Here, for example, is Jessica Matthews advocating "coercive inspections" as an alternative to "the very real possibility that a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even if successful in doing so, could subtract more from U.S. security and long-term political interests than it adds. In this case an alternative does exist."
Rudy Giuliani's Foreign Affairs essay really is a bit of a revelation. To understand it, I think you need to understand the broader context of the political dilemmas he's facing. One is the simple dilemma all the Republican contenders face -- namely that the conservative base remains fanatically committed to a grandiose view of "the war on terror" that most Americans have grown disillusioned with. Indeed, the conservative base appears to be more committed to this vision at this point than is George W. Bush. After all, while I think the rise of moderate foreign policy in the Bush administration has often been overstated, there's no doubt that the President has softened the edges somewhat. Don Rumsfeld is gone. Rumsfeld's cookiest subordinates are gone. John Bolton is gone. Etc., etc. etc. But the Hugh Hewitt crowd, the Rush Limbaugh listeners, the Glenn Beck fans, and that whole lot still, in essence, want to see a bloody, bloody, bloody foreign policy.
The most natural way to finesse the fact that this agenda's become unpopular is to try to stay vague in your primary campaign. Emphasize points of agreement with Bush, emphasize points of disagreement with the Democrats, but leave yourself some of the proverbial wiggle room.
Michael Cohen catches something I missed about the decision to start calling the IRGC terrorists. According to the Post, one of the motives for this action was Condoleezza Rice's desire "to pacify, for a while, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action."
I think one good way to tell that your country's gone 'round the bend is that this sort of thing starts showing up in your morning paper.
Maybe Michael O'Hanlon's continued prominence in the media is more useful than I'd realized. Here's Michael Crowley:
But this evening I heard an NPR program (audio here) on which O'Hanlon was a guest, and I was struck by how self-defeatingly thin his argument for a continued occupation was. O'Hanlon readily conceded that he can't construct a "convincing theory" for how political reconciliation might be achieved--and moreover that his argument for patience amounts to "a gut level... theory of hope" that somehow things will get better. I'm very torn but persuadable that sticking around might be better than various gruesome alternatives. But less so if advocates for that position--particularly nonideological ones like O'Hanlon--concede that their argument amounts to wishing upon a star.
Perhaps having more anti-war voices in the press would convince nobody -- after all, they're not "nonideological" like O'Hanlon -- and what we need are more lame pro-war arguments in hopes that the overwhelming lameness will bring people around.
Kevin Drum tries to make himself feel good about not owning an iPhone: "To summarize: the iPhone is expensive and fails miserably at its primary function of making telephone calls, but other than that it's really great. Sign me up!"
Seriously, though, it's true. At the same time, there strikes me as something quaint about this notion that a cell phone's primary function is "making telephone callls." Personally, I don't like talking on the phone very much. My old Razr's primary function was sending and receiving SMS messages. My new iPhone's primary function is probably as an MP3 player, with SMSing as the key secondary function. Beyond that, I use the Web browser and the Google Maps function a lot. The phone's actual "talking on the phone" functionality is unimpressive, but I don't really mind that. Indeed, I mind it a lot less than I mind the fact that it doesn't allow you to SMS to multiple people simultaneously, a flaw I fervently hope and pray will be corrected by some future software update.
At any rate, I realize that there's probably a lot of variation about this. Most people aren't nearly as phone-averse as I am. Meanwhile, thanks to the combination of the Google Calendar and Twitter, I count on a steady stream of text messages to figure out what I'm supposed to do with my life, but most people aren't living their lives like that.
You may have read on the internet that Andrew Sullivan is the 46th most powerful person in Washington, but as best I can tell you need to get your hands on a copy of the print GQ to find the real news of the list -- Ross and I are "up and coming" powerful just like the mayor and Susan Rice.
You might be tempted to look at this list and nitpick. Does it really make sense to say that John Podesta is more powerful than Ben Bernanke? Suppose Podesta wanted to cause a global financial meltdown, or plunge the country into recession . . . what he could do about it? Nothing. But then you realize, no, this list must be one hundred percent accurate since it correctly identifies me as one of the centrally important figures of our time.
David Bradley, owner and Supreme Leader of the Atlantic Media Company is also on the list, but since he doesn't have a blog it's difficult for him to brag about it in a somewhat ironic and self-effacing manner. Point being: the Atlantic Media Company and its associated blogs are very, very, very powerful or, in some cases, up and coming as powerful. Be afraid.
One of Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisors is Martin Kramer (about which more later), who has a blog called "the Sandbox" from which he propounds his view that the problem with US Middle East policy is that it's unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East, and insufficiently under the thumb of people like Kramer who recognize that the only thing these brutes understand is force. At any rate, from Kramer's sidebar I followed a link to Eli Lake's New York Sunarticle in which Giuliani criticizes Bush's foreign policyfor being too favorable to the Palestinians.
This is, perhaps, not entirely unexpected from a man whose entire foreign policy resume consists of having been rude to Yasser Arafat once, but still: It's inane.
I think Andrew Sullivan made an effort to popularize that term at one point, and I liked it. Take, for example, Steve Hayes latest bout of enthusiasm for Dick Cheney who, he says, "has not moved on. He still awakens each day asking the same questions he asked on Sept. 12, 2001."
I mean, is that really supposed to be a good thing. I don't remember my mental state on 9/12/01 in perfect detail, but a broad-brush outline would be that I was freaking out. Nobody knew how many people had died the previous day, but the total was assumed to be way higher than the 3,000 or so it turned out to be. People (except for Dick Cheney, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic) mostly assumed it was al-Qaeda, but nobody really knew and nobody really knew anything about al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, I was really, really, really scared that we'd just witnessed the first wave of some sustained assault on the United States. Like emergency workers were going to be deployed to New York, only to find skyscrapers in the cities they'd left tumbling down. Or maybe a masked man would just start opening fire in a crowded shopping mall and gun people down. Going to a college that doubles as a tourist attraction suddenly went from neat-but-annoying to terrifying.
It simply put, wasn't the best day to be making decisions. Obviously, the country's top leaders need to make decisions in crises. At the same time, they're bound to be fallible like everyone else. And, like everyone else, eventually they need to calm down, step back, and evaluate what's happening. But Cheney and his hagiographer see it as a virtue that he continues to make decisions based on the panicky and inaccurate vision of events we had on 9/12.
From the "claim that's sufficiently appealing that I haven't read the underlying paper" file, here's Charles Kenny:
Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap? is an unpublished short paper. The key features of the Malthusian model are that (i) income determines population growth, with rising wages increasing survival rates and (ii) there is a vital factor of production (land) which is fixed, implying decreased returns to scale for all other factors. The equilibrium state in such a model is a population living on subsistence incomes. The analysis in this paper suggests that (i) the link between income and population growth is (almost) everywhere broken and (ii) there is little evidence of declining returns to scale because of constraints imposed by land carrying capacity at the macro level anywhere. Population dynamics are being driven by non-income factors in a manner that is reducing population growth rates everywhere. At the same time, output is increasing everywhere, in a manner inconsistent with significantly declining returns to scale based on land being a vital factor of production.
Good news! If true, of course. Here's his blog. This comes via Tyler Cowen.
U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim.
Normally, a story would go on for grafs and grafs about the claims US officials make before noting that the claims, as best as the reporter can tell, are false. So, I dunno, maybe you want to send Leila Fadel a nice note? Suggest to the next editor of a more-prominent-than-McClatchy paper you read that they should hire Leila Fadel? Bloghers are good at complaining about sub-standard work, but should also get better at deploying carrots.
Not that it's going to make him president, but Chris Dodd is making sense:
For more than forty-six years, the United States has maintained an isolationist policy toward Cuba, which I believe has not achieved its intended objectives, namely to hasten a peaceful and democratic transition on the Island of Cuba. Rather, it has solidified the authoritarian control of Fidel Castro, and has adversely affected the already miserable living conditions of 11 million innocent men, women, and children on the Island.
I think Democrats due themselves a disservice when they pander to the absurd views of the Cuban exile lobby rather than saying these words that everyone knows to be true. Among other things, it makes it difficult for Democrats to argue for engagement with Iran or Syria or wherever when they can't point to the most clear-cut and famous example of the failure of isolation strategies.
I overheard this on The Daily Show playing in the room next door, and now Fallows is linking to it, too. I dunno why it seems to have just surfaced today, but check it out:
The speaker is Dick Cheney in 1994, pointing out that marching on Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein would likely lead to some kind of "quagmire."
Writing about alcohol regulation, Tyler Cowen observes that "Penalties for drunk driving should be much stricter." This is true. Our whole system of punishment around this topic is really messed up. The tendency is to punish people by restricting their ability to drive. The problem is that in most parts of the US, driving around is a requirement for living an adult life. The penalty is too severe, enforcement gets spotty, sentences are brief. Then, when people talk about making the laws tougher, the current trend is to ratchet-down the prohibited blood-alcohol content level to a point where some drunk drivers are, arguably, not actually doing anything worthy of severe punishment.
Mark Kleiman has proposed the idea that instead of showing your driver's license when you go into a bar or liquor store that you should need to show a "drinking license" and that could be suspended for alcohol-related misconduct including driving. That's the sort of penalty one could realistically apply to violators on a widespread basis, but that also could act as a meaningful deterrent for people who like to drink. Then you'd have to make the penalties for serving (or buying) without a license severe. And you could maybe give older teens the choice between a drinking license and a driving license, rather than trying to curtail teen drunk driving purely by curtailing teen drinking.
I never know whether or not to link to stories like this one about breaking news from Peru where an earthquake has killed hundreds and done all sorts of other damage. I have nothing to say about it, but it seems wrong not to recognize these tragedies and their victims.
Gary Farber emailed last night "Just a quick note to say that I'm really surprised how
few major left/liberal bloggers have blogged this Wall
Street Journal page one story today. I'm surprised, too! I missed it somehow until this morning I saw it as a day two story in the Post. This seems important. Check out Gary's post here.
The bottom-line is that all kinds of restrictions on satellite surveillance are being lifted. This has potentially enormous consequences when you consider that as good as satellite imagery and so forth is today, it's likely to be much better in a few years.
Jonathan Weisman and Karen DeYoung refer to the upcoming September reports on Iraq as "widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush's war strategy." But why should that be. Report or no report, Bush is still president, Democrats still have so many votes in congress, and fundamentally there's no reason for anything to change. In the next graf, they acknowledge this ("Lawmakers from both parties are growing worried that the report -- far from clarifying the United States' future in Iraq -- will only harden the political battle lines around the war") but the rest of their reporting on the hard-fought battles about the details of staging the report's presentation make it seem as if folks on the Hill really do see this as a make or break turning point.
But as we read yesterday, the reports are being written by the White House. This is, in my view, appropriate. Petraeus and Crocker work for Bush and it's always been silly to portray them as independent actors. But the point is that there's no independent assessment here -- the White House is going to make an official statement of the White House's assessment of the situation and why the White House believes its official assessment supports the policies the White House favors. All that's fine, and insofar as the White House is persuasive it should sway people. But we've already seen what the White House talking points on the surge are -- tribal alliances in Anbar Province, unsupported claims that civilian casualties are declining, plus we need more time for progress on the political front to take hold -- there's no particular reason to wait with baited breath to see how they format the official document.
I don't blame politicians for not having off-the-shelf brilliant solutions to the question of what our policy toward Pakistan should be, but Ilan Goldenberg's surely right that something's amiss when Rudy Giuliani spends 6,000 words on foreign policy and doesn't mention Pakistan at all.
This, though, is the neocon two-step we've been living with for years. Despite the talk of "The Terrorists' War on Us" the folks Giuliani has associated himself with don't care about al-Qaeda terrorism. Before 9/11 they mostly wanted a war with China, and then secondarily wars with Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These days, it's more like they primarily want a war with Iran and Syria (they already got Iraq) with China and maybe Russia as second-tier priorities. Fighting al-Qaeda isn't even a close second -- it's just not on the map.
Yesterday, Andrew linked to this video of David Brooks telling Chris Matthews that many Republicans hate George W. Bush:
Andrew refers to this as "life outside the cocoon" but I think it may be the reverse. Certainly, it seems to me that a healthy number of professional conservatives in Washington and New York are kind of sick of Bush and, if nothing else, blame him for damaging the Republican Party and the conservative brand. But the fact remains that Bush's approval ratings are in the low twenties. If we assume (which I think is safe) that essentially all of that support is coming from Republicans, it means that the overwhelming majority of Republicans (though almost nobody else) thinks Bush is doing a good job as president.
That's the problem facing the Republican primary candidates. It's obvious that the best path to the White House for any of these guys would be to run a Sarkozy-style strategy that emphasizes the need for change even while making the case for partisan continuity. But Republican primary voters don't think we need to change course on anything but immigration.
The person who alerted me to the fact that the entirety of The New Pornographers' forthcoming album Challengers is now streaming on their MySpace page was worried that he was the last one in the universe to know. Well, now I'm worried I'm the last to know, so I'm telling you, my readers, since probably some of you don't know (probably many of you hate the band) and now you're the last to know.
After one listen, I think they've managed to make it more middling than any of their previous efforts. Mass Romantic, Electric Version, and Twin Cinemas all feature brilliant tracks and some that I find pretty annoying. Nothing on Challengers annoyed me. But nothing thrilled me the way "The Laws Have Changes," "Mass Romantic," "Miss Teen Wordpower," "All for Swinging Your Around," "Twin Cinema," or "Jackie Dressed in Cobras" does. We'll see, though, how I feel after repeat listens.
Robert Farley notes that the US-India nuclear deal is so one-sided and favorable to India that it's hard for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to convince parliament that the deal really says what he says it says.
I felt like I mostly read respectful disagreement with Peter Beinart's notion that the right needs a Republican version of the DLC, but I thought it was way off base. The GOP has shown itself over the years to be quite adept at standing for social conservatism just insofar as standing for social conservatism is politically expedient. Yes, every once in a while they missfire like with the Terry Schiavo business, but that was genuinely a mistake -- lots of people thought that the GOP was making a savvy play there until the polls starting coming out -- not the base driving politicians to do something they didn't want to do. Meanwhile, once some aspect of social conservatism becomes politically untenable, the GOP drops it like a rock. Nixon's "southern strategy" didn't promise resegregation any more than George W. Bush advocated federal criminal penalties for sodomy.
The Republicans' strength as a coalition is that the movers and shakers behind it in the business community have a much more coherent agenda than does the interest-group coalition behind the Democrats. The formula isn't fool proof, and it can hit stumbling blocks every once in a while like a recession (1992) or a badly misfiring war (2006), but over the long run if you think of the modern Republican Party as an organized conspiracy for the purposes of concentrating America's wealth and income in the hands of the smallest possible number of people, it's been wildly successful for the past 30 years and we've yet to see any really clear evidence that the basic formula has stopped succeeding.
Maybe the Republicans will lose in 2008, but prove capable of blocking a progressive agenda anyway just as they were in 1993. Maybe not. Or maybe they'll be punished at the polls for obstruction in 2010. But the time for the sort of reconfiguration that Beinart's talking about would be then -- in 2011 or 2012 if there were actual reason to believe that the party was failing to achieve its core purpose.
The AP reports on some big news: "The Iraqi prime minister and president announced a new alliance of moderate Shiites and Kurds in a push to save the crumbing government Thursday, saying a key Sunni bloc refused to join but the door remained open to them [...] Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the new agreement was the first step to unblock political stagnation that has gripped his Shiite-led government since it first took power in May 2006." In fact, though, there's nothing to it. Eric Martin says: "So it's not necessarily a new alliance, just the remnants of the old alliance with a generous application of glitzy lipstick."
I don't actually see any lipstick here. This is the same coalition of SCIRI (now with a new name, though) and Dawa that's been running the show ever since Iyad Allawi got tossed. They also have the parliamentary votes of the Kurdish parties in exchange for the government permitting de facto autonomy for a Kurdistan run by those two parties. Sunnis and Sadrists alike will regard the central government as a Kurdish-American plot to destroy the country and violence will continue. Insofar as the central government ever does get close to consolidating power, that'll just expose the simmering tensions inside the rump coalition -- the looking Kirkuk referendum is an obvious potential flashpoint.
Brink Lindsey points out that if you dig into the transcript of the interview that the now-famous video comes from, it turns out that Cheney's changed his tune on Iran as well.
Via Daniel Levy, the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs looks back at the West's recent handling of the Israeli-Arab conflict:
We conclude that the decision to boycott Hamas despite the Mecca agreement and the continued suspension of aid to the national unity Government meant that this Government was highly likely to collapse. We further conclude that whilst the international community was not the root cause of the intra-Palestinian violence, it failed to take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of such violence occurring.
Given the failure of the boycott to deliver results, we recommend that the Government should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles. We conclude that any attempts to pursue a 'West Bank first' policy would risk further jeopardising the peace process. We recommend that the Government urge President Abbas to come to a negotiated settlement with Hamas with a view to re-establishing a national unity Government across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
That seems completely sound to me. Even if you disagree, there's no denying that there's something bracing -- from an American perspective -- about exercises like this one, or like the one the Knesset undertook after the 2006 war in Lebanon. The Bush administration has shifted its policies around here and there since 9/11, and the press has always been eager to exaggerate the scope of these course-corrections, but none of the efforts to change direction -- even the real ones -- have involved any kind of serious effort to come to terms with the errors of the past.
Ross says folks who'd like to see the US move to a more humane criminal justice system can't beat something with nothing, and had better propose an alternative means of getting the crime-control effects of mass incarceration. His idea: more cops on the beat:
One possible answer, I think - again, drawing a bit from The Wire as well as from public policy research - is more cops on the beat. This could be the twofer that (right-wing) prison reformers offer skeptical voters: Lighter sentences and more emphasis on rehabilitation on the one hand, and larger, more active police forces to pick up the slack (and ideally gain even more ground) on the other.
I think there's a lot to that. Even better in some ways, though not as good in political terms, would be to have more parole officers. A year on parole is obviously far more humane than a year in prison. And even a closely monitored parolee is less expensive than an additional prisoner. But a well-designed parole system can have almost as much crime control oomph as more prison beds. The trick is that it only works if you put enough money into hiring parole officers that they can really monitor their parolees. Right now, the system depends very heavily on infrequently enforced but very severe sanctions for, e.g., people who fail drug tests. With more resources you could switch that around to a much more effective system with less severe penalties but a higher cost of getting caught.
I've gotta stop Jason Zengerle and Ross Douthat from propagating some kind of revisionist notion whereby Dick Cheney (in Zengerle's words) "could well benefit from a round of media appearances - because, while his views may be crazy and alarmist, his public presentation of them isn't." Or, as Ross puts it, "Cheney entered this Administration with a reputation for being anti-charismatic but deeply responsible, but if anything the reverse has proven true: When he's ventured out of the undisclosed location, he's actually been a much more compelling spokesman for the Administration than the President, even as he's been associated with many of its more reckless and tone-deaf policy decisions."
This is crazy talk. One's first-glance view of the situation is correct. Steve Hayes is a crazy sycophant. His idea that Cheney could enhance his popularity by speaking more in public is the sort of thing a crazy sycophant would say. Cheney is kept in hiding because even before it became known that his policy judgment was absolutely abysmal, he always looked and sounded like an evil troll. He comes across as the kind of guy who'd vote to keep Nelson Mandela locked in prison. It's obvious from Ross' and Jason' posts, however, that people are beginning to forget exactly how abhorrent he is. More public appearances will cure that fast.
I've gotta stop Jason Zengerle and Ross Douthat from propagating some kind of revisionist notion whereby Dick Cheney (in Zengerle's words) "could well benefit from a round of media appearances - because, while his views may be crazy and alarmist, his public presentation of them isn't." Or, as Ross puts it, "Cheney entered this Administration with a reputation for being anti-charismatic but deeply responsible, but if anything the reverse has proven true: When he's ventured out of the undisclosed location, he's actually been a much more compelling spokesman for the Administration than the President, even as he's been associated with many of its more reckless and tone-deaf policy decisions."
This is crazy talk. One's first-glance view of the situation is correct. Steve Hayes is a crazy sycophant. His idea that Cheney could enhance his popularity by speaking more in public is the sort of thing a crazy sycophant would say. Cheney is kept in hiding because even before it became known that his policy judgment was absolutely abysmal, he always looked and sounded like an evil troll. He comes across as the kind of guy who'd vote to keep Nelson Mandela locked in prison. It's obvious from Ross' and Jason' posts, however, that people are beginning to forget exactly how abhorrent he is. More public appearances will cure that fast.
Julian Sanchez makes the case that advances in satellite technology may have rendered our conventional privacy laws obsolete:
The courts have, to date, not regarded aerial observation by planes as a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes, under the plain view doctrine. The sensible intuition here is that you have no protected privacy interest in what can be observed without entering your property: If you're foolish enough to put your marijuana crop in front of an open window—or in a field that can be spotted by someone flying overhead—you can't complain if the police notice it. But the analogy to casual observation begins to seem awfully strained when we consider the potential of satellite imaging to create a perpetual record of whole regions of the country, allowing anyone's comings and goings to be tracked. This may, then, present a problem of what Lawrence Lessig has called "Fidelity in Translation": Constitutional rules create a balance between conflicting interests—citizens' need for privacy and law enforcement's need to gather information—but as technology changes, the application of the same rule may produce a very different balance of interests. The question, then, is how, whether, and when fidelity to the Constitution may mean discarding the original rule in order to preserve the original balance.
Of course, another solution here would be for congress to recognize there's a problem and pass a sensible law governing the use of satellite imagery. Sadly, though, we've seen a few times that there seems to be majority support in congress for the view that 9/11 made civil liberties obsolete.
Mike Lux at OpenLeft offers up an almost shockingly conventional homage to the virtues of the small state primary tradition. And, of course, I suppose these kind of weird quirks might seem folks and reassuring to you if you, like the majority of the population of Iowa and New Hampshire, are part of the tiny minority of Americans who live in lily white rural areas. I think it'd be fun to see my favorite presidential candidates swipe their MetroCards in the subway or wait on line (yes, on line, damit) for a knish at a hot dog stand.
That said, it's hard to see how any liberal can be happy, at the end of the day, with the distorting effect the disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire have on our politics. It's bad enough the way cities are disadvantaged by the structure of the constitution, that to also add on this additional extra-constitutional mechanism for further re-enforcing the existing biases of the system is insane. People talk themselves to death trying to design alternative primary schemes, but at this point I'd take pretty much any change you care to name. It would make more sense to enter the names of every registered Democrat in a hat, pick at random, and then let that guy choose.
I watched this somewhat widely praised show for the first time last night, and while my brother kept complaining it was "boring" the obvious fact of the matter was that he was missing the key point that the main theme of the episode was the incontrollable sense of jealously inspired when a colleague of yours publishes something in The Atlantic Monthly. Of all the timeless elements of the human condition this is, perhaps, the one that's been least explored thus far on the small screen and I commend Madmen for raising the topic and facing it squarely.
Tavits finds that, on average, shifts on pragmatic issues benefit politicians politically, whereas shifts on social issues are harmful. Since it seems like there is potential for a lot of overlap between issues designated as either "pragmatic" or "principled," the waters are muddied somewhat. But attempting to moderate or reverse one's positions on strong, clearly principled issues like abortion, gay marriage, or religion's place in public life appears to be one ticket to a lost election. If you're on the record supporting liberal social policies and you're worried about the South and Midwest, it's probably a better bet to remain passionate on the stump, while not exactly leading with those issues.
This Post article about the DCPD's database of nicknames that they use to identify people:
The repository has thousands of entries -- such as Fat Boy, Boo Boo, Meatball, Money Cash, Big Stupid, Butter, P-Funk, Dirt and Ed Lover. Many evoke real or fictional gangsters -- Gotti, Godfather, Corleone.
Wow. David Brooks really likes John Edwards. So much so that I feel compelled to attack Brooks from the right. He says that "If you had to put a label on Edwards, you’d say that he is a culturally conservative anti-Washington liberal" and he means it in a good way. Edwards, says Brooks, is "going to be able to connect with working-class white voters in Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Michigan" and that a big part of this "is his cultural traditionalism." Of what does this traditionalism consist?
Edwards will be talking about an issue, and his voice will rise and he’ll punctuate his argument with a ringing declaration of stern common sense. On education: “Parents can’t just drop their kids off at school and forget about it. Parents have to take responsibility for their children!” On immigration: “They have to learn English!”
I dunno about that. My upbringing was about as far from working class Ohio as you can get, and this idea that parents should be interested in kids' education and immigrants should learn English was pretty uncontroversial among secular Jews in Greenwich Village. If this is all it takes to be a cultural conservative, then sign me up. It's all the stuff about sex -- abortion, gays, abstinence, etc. -- that turned me off of cultural conservatism, not the idea that parents should care about their kids.
Meanwhile, I note that while Brooks has never taken such a simplistic view, I do believe the orthodox conservative position is that if public school teachers didn't have unions -- or, better, if we didn't have public schools at all -- that education would be great no matter what parents thought or did. Be that as it may, this is one of the strongest parts of the Case for Edwards: out of his mouth, totally banal phrases strike many people as culturally conservative.
I love Fred Kaplan's devastating takedown of Rudy Giuliani's Foreign Affairs manifesto, but I think it's misleading to frame the problems with Rudy's worldview as a kind of ignorance or childishness. The piece reflects the views of a substantial and influential group of people. I'd be inclined to dismiss the Norman Podhoretzes and Charles Krauthammers of the world as merely ignorant, since their ideas don't make any sense, but they've been at this long enough that they know what they're doing.
A merely ignorant Giuliani would be worrying, but what we actually see here is a man deeply invested in a deeply wrongheaded worldview which, I think, is much more dangerous. To observers looking on from the outside, the Bush administration has been a case study in neoconservative folly. To neoconservatives themselves, however, the Bush administration has been a study in betrayal. They're brilliant ideas have been compromised at every turn by the president's wavering attention, by liberals in congress, by Arabists in the State Department, etc., etc., etc. Giuliani represents precisely that point of view -- the kind of people who think Bush's big mistake was not listening to Perle and Frum in An End to Evil.
Would Giuliani actually govern this way? It's impossible to say for sure, but one has to take seriously the possibility that he's not only signaling a desire to implement policies more militaristic, more hostile to professionals at State and the CIA, more dismissive of the UN, less friendly to Palestinians, etc. than has George W. Bush. There are people -- lots and lots of people -- who think Bush abandonned the True Path sometime in 2004 and that what the country needs is to get back on track. Giuliani's roster of advisers and now his essay indicate that he wants to be the candidate for those people. That should scare you.
I would be fascinated to see someone (someone at The New Republic, perhaps) try to write an article about why this is a good idea:
The new aid to Israel will average $3 billion a year on a sliding scale, an increase of about 25 percent from current figures, to begin in October 2008. That year, American economic aid to Israel, which has a vibrant, growing economy, is scheduled to end. Uniquely, officials said, the new deal allows Israel to spend 26.3 percent of the aid on arms from Israel’s domestic military industry; the rest of the money must be spent on American equipment.
The New York Times's Steve Erlanger hints here at the odd specter of a gigantic increase in aide to a country with a vibrant, growing economy. He doesn't note that the baseline level already made Israel the country's largest aid recipient. And Israel is, of course, not a poor country. It is, of course, a democracy. But so is Bangladesh -- a country with many more citizens and much less money. But not only is Israel's giant aid package getting substantially larger, it's "uniquely" going to allow "26.3 percent of the aid on arms from Israel’s domestic military industry." The standard military aid package requires all the money to be spent on US defense contractors, making it half partially a subsidy to a foreign country, partially a subsidy to American arms manufacturers.
There's some indication in the article, meanwhile, that Steny Hoyer and other Democrats may raise objections not to this aid package but to the "don't call it a quid pro quo" complementary package of arms sales to the Gulf monarchies. And thus both parties continue in the quest to be more slavishly in hock to AIPAC.
I suppose in some sense it's better that it's now The Washington Post's dollars that are going to pay Michael Gerson to lie on George W. Bush's behalf rather than our tax dollars, but the paper should really consider sitting him down and reminding him that while "lying on behalf of George W. Bush" is the key task of a Bush administration aide, a newspaper columnist should be doing something else. I mean, what are we supposed to make of this?
First, Rove argues that Republicans win as activist reformers, in the tradition of Lincoln, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. "We were founded as a reformist party," he said in our conversation this week, "not to be against something, but to help the little guy get ahead." The models he cites are 401(k)s and the mortgage interest deduction -- government policies that encouraged individual wealth and ownership. Then Rove spent several minutes describing, with wonkish delight, the momentum and virtues of health savings accounts, a Bush-era innovation allowing individuals to save tax-free for routine medical expenses.
Look, I dunno. It's mean to call people liars. And probably inappropriate. I have no real basis for my beliefs about Gerson's mental state. Maybe he's just ignorant. Maybe he has no idea that all of these programs provide much more assistance to rich people than they do to poor people. Maybe he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. But that's bad, too. 401(k)s aren't a way to help the little guy get ahead. Neither is the mortgage interest deduction. Neither are Health Savings Accounts. These are all ways to sharply reduce the taxes of rich people.
If Karl Rove ever described these programs "with wonkish delight" as a way to help the little guy get ahead, then the moral of the story is that Rove is a moron, unfamiliar with the basic aspects of public policy. More likely, Rove knew exactly what he was doing and saw promotion of these policies as just the sort of cynical move Gerson denies Rove would ever contemplate -- a way to mislead voters into supporting a political agenda aimed at securing the interests of the rich. But what's Gerson doing? Why is the Post publishing these columns? The White House has its own press operation.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine finds himself needing to scale back his preschool proposals and restrict himself to a targeted program for the state's neediest kids rather than a universal one. This seems like a reasonable response to budgetary realism, but as is usually the case with this sort of thing it'd be better to have a universal program. Preschool money for poor kids is the sort of thing that sounds good when a state is flush. When a recession comes, Medicaid costs go up, and tax revenues go down it's another matter. The state needs to balance its budget, and it's not going to want to do it by slashing services the middle class enjoys. So it comes down to tax increases and cutting services for the poor (and, of course, infrastructure maintenance as we've seen recently) and the poor tend to lose.
But the same balanced budget requirements are the very things that make it so hard to pass a universal program in the first place. The structure is similar to Ezra's argument about the states and health care. That piece turned out to be more controversial than I would have thought. The basic point it pretty simple -- it's very hard to do certain kinds of ambitious progressive programs in the context of strict balanced budget requirements. That's why liberals oppose a federal balanced budget amendment, that's why liberals didn't like the balanced budget fetishism of Al Gore's 2000 campaign, and that's also why liberals' aspirations for state action on pressing issues should also be tempered by realism about the need for a large federal role in anything that's seriously expensive.
The family was talking yesterday about why the lobster rolls are better at the Fishnet in Blue Hill than at the Bagaduce Lunch in Brooksville. People were bringing up micro-causal factors -- lobster to bread ratio, quantity of mayo, etc. I, however, equipped with having recently read Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist had a macro-level explanation at hand. The Bagaduce Lunch as a very scenic location directly adjacent to an interesting reversing waterfall. Fishnet, by contrast, needs to make due with an uninteresting location in the non-picturesque part of Blue Hill.
Under the circumstances, nobody would go to Fishnet unless the food was reasonably compelling. Thus, given that the Fishnet has been in business for years, one should assume that its food is superior to that offered at superficially comparable, but better located, fried seafood outlets. At any rate, this insight mostly seemed to bore my family, but I think this sort of thing is interesting.
The whole business of calling people chickenhawks has fallen into disrepute but I, for one, enjoy it greatly. What's more, it's precisely things like this Hitchens passage that Julian and Ross are discussing that leads to anti-chickenhawk dogmatism. Check it out, but this time with my emphasis added:
In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
Now say it with me: which war, exactly, was Hitchens waging? He's not waging a war at all, he's sitting at a desk writing magazine articles and Slate columns and drinking just like the rest of us. He isn't waging war, he's advocating that other people wage war. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but he's saying that part of the reason he's advocating that other people wage war is that he enjoys imagining himself as a warrior.
When my brother and I were teenagers, my dad used to have a joke about how we should be made to hold up "irony" signs when we said something around the dinner table that we didn't intend to take seriously. Maybe I should start using one for Noah Pollack's benefit. He's apparently an admirer of the work of Martin Kramer, who holds the view that the mainstream of the field of Middle East Studies does bad work. Or, as Pollack puts it, that "they've become enamored of post-colonial academic fads." Because Kramer thinks their work is bad, he takes the view that the views of mainstream scholars in the field should be marginalized in our discourse and our policy process.
I disagree, and glossed this ironically as the view that "the problem with U.S. Middle East policy is that it's unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East."Pollack then decides to prove that if you take that literally, it's not literally true.
At any rate, if you were sitting around in December 2001 looking at the dispute between the Middle East Studies mainstream and the Kramer-style revisionist camp, you might have a hard time making up your mind. The mainstream is the mainstream, and there's a lot to be said for following the academic consensus. The consensus, however, could be wrong. Maybe academic fashion really has just gone astray. Fortunately, though, we've actually had the experiencing of living now for the past five or six years in a country that's made drastic policy decisions in the Middle East that have been heavily influenced by interpretations favored by people and institutions -- Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, etc. -- firmly in the revisionist camp. It's all turned out to be a huge disaster.
By contrast, while mainstream Middle East Studies folks (Juan Cole and Marc Lynch probably the ones best-known to the blogosphere) haven't been right about everything, their commentary over these years has held up quite well. It looks like maybe the mainstream views are mainstream because they're correct! It's also telling that in many respects what Middle East Studies scholars have been telling us about the Bush administration's policies is broadly similar to what international relations scholars have been telling us. But as I say, at this point the proof is in the pudding, and the revisionist pudding is terrible.
Props for this. I recall having read somewhere, though, that most African-American Muslims these days actually aren't NOI and don't necessarily like it when people assume they are.
Here's some classic Barack Obama hoops action from his high school days:
Over here, my Atlantic colleague Marshall Poe writes about his recollection of playing pick-up ball with Obama at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center ("the Mac" to friends) back in 1988-89.
I'm trying to think of what to say about Foreign Affairs Managing Editor Gideon Rose's attack on bloggers but I think this makes for a good entry point:
The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don't deserve to be listened to in the future. (Take a look at pretty much any old Jim Hoagland column and you'll see what I mean.) Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies — freedom-hating mediocrities at the CIA, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers' attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world.
Rose sees an irony -- there's a certain structural similarity between the claims neocons made against one group of experts (professional diplomats and intelligence analysts) and the claims liberal bloggers are making against another group of experts (center-left think tankers). I see a different irony. When neocons were busy deriding the expertise of professional diplomats and intelligence analysts, where oh where were our precious think tankers?
Was Brookings holding panels on what to do about the fact that a group of dangerous radicals had taken control of the policy apparatus and was, against the advice of diplomatic and intelligence professionals, taking the country into a wildly misguided invasion of Iraq? No. Many relevant Brookings experts were saying nothing, and others were joining with the neocons to push the country, against the advice of diplomatic and intelligence professionals, taking the country into a wildly misguided invasion of Iraq.
And there's the rub. Rose would, I think, like to make this a conversation about expertise and professionalism. But I'm not, and I don't think anyone in the blogosphere is, against expertise and professionalism. The question is whether some of our country's self-proclaimed experts -- and media proclaimed experts -- really deserve to be considered experts. What, for example, is the nature of Michael O'Hanlon's expertise on the broad range of subjects (his official bio lists him as an expert on "Arms treaties; Asian security issues; Homeland security; Iraq policy; Military technology; Missile defense; North Korea policy; Peacekeeping operations; Taiwan policy, military analysis; U.S. defense strategy and budget") upon which he comments? Obviously, it would be foolish to just let me speak ex cathedra as an "expert" on the dizzying array of subjects on which I comment, but it seems equally foolish to let O'Hanlon do so, especially since his judgment seems so poor. I made a stab at a systemic difference between think tank people and professionals in the public sector, but Rose raises some convincing points to the effect that this dichotomy isn't as sharp as I wanted it to be. Still, we can certainly talk about specific individuals -- particularly individuals who seem to be unusually prominent or influential -- and whether or not they really deserve to be held in high esteem.
What's needed isn't less expertise, but better expertise and above all more honest expertise. To take an example, Rose accuses me of repeating "a silly canard about Foreign Affairs never having published anything opposing the Iraq war, which conveniently ignores this." When I read that, I got worried. When I wrote that, I was just repeating something I'd read in the book, and maybe the authors were wrong. I clicked the link expecting to find out that I'd made an embarrassing error and I was going to need to post a correction. The full article is for subscribers only, so I actually can't read it, but here's Foreign Affairs' summary:
President Bush's case for war on Iraq overlooks a very real danger: if pushed to the wall, Saddam Hussein may resort to using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. Such a strike may not be likely, or may not succeed, but attacking Saddam is the best way to guarantee that it will happen. And Washington has done far too little to prepare for it.
That was in the January/February 2003 issue of the magazine. If that's Rose's best stab at a refutation of the notion that Foreign Affairs didn't provide a venue for opponents of the war to make their correct arguments about the Iraq debate, then I'm not sure I have anything to apologize for. At any rate, I'm actually quite encouraged by the fact that we now have members of the Dread Establishment engaging with their critics (O'Hanlon's interview with Glenn Greenwald, etc.) since that in and of itself changes the pattern of consistent high-handed dismissals of everyone to their left. People should recall that the "Very Serious People" business is, at root, a joke about the habit of using the "serious/unserious" concept to unfairly marginalize people.
If we're all talking now, then perhaps those days are behind us.
The primary leapfrogging sweepstakes seems to have really taken off now that Michigan's moving to January 15. This means that if New Hampshire and Iowa try to maintain the usual spacing, Iowa's going to wind up in 2007. One can only hope this means the Iowa/New Hampshire-ification of American politics has reached some kind of a breaking point and we won't stick with this farcical nominating process in 2012.
Just as further proof that I'm not hostile to expertise, let me quote from Assistant Professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce Robert Farley's review of Negotiating Change:
Negotiating Change, by Jeremy Jones, is about democratization and political change in the Middle East. Jones, a Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, is extremely, if often implicitly, critical of US policy in the Middle East and in particular the process through which policy is made. In short, I think Jones would say, American policymaking has made cultural illiteracy a virtue, with disastrous effects.
Jones point is that context is important. Readings of Middle Eastern politics that don't understand the local meaning of party politics and civil society inevitably fail to capture a reliable picture of what's going on. For example, Jones argues that the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt doesn't necessarily indicate that the movement is politically popular, or that it has achieved success on its own merits. Rather, the repressive Egyptian state has limited the capacity of civil society to develop. The state, however, is reluctant to invade the mosque, meaning that Islamic groups have a freedom to organize and assemble that other societal groups lack. The result of political oppression, then, is the production of a movement that may be more dangerous to the survival of the Egyptian state than the forces that the state is trying to repress. Although Jones recognizes that their may be cross-national similarities, he doesn't apply the same lens to every country; again, context matters, and superficially similar events may have entirely different political meanings in different countries. [...]
Given his approach, Negotiating Change is necessarily fragmented and episodic. The main theme that comes through, though is that the statements of US policymakers on democracy in the Middle East are almost universally myopic and ill-informed. Without understanding Middle Eastern societies, it's impossible to craft a policy likely to promote, rather than foreclose, democratization. I would add that this insight is particularly unfortunate for a foreign policy group that purports to believe that a) democratization should be the primary goal of US Middle Eastern policy, and b) virtually all experts on the Middle East are ideological poison. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a world in which the combination of those two traits could lead to any success at all.
Food for thought. Over the years, I've come to believe that the central takeaway lesson of this sort of critique is, on some level, that we simply have to make our policies more robust against the possibility that we don't understand what's happening. In other words, if your pet scheme for American policy toward the Middle East crucially depends on your particular interpretation of the Muslim Brotherhood's rise and significant, then it looks very, very risky to bet the farm on that interpretation. To actually understand what's happening in these different countries is hard and requires a great deal of specific knowledge. We shouldn't overestimate the capacity of the government to obtain that knowledge, disseminate it to the right people, and then effectively micromanage outcomes halfway around the world based on up-to-date fine-grained understandings of Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, etc.
Obviously, one does one's best with these difficulties, but the main goal should be to do the best one can to outline policies that work okay one way or the other. We should want political actors in the Arab world to believe that killing Americans is not necessary to achieving their domestic political goals (whatever those goals may be) and try to promote a general climate of peace and prosperity since those would be good things even if they didn't promote democratization. The alternative path of trying to figure out the best possible way to effectively determine political outcomes on the other side of the world seems doomed to failure.
Barack Obama's campaign is prepared to announce that he won't be participating in any more debates or "candidates' forums" except for the handful with Democratic National Committee sponsorship. I hope (but doubt) that others follow in his lead, since I feel a vague compulsion to watch these things and form opinions about what transpired, but they're excruciatingly boring to watch after you've seen a few of them.
The War on Drugs, which has contributed more to our mass-incarceration orgy than anything else, strikes me as more than just Jim Crow for the 21st century. After all, as Lazare notes, in 1989 even Jesse Jackson was talking about applying "antiterrorist policies" on drug users and traffickers. Charlie Rangel was attacking Reagan for being soft on the drug menace.
Indeed, when I read Randall Kennedy's Race, Crime, and the Law a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that Rangel was one of the movers behind creating the powder-crack sentencing gap. Not that he specifically wanted to create a gap, as such, but in the 1980s he was head of a Select Committee on narcotics and favored super-harsh sentences for crack as a way to try to protect inner city neighborhoods.
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Heads in the Sand
