« August 12, 2007 - August 18, 2007 | Main | August 26, 2007 - September 1, 2007 » August 19, 2007 - August 25, 2007 ArchivesAugust 19, 2007So EarlyOh my God it's 9AM and already there's a Democratic debate on TV and I've missed a lot of it. I continue to be shocked by Joe Biden's behavior in this campaign -- like most people, I assumed he was running for Secretary of State, which seemed to imply he should be nice to the people who have a chance of winning. Instead he's way meaner than everyone else. Easy AnswersJosh Patashnik at TNR hits back on my remarks about targeted programs for the poor: Instead of having targeted programs whose funding comes under attack in lean times, you'd just have an incredibly difficult time getting any programs passed in the first place (which is, presumably, why Kaine is opting for the means-tested version). Does he really think Kaine should pass up the chance to get more poor Virginia kids into preschool now in the hope that a universal program can be implemented at some future date, or that the federal government will suddenly step in? Do I "really" think Kaine should avoid passing the best program he can pass? No. Which is why I don't think I ever said that. A governor's got to do the best he can do. What I am saying is that we should probably have limited expectations about what even the best state-level politicians can achieve on this issue without, at a minimum, a substantial infusion of federal funds. Small Differences?John Edwards is saying in the debate that the differences between the Democrats on Iraq are small. That's certainly something I'd like to believe, since the people who have positions on Iraq I agree with -- Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich -- aren't people I particularly want to see as president and aren't people with a good chance of winning. But I don't really think Edwards is right. It's true that the Democrats all, in some sense, want to end the war in Iraq, but these plans to leave tens of thousands of residual forces won't in fact end the war. Richardson and Kucinich seem to clearly be saying they'll end the war. Clinton and Biden are clearly saying the war will continue. I think Edwards is essentially in agreement with Clinton, but that's not totally clear to me. Obama, meanwhile, seems to consistently succeed in ducking this debate in favor of returning to his other foreign policy points. "We Must Be Doing Something Right!"Commenter Roger picks up on something I'd noticed but not commented on: "Thus, [Gideon] Rose thinks it is a knock me down proof of the wrongness of the criticisms of the clerisy leveled by Greenwald, et al., that ... criticisms have also been leveled by ... the neo-cons! Both sides have criticized the foreign policy establishment!" Indeed. This argument pops up in a surprising variety of places, and it truly seems like the last resort of the damned. In the real world, after all, anyone who gets criticized at all ends up getting criticized "by both sides." Just because you're a liberal blogger like me doesn't mean there aren't other bloggers out there who are further to the left and willing to criticize me. And yet, not everyone who's not as far right as one might be but also not as far left as one might be can simultaneously all be correct. Meanwhile, this line of thought prejudices analysis of future issues. If the criteria of sober-minded sensibility is that both sides' partisans think you're wrong, then you've preemptively excluded from consideration the possibility that one side might ever be correct. So no matter how true it may be that the current conflict with Iran has been cooked up by some mix of Bush administration blundering and Bush administration malignancy, one can't simply say that because then liberals won't complain. So you need to exhort liberals to take the threat more "seriously," get yelled at, and then go home feelings very sensible. Dreaming of an iLobster
Last Monday night, I took the train up to NYC planning to drive with my dad and brother up to Maine the following day. At the house, though, I discovered a problem -- my MacBook's power cord wasn't working. Fortunately, this crazy rumor I'd heard about a 24 hour Apple Store in Manhattan proved true. I was shocked to discover that not only did the store exist, but it was pretty packed with shoppers at 10:30 PM on a Monday. Conversely, we're up in Maine right now experiencing some car trouble and it proved completely impossible to find a garage in the area that's open on Saturdays even in a pretty touristy part of the state at the very height of tourist season. Just think of the ways Steve Jobs could revolutionize the local economy -- "it'll be like a normal car repair place, except better-designed, open on weekends, and triple prices!" Odierno Versus O'PollahanBrookings' dynamic duo says the surge should be continued "at least into 2008," while Greg Djerejian discovers Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno in Baghdad saying "we all know" the surge forces will start leaving "in the beginning of 2008." Better Get a New JobMichael Skube stands up for good old-fashioned reporting: And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization. I'm fairly certain that Andrew and I both have full time jobs as employees of the Atlantic Media Company. I even have a 401(k). Josh is a small businessman and entrepreneur, I've seen the office in New York where he and his employees and their interns all work. This kind of sloppy error aside, I'm actually more upset by this: In our time, the Washington Post's reporting, in late 2005, of the CIA's secret overseas prisons and its painstaking reports this year on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center -- both of which won Pulitzer Prizes -- were not exercises in armchair commentary. The disgrace at Walter Reed, true enough, was first mentioned in a blog, but the full scope of that story could not have been undertaken by a blogger or, for that matter, an Op-Ed columnist, whose interest is in expressing an opinion quickly and pungently. Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It's not something one does as a hobby. Now, look. I'd be fascinated to see if Skube has an example of progressive bloggers linking to the Post's reporting on either of these subjects and deriding the work in question as hackwork by obsolete dinosaurs. What I recall is that these stories were widely linked to, praised, promoted, circulated, and disseminated. Obviously, Dana Priest's reporting on the "black sites" would have been a big deal no matter what, but what progressive bloggers did was amplify and disseminate that story to a wider audience than The Washington Post ever could have reached. Some bloggers, meanwhile, are also lawyers who were able to (yes, from their armchair) provide some expert commentary and analysis on the issues raised by the facts the Post brought to light. And other bloggers were able to combine links or references to the reporting with links to the analysis done by specialist people. As Kevin Drum says there was no crowding out here where what Marty Lederman or Duncan Black or Andrew or I were doing somehow made it more difficult for newspapers to do investigative reporting. If anything, the reverse is true. The widespread availability of a vast sea of armchair analysis and commentary on the internet will, over time, force large, professionalized news organizations to focus on their core, hard-to-duplicate competencies -- and spend less time on the sort of fact-averse punditry Skube's doing right here. Better QuestionsAnn Friedman recommends a "great idea" from Eleanor Clift, "Stop asking the Republican candidates where they stand on abortion, and start asking specifically about birth control access." It is a good idea. Clift's specific questions: Instead of hammering away at the candidates about abortion, Keenan suggests a set of questions far more revealing: do you think it’s OK for a pharmacy to refuse to fill a woman’s prescription for birth-control pills based on the personal views of the pharmacist? Should hospital emergency rooms be allowed to withhold information from a rape victim about the morning-after pill, which can prevent a pregnancy if it’s taken soon enough after the assault? Do you support age-appropriate sex education (with “age-appropriate” the key phrase as to when it’s time to shelve the stork)? I'm also always curious as to where the opponents of stem cell research stand on issues related to in-vitro fertilization. Today's Must-Read Op-EdOf course, Michael O'Hanlon spent a week in Iraq and says these guys are wrong: Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.) Obviously, the other side of this debate is going to be able to produce its own group of soldiers to back them up, but the basic claim these guys are making is more logical than factual: "Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population." As they say, it's simply implausible on its face to think that better tactics and an increase in the level of troops from way, way, way fewer than history deems necessary for this sort of thing to way, way fewer than history deems necessary for this sort of thing could reverse the fact that the US troop presence lost the support of the population years before the surge began. Juxtaposition of the DayI haven't been able to actually read this week's New York Times Magazine cover story. Right there in big test it says: "We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile separation." Meanwhile, Isaac Chotiner observes: In an otherwise uneventful forum this morning on ABC, the Democratic presidential candidates were asked whether prayer could have prevented the Minnesota bridge collapse. John Edwards actually had a very good answer to this question (observing that he prayed before his son died and prayed before his wife got cancer so, no, he doesn't think praying hard enough stops bad things from happening; rather, he prays for guidance in how to deal with the things that arise in life), but it still makes it pretty hard to credit that "we" thought the religification of politics was a thing of the past. It all depends on whether or not "we" were paying attention. The Skube Plot ThickensJosh Marshall discovers that Michael Skube doesn't read his blog and just tossed his name in their because an editor suggested he needed more examples and, apparently, nobody minded too much whether or not the examples were accurate. I believe the relevant joke has to do with a blogger ethics panel. . . . August 20, 2007Here It IsI said the other day that I hoped somebody would make the case on the merits for the military aid package to the Gulf Arabs and Israel, and now Tony Cordesman's gone and done it. Insofar as one reads him as responding to objections to the deal from the holier-than-the-pope pro-Israel side I think he's fairly convincing: "We also must not discriminate between Israel and Arab allies, which would undercut our national interest and maybe actually weaken Israeli security by increasing Arab hostility to both Israel and the United States." His case for giving the aid to Israel seems substantially weaker to me, he primarily focuses on mounting a convincing argument that this is less of a departure from the status quo than it seems at first glance, but even if you buy that, the status quo seems out of whack. I Wanna Be Your Nguyen Khanh
What was Iyad Allawi's Post op-ed yesterday trying to say? It's like it's written in a slightly strange foreign language. Andrew Sullivan says he's asking Bush to help him engineer a coup, but that's not the sort of message I would try to communicate on an op-ed page. He does, however, clearly call for "change at the top of the Iraqi government and also try to pitch whatever it is he's pitching to moderate Democrats as well, promising "the withdrawal of the majority of U.S. forces over the next two years, and that, before then, gradually and substantially reduces the U.S. combat role." I hope this kind of mucking around is too crazy for anyone to seriously consider. That said, a lot of people's approach to Iraq is just decide in advance that giving up isn't an option, so we need to try literally anything -- possibly including this -- before we admit we need to get out. Study TimeBenjamin Wittes plays his appointed role as "liberal who agrees with conservatives about all the topics he writes about" (it seems shocking that Jeffrey Rosen wasn't available) and defends the new wiretapping law: To know whether the new law represents a strong long-term policy response to the technological changes now challenging FISA, I would have to know a lot more about the NSA's surveillance technologies both in the 1970s and now than is public. I would want to know also how the NSA interprets phrases like "reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States" and how it means to handle situations in which such people turn out, notwithstanding the agency's reasonable belief, to be running around Cleveland. I may not be a Fellow and Research Director in Public Law at The Brookings Institution or a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, but here's a wild guess as to how the NSA is going to interpret the phrase "reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States" -- they'll interpret it so as to give themselves as broad a mandate as possible. Other ambiguous phrases, likewise, will be interpreted so as to give themselves as broad a mandate as possible. What's going to happen when they mess up: as little as possible. This is why, in the real world, we look not at administrative guidelines but rather at enforcement mechanisms. Rules and interpretations of this sort aren't self-enforcing (you can look it up in Wittgenstein) which is why the significant part was way up higher in the piece: "Hang on," I hear you cry. "Wasn't the 1978 FISA a restraint on government surveillance power? Didn't it put a court between the spooks and their targets? And doesn't this law remove that court in vast numbers of cases?" Yes to all. And there's the rub. Absent meaningful checks and balances -- or even the prospect of embarrassing public disclosure -- the rule can say anything you like. It could be "surveillance is allowed only for really good and worthy purposes, and never for bad and abusive ones" and it wouldn't make any difference. Getting NonpartisanIf I may revise and extend my remarks on Benjamin Wittes slightly, I'd like to clarify that my view isn't quite that "we have enough experience with this administration that it's not wholly mysterious how unclear provisions might be interpreted." This could be construed as a manifestation of the dread Bush Derangement Syndrome, but realistically the point is completely independent of the specific characteristics of this administration. Laws like the semi-repealed FISA came into place because the Watergate investigation eventually uncovered a whole series of Nixon administration abuses of power that were, in important ways, continuous with abuses under the Johnson administration and in some ways going all the way back to FDR. Nixon was worse than the others, but what he did wasn't totally out of left field. If we were merely talking about setting up the potential for Bush to do abusive things in some ways that wouldn't be so bad since, after all, he won't be president for much longer. But the next administration, of either party, isn't going to be immune from the laws of human nature -- given the opportunity, they'll take about as much power as they think they can get away with taking. Famous Last Words"Just because we're not finding them doesn't mean they're not there," says Major Alayne Conway of the dread Iranian infiltrators. By the same token, of course, maybe the insurgency is being fueled by Martians or Venezuelan space terrorists -- after all, just because we're not finding them doesn't mean they're not there. This is all from Chris Collins' report for McClatchy which makes the evidence sound pretty thin: Conway said that U.S.-led forces have not caught any of the Iranians, but she said military intelligence and recently discovered caches of weapons with Iranian markings on them indicate that the Iranians are there. So there you have it. Given the vagaries of the small arms market and the fact that Iran is conveniently located next to Iraq, it's hard to say what this is supposed to mean. The core point, however, remains that even if the full bill of particulars against Iran is true and they're the primary source for EFPs and Mahdi Army weapons more generally (this last is plausible -- their guns come from somewhere) it's not at all clear why you'd think escalating the conflict with Iran would be the preferred solution. The US has already thrown way, way, way more of our assets into Iraq than has Iran -- any escalation we undertake can be responded to and not necessarily to our advantage. Rationally, the Iranian government can no more be indifferent to events in Iraq than we could be to a massive Iranian invasion force in the middle of a civil war in Mexico. We can either escalate to full-scale war with Iran, or we can reach some kind of agreement that takes care of both sides' core interests. The New Brian BeutlerBrian Beutler has a new URL -- BrianBeutler.com with a brand new design from the creative team behind the old MatthewYglesias.com website. Brian's a friend, an ideological fellow-traveler, and a damn fine blogger, so I highly suggest that you check out his site or subscribe to the RSS feed. National Review Signs Up for WarHow else to read these passages from their new editorial? To designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, then, is to acknowledge reality. Yet there is something decidedly unrealistic in the idea that the Revolutionary Guard can be separated from the Iranian government as a whole. [...] For a variety of reasons — economic interest, anti-Americanism, and reflexive pacifism chief among them — it would prefer to avoid any bad blood with the Islamic Republic. Most of the U.S. State Department feels likewise. But the simple truth is that, unless Iran’s regime gives up both its terrorist ideology and its weapons, we will never be safe. The president has taken an important — albeit partial and overdue — step toward facing that unpleasant reality. I doubt Iran's regime is going to just abandon it's ideology if George Bush asks them too, so I guess this counts as a call for us to invade Iran, overthrow its regime, and install in its place one that's both more ideological acceptable and also prone to abandon the nuclear program that the Shah started and the Ayatollahs have continued. Strangely, though, the editorial doesn't actually say any of those things, continuing the weird pattern of dissembling and doublespeak that's characterized the Iran debate for years now. But if we can't be safe without regime change, then surely we should invade and change the regime, right? The Death FactorJohn Judis on the application of some psychological research to trends in American politics: There is, however, one group of scholars--members of the relatively new field of political psychology--who are trying to explain voter preferences that can't be easily quantified. The best general introduction to this field is Drew Westen's recent book, The Political Brain, but the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called "terror management theory." Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores. This seems in line with the American Environics data that Garance wrote about a while back which showed a large and rather sudden upsurge in patriarchal sentiments following 9/11. At any rate, I think there's good reason to be a bit skeptical about the current faddish enthusiasm for Drew Westen (remember George Lakoff?), but it certainly is true that thinking about politics does seem unduly reliant on a particular mode of public opinion polling and could benefit from deeper engagement with contemporary psychological research. Social Science Result of the DayRobert J. Oxoby of the University of Calgary reports in Our results suggest that having participants listen to songs by AC/DC in which Brian Johnson served as vocalist results in participants realizing more efficient outcomes. Thus, in terms of a singer’s ability to implement efficient behavioral outcomes among listeners, our results suggest that Brian Johnson was a better vocalist than Bon Scott. I think the trend toward economists studying silly topics may have gone too far. Don't we still need people to look into minor questions like how do changes in income tax rates effect GDP growth? This comes via Tyler Cowen, whose blog I now fear may be helping to encourage a more-than-optimal level of silly research. When Is a Bank Not a BankPaul Krugman helps me understand something that had been puzzling me -- how can subprime lending problems be causing such widespread financial issues? He says we're seeing a kind of bank panic. Ever since the Depression, we've gotten used to their not being bank panics thanks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But "consider the case of KKR Financial Holdings, an affiliate of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a powerhouse Wall Street operator." KKR Financial raises money by issuing asset-backed commercial paper — a claim that’s sort of like a short-term C.D., used by large investors to temporarily park funds — and invests most of this money in longer-term assets. So the company is acting as a kind of bank, one that offers a higher interest rate than ordinary banks pay their clients. Since KKR and similar firms aren't technically "banks" the systems in place to prevent bank panics don't apply to them. But they function like banks. And the mortgage meltdown has made people skittish generally, creating panics in areas of the economy that aren't necessarily closely related to the subprime mortgage market. The good news, it seems to me, is that when the dust clears it should be relatively easy to fix this problem. The programs aimed at preventing panics at traditional banks are, after all, highly successful. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it would be hard to devise a way to extend the system. In the interim, though, who knows. Portman in My SightsI got my first-ever fifth reunion-related email from folks on my class committee. "It has been almost five years since our graduation from fair Harvard," it says "No doubt we have all been keeping busy determining and pursuing our life's work." My main pursuit has been a remorseless quest to become the most famous member of the class of 2003, a mission in which I've been stymied at every turn by Miss Natalie Portman. Now, it seemed to me that she'd kind of fallen off the peak of her fame, but IMDB lists three feature credits for 2007 forthcoming, so I guess I'm doomed. Nobody Summons MegatronThe Atlantic blog team gets a new member today, Megan McArdle, formerly of The Economist and the Jane Galt blog. With her on board, Atlantic Voices now encompasses two different genders and graduates of two different Ivy League schools. Today she offers the view that the current problems in the market won't be as bad as the Great Depression, which we should all find very reassuring. It's The Structure, StupidJerome Armstrong: "What's more, though the notion of bipartisanship as exemplified by folks like Sam Nunn and Unity08 may sound laudable, as I've written at length before the bipartisanship of the 1970s and 1980s was a byproduct of the changing partisan leanings of the electorate coupled with decades-long Democratic dominance on the congressional level, two conditions we do not see today." I'm not sure I agree with that in all the details, but it really is remarkable that for all the bellyaching about the decline of bipartisan behavior in DC there's very little attention paid to the fact that there are actual reasons this has happened beyond Newt Gingrich being a meany and bloggers being too shrill. The Jim Crow South gave rise to an odd structure of American political institutions whereby both of the parties contained substantial ideological diversity. This had the benefit of setting the stage for a wide array of cross-cutting alliances. It came, however, at the cost of consigning a substantial portion of the population to life under a brutal system of apartheid ruthlessly upheld through systematic violence. After that system collapsed, there was a two decade or so period during which the voters and parties were re-aligning themselves during which we had cross-cutting alliances but no apartheid. And now the aligning process is done, so we have two parties where essentially all Democrats are to the left of essentially all Republicans and so you have relatively few genuinely bipartisan coalitions. The Cougar Threat
Color me unimpressed by Mark Penn's "microtrends" based on Marc Ambinder's writeup. Penn mostly seems to be playing his favorite sport of defining groups arbitrarily and then finding that if you slice up the population in random ways, you can get interesting-but-meaningless results. That said, this is funny: Within the past ten years, the number of women who sought younger male boyfriends has quintupled. These are the "cougars," Penn writes. I'm not sure I understand why they're cougars? Because it's an alternative to being a cat lady? Relatedly: There are about 109 million straight women in America now compared to 98 million straight men; the gender ratio in the African American community is 56 to 44, female to male. The surplus of single women "are left out of the institution of marriage." But how much of this is simply accounted for by the fact that men live longer than women [UPDATE: I mean, of course, that women live longer than men]? I'm not sure it makes sense to think of widows as "left out" of the institution of marriage. Coup Who?Nibras Kazimi from the Hudson Institute is hearing coup rumors in Washington: So the folks in Stephen Hadley’s NSC outfit are allegedly putting out the word that Meghan “Wanna-Be Ms. Bell” O’Sullivan, the White House’s political envoy to Baghdad, has lined up the necessary support to unseat current Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, who would ostensibly be replaced by the former PM Ayad Allawi. He points out, however, that "no one can pull-off a military coup in Iraq." After all, Iraq notably lacks in security services that can effectively control the country. As Brian Ulrich says "Nibras Kazimi made an important point about this Allawi coup business that I'm just now seeing: Seriously, how is this coup supposed to work? Is the United States supposed to do it openly? The Mahdi Army? Badr Brigades? The Kurdish peshmerga? What kind of reaction is this likely to get from the other factions? I suspect it won't lead to national reconciliation. Kazimi suspects that this is a way of trying to spook Nouri al-Maliki and his allies into compromising with the Sunni Arabs. SmallMike Lux responds on the primaries issue, says my anti-Iowa, anti-New Hampshire views have some merit, but says he "still believe[s] passionately in small state starting this thing" because that forces closer interactions with the candidates. I see the merits in that, though I'm significantly less passionate about it than I am about the idea that it's really deleterious to give this sort of outsized role to two lily-white states with no major urban centers. One could, however, have it both ways. Iowa has 7 electoral votes just like Oregon or Connecticut and it's actually bigger than Rhode Island, Nevada, or New Mexico. Never AgainAccording to Mike Crowley, the Anti-Defamation League has decided to make common cause with Turkish genocide deniers out of recognition for Turkey's friendly relationship with Israel. I completely understand that Israel foreign policy needs to be what Israeli foreign policy needs to be, but I completely fail to understand why major American Jewish organizations need to subvert their own commitments to come closer in line with the dictates of Israeli foreign policy. August 21, 2007How Big Is Hurricane DeanChris Mooney says it's huge and part of a trend: Dean was officially the most powerful hurricane that we’ve seen globally so far in 2007, and was by far the strongest at landfall. It was also the first Category 5 Atlantic hurricane seen in the since the record-setting Hurricane Wilma of October 2005. In fact, Dean set some records of its own. Its pressure was the ninth lowest ever measured in the Atlantic, and the third lowest at landfall. Indeed, there hasn’t been a full Category 5 landfall in our part of the world since 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. Dean was in all respects a terrifying storm, and we can only hope that the damage will somehow be less than expected as it tears across the peninsula and then, after crossing the Bay of Campeche, moves on to a presumed second Mexican landfall. [...] Is global warming to blame? You'll need to read Chris' book Storm World to get a sense for the science in detail, but there's a rough consensus that a warming planet should lead to more intense storms, albeit a lot of disagreement as to how strong that effect is. Now That's a Headline"Efforts to crack down on lead paint thwarted by China, Bush Administration" by Kevin G. Hall of, naturally, McClatchey Newspapers. Hall explains that "The Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts." First, "It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products" and second, "it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach." Now that this is in the news, of course, the administration is ordering the government to look into ways to keep kids safe from lead toys, "but as recently as last December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health and safety studies for companies that use lead in children’s products." There's more in the article, so read the whole thing. Tuesday Religious Exemption BloggingWhen I was an undergraduate, religion-based exemptions from various kinds of rules was a hot topic in political philosophy and a lot of the examples revolved around religiously-mandated headgear. Thus I was psyched to see Shadi Hamid post this letter from the Sikh Coalition: HypotheticalsBrian Beutler's upset that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards wouldn't answer hypothetical questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Pakistan: Seriously, though! How much value do Clinton and Edwards really place on keeping alive the (psychotic) possibility that either of them will resort to using nuclear weapons as an anti-terror tactic? If it's important to maintain stability in Pakistan by not instilling its people with the fear of an atomic strike, then the thing to do is say there won't be an atomic strike; it is not to imply that the nuclear option is a remote possibility by refusing to make pronouncements about hypothetical questions with obvious answers. In Clinton's case, though, her refusal to answer the question isn't about the question. It's about a line of attack she's opened on Obama to the effect of his commensensical statement that he won't drop nukes on al-Qaeda training camps demonstrates a lack of experience. It's too much common sense, you might say, and not enough training in high-level executive branch doublespeak. I think that's a pretty silly line of attack, but they're sticking with it. Last Word on Gideon RoseI don't really know what to say about Gideon Rose's attempt to respond to his blogospheric critics. Instead, let me observe this. During a week long guest-blogging stint for The Economist Rose seems to have written five blog posts. Two of them -- forty percent of the total -- were dedicated to how left-wing critics of the foreign policy establishment go too far and, in fact, are just as bad as those dastardly neocons. Zero percent of his posts concerned the current neoconservative effort to gin up a war with Iran. National Review's editorial proclaiming that we "will never be safe" until we change the ideology of the government in power in Iraq? Not mentioned. Anything in The Weekly Standard or Charles Krauthammer column or Bill Kristol's many TV appearances worth criticizing? No. Okay, so maybe liberal bloggers are both more pernicious and more influential than every single conservative opinion journalist in the country. Maybe rebutting Duncan Black is really more important than tackling the right-wing noise machine. But how about Rudy Giuliani? His senior foreign policy advisor Norm Podhoretz published a long article making "the case for bombing Iran" earlier this year. Podhoretz says he thinks Giuliani shares his views on this matter. Giuliani himself penned a foreign policy manifesto for Foreign Affairs (where Rose himself works so surely he's read it) in which he came out of the closet as a raving lunatic whose idea of peace is to plunge the country into an endless series of wars. Rose didn't see fit to mention that, either. This is why even someone like me who thinks Glenn Greenwald's views are a bit too far to the left can heartily share his concerns about the nature of the foreign policy establishment. Given that Rose deploys "anti-war bloggers are like neocons" as an insult, I suppose he doesn't admire the neoconservative worldview. And yet he can't seem to muster the energy to actually oppose it, even at the very time it's being espoused more loudly than ever by a leading presidential candidate, and the Bush administration itself is once again taking steps to lay a legal predicate for war with Iran. Something is wrong here. Der Langrisser
If you're anything like me (an admittedly remote possibility) then you've probably been Good luck! The Money TrainOne interesting thing from the Tony Cordesman op-ed I linked to yesterday was this disclosure statement: Disclosure: the nonprofit organization I work for receives financing from many sources, including the United States government, Saudi Arabia and Israel. No one from any of those sources has asked me to write this article. I often think the people who make these kind of conflict-of-interest disclosures often protest too much. It would be pretty ridiculous to think that Ehud Olmert or Crown Prince Whomever called Cordesman up on the phone and asked him to defend the Saudi/Israel arms package. The significance of looking into who funds foreign policy research in the United States is simply that funders in this field -- as in any other field -- are going to want their funds to flow toward people with congenial ideas. People with perspectives that aren't congenial to anyone who invests money in foreign policy think tanks, meanwhile, aren't going to be able to get think tank jobs. The Prestigious MRS DegreeJessica Valenti has the story of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's plans to start offering a degree in homemaking. It seems that the "biblical model for the home and family" will be on the agenda. Credit and Class WarI'm having some trouble getting my head around many different aspects of the big financial crisis. In particular, the whole sub-prime mortgage business seems to be screwing over a lot of folks of modest means. But on the other hand, it's hard to see how making credit unavailable to folks of modest means would really be a good thing for them in general. A lot of the liberal commentary on this seems to basically take the form of saying, well, these poor folks just shouldn't be able to get loans. Max Sawicky (whose "left" credentials are more impeccable than mine) laid out the dilemma the other day: Easier credit benefits the working class, since it faces borrowing constraints. Available credit can make possible otherwise infeasible home purchases, higher education, and business start-ups. Inevitably in this context you will see predation, but defining predation is not so easy. An obvious case would be lenders providing loans with inadequate disclosure of terms. Even with full disclosure, however, the borrower could make unwise financial decisions. In fact, we know that many always have and always will. Right. The trick is that given a collapse of this magnitude, it's all but inevitable that the public sector will do some bailing out. What one wants is, at the margin, for the largest possible portion of the bailing to go to people with the most objective need rather than the most political clout. Right of GreenwaldI think it's interesting that when I wrote a long post criticizing Gideon Rose that mentioned as an aside that I think "Glenn Greenwald's views are a bit too far to the left" mostly seemed to prompt comments calling into question my motives for making this observation. Well, I made it because I think Glenn's views are a bit too far to the left! It's a little hard to say, because he overwhelmingly does critique, but what I had in mind in particular was this: But the notion that the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security is not really extraordinary. Quite the contrary, that is how virtually every country in the world conducts itself, and it is a founding principle of our country. Starting wars against countries that have not attacked you, and especially against those who cannot attack you, is abnormal. Re-reading, Glenn doesn't explicitly endorse the view that all wars fought for reasons other than strict self-defense are illegitimate, but that's what I took him to be saying, it's something he very well may believe, and it's not something I believe. To me, in addition to fighting wars in self-defense it's also quite appropriate for us to engage in acts of collective self-defense in order to help other countries repel acts of aggression. The Korean War and the first Gulf War would be the key examples here. I also think there are circumstances in which it's a good idea to deploy military forces with UN authorization as peacekeepers or possibly for other humanitarian purposes. I took Glenn to be making a claim about the desirability of scaling America's global role even further back than I would favor. Perhaps he doesn't think that. Certainly, there are people I know and respect who do think that. My point was that whether or not one agrees with the strict self-defense doctrine, there's ample reason to wonder why, exactly, the foreign policy consensus is so lopsided in terms of the vicious attacks it launches on dissenters from the left while tolerating and sometimes collaborating with the most egregious knee-jerk militarists imaginable. Nobody CaresHere's an intriguing result lurking in American Environics' report on attitudes toward energy and global warming (PDF) -- basically, people have the right views on environmental issues, but they don't really care:
69 percent of the public, in short, is prepared to overlook disagreement about the environment and there are six issues that rate ahead of the environment in terms of the number of people who consider them redlines. Interestingly, even people who say they care about the environment don't seem to care about it all that much:
Even people who rate themselves 8s, 9s, or 10s on a scale of "are you an environmentalist" have these other issues that rate higher as redlines. The upshot of this and other data, according to the report, is that while there's public eagerness to do something about global warming, it's very tenuous, and people are rabidly opposed to anything that would increase energy costs. Since this is public opinion research, they go on to discuss a lot of ways to try to navigate that terrain, but it's hard for me to imagine any way to seriously curb carbon emissions that doesn't involve some increase in energy costs. It'd be nice, of course, if renewables just suddenly became cheaper than coal and gasoline, but then there's hardly be need for any policy. Programming NoteI would be writing more blog posts, but I'm too busy using this easy method (really! I tried earlier hacks and couldn't get any to work, but this is simple) to install third-party aps on my iPhone. Torture ShrinksAmerican Psychological Association says psychologists should stop participating in abusive interrogations. Good for them. On some level, it's sad that it took them this long. On another level, it's just so weird that they even need to address this in the first place that you can see how it might have taken a while to snap into action. Four years ago, I never would have guessed that the US government's officially sanctioned systematic use of torture was going to be a recurring topic in my political commentary. I guess I was naive, but I think it was naive in a good way. Partisanship ChartsBrendan Nyhan has a nice political science-y followup on the bipartisanship issue, complete with charts of partisan polarization in congress. The charts illustrate both that the bipartisanship era was a historical aberration and that it was very specifically driven by the presence of a large number of conservative southerners in congress who were members of a mostly non-conservative Democratic Party because they were also hard-core white supremacists and being Democrats was part of maintaining Jim Crow. The departure of these times and the rise of ideologically coherent parties isn't really something to be sad about. That's Our Rudy!I am not defending Rudy, the presidential candidate. Almost no one who has lived in New York wants Rudy anywhere near the nuclear football, nor would we like to see his strongly authoritarian instincts (however much they arguably may have done for New York's policing) unleashed on the federal justice system. Rudy is craaaaaaaaazy, albeit not in a way that made him a particularly bad mayor. This is, I think, true. The American people should spend some time considering the fact that a large number of people who voted for Rudy Giuliani as mayor and who then voted for his designated successor have no desire whatsoever to see him in the White House. Part of it is just that being crazy seemed "in character" for New York. It's a town full of crazy people. There was a sort of "that's our Rudy" mentality about it -- what a crazy character! -- after all, Ed Koch was crazy, too, and David Dinkins was just boring. It's a point of pride. Everyone loves the proverbial ranting and raving cab driver. One doesn't, however, necessarily want to see him running the country. The crux of the matter is that the mayor of a city has way, way, way less power than the president. When Giuliani cooked up his nutty scheme to use 9/11 as a pretext to cancel an election, suspend the rule of law, and extend his term in office, all that happened was . . . none of that happened, since he was just the mayor. By contrast, as we've been learning lately, it's really hard to stop the President of the United States from ordering that people be indefinitely detained and tortured in secret on the basis of God-only-knows what evidence. The damage that these aspects to Giuliani's approach could do as mayor were rather limited, but as a potential president it's a whole different can of worms. 13-24?Via Kay Steiger, MSNBC finds that young, white Americans are happier than young Americans of color. Boring into it, the survey in particular was of 13-24 year-olds. But what kind of age group is that? It's hard to think of a ten year span that has more heterogeneity than that one. Now He Listens?Shadi Hamid on Peter Baker's weird theory that opposition from foreign service professions wrecked Bush's strategy of democracy promotion: Wait a second, wasn’t the State Department against another “new idea” in 2002? I seem to recall that there was some talk around then of invading a foreign country that had nothing to do with 9/11. I seem to also recall that the State Department bureaucracy was furious about this. President Bush was able, however, to overrule or circumvent this “resistance” because he wanted to. Iraq was his priority. I don’t doubt that Bush is sincere in his commitment to democracy, but I’m under no illusions that it was ever a top priority of his, or that it took precedence over more “tangible” strategic interests…like, um, supporting dictators with billions of dollars, something which Bush has proven quite fond of. Right. Similarly, one doubts that the professional bureaucracy in the Treasury Department has been wildly enthusiastic about Bush's tax-and-budget policies or that folks in the EPA love Bush's environmental policies. The dominant views of the civil service, the foreign service, the uniformed military, and the intelligence community all really do matter in Washington, but Bush has time and again shown an ability to get his way when he's determined to. The democracy agenda didn't make it through the grinder because there was no agenda. August 22, 2007Maliki is not the ProblemSenator Carl Levin says "said yesterday that Iraq's parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days." Today, President George W. Bush made "a striking attempt . . . to distance itself from the Maliki government before September, when the president’s troop buildup faces an intense review on Capitol Hill." This is crazy talk. As Eric Martin points out we went through this exact cycle just last year. Back in the day some crazy and unserious persosn such as myself wondered what good "ousting" Ibrahim Jafari and replacing him with another member of the same political coalition would do. But no! George Bush and David Ignatius assured us that Maliki was the man. Now Maliki's not the man! But the man's not the problem. There's a structural problem here about what sort of leadership is possible given the objective correlation of political forces on the ground. We can go through a half dozen coups and 17 prime ministers and if it does anything it'll make things worse. How The Hottness Was WonSalon's Farhad Manjoo has the scoop on my roommates' cheating to win the FishbowlDC hottest media types competition. The hotties themselves respond here. UPDATE: For the record, Spencer is, of course, not a "New Republic staffer" as the Salon piece says -- he's up to his eyes in muck. NeomaniaApparently the "big idea" in Matt Bai's new book is that all this work on improving the infrastructure of progressive politics won't work unless progressives also bring to bear some new ideas. This seems like a good time to link once again to Jon Chait's case against new ideas which, I think, thoroughly demolished the notion that new ideas are really integral to political success. Matt Stoller's rhetorical question is also a good one: "What about caring about ideas because ideas are, you know, good things to care about? What about caring about ideas because good ideas can promote justice, tolerance, and a better world?" Right. I think it's worth saying that there's a real danger here in policy terms. Just as all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, there are about a million different ways drastic new policy initiatives can make things worse. If you say to yourself, "okay, we need a big new idea" and then start thinking about the merits of various big new ideas there's a decent chance that you'll settle on a very bad idea. My guess is that this is part of the problem with things like the "concert of democracies" scheme -- it seems to people that there ought to be some new ideas, so they came up with this one because it's a new idea rather than because it's a good idea. Obviously, in politics you need to have ideas of some sort. But there are some perfectly good old ideas out there. Progressive taxation, universal health care, public provision for retirement, and the U.N. Charter are all perfectly good ideas. Sometimes we just need to apply an old idea like emissions regulations to a new area like carbon dioxide. Sometimes a good old idea needs a new level of commitment plus some tweaking -- I'd put the Non-Proliferation Treaty in this category. Practical politicians, of course, have an interest in making their ideas appear exciting, but that's different from saying that it's actually necessary to be constantly trying to devise non-circular wheels just for fun. Good NewsLooks like the Anti-Defamation League is now acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was "tantamount to genocide" (which, admittedly, has a kind of partially pregnant ring to it, but whatever). The Conservation of ChaitOne of the fundamental laws of political punditry is that for every post praising Jon Chait on domestic issues, an equal and oppose post must attack his views on foreign policy. To wit, his TRB column about Bill Kristol's shameful and dishonest attacks on TNR and its editors. His critique is sound, but his framing of the issue is way off. Here's the first graf: It's hard to believe that, not so long ago, neoconservative foreign policy thinking overflowed with ideas and idealism. The descent has been steep, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the pages of The Weekly Standard--particularly in William Kristol's editorials, which have come to consist of stubborn denials of any bad news, diatribes about internal enemies, and harangues against the cowardice of Republican dissenters. And here's the penultimate one: There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower--a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol's arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all. But this is silly -- neither Kristol nor The Weekly Standard has changed. It's just that The New Republic used to join up with neoconservatives to bully people who disagree with its foreign policy views and now TNR is being bullied. It wasn't The Weekly Standard that this article calling John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt un-American. Nor was in The Weekly Standard that published this article about how liberals don't want to invade Iraq because they don't like advancing America's interests. Nor was it The Weekly Standard that analogized MoveOn to Stalin-controlled Communist agents. Seeing criticism of Kristol's tactics is great, but this is just a new target not a new game for Kristol. Deaths in Vietnam
Bush is going to give a speech blaming Vietnam War opponents for the fact that lots of Vietnamese people died and/or became refugees. Jim Henley points out the minor fact that "Millions of people died while we were there. A fair proportion of them were people we ourselves killed. In any reckoning of the costs of intervening and withdrawing from Indochina, those people count too. It’s a bizarre, narcissistic blind spot to imagine otherwise." Indeed, the 1.7 million or so people reckoned to have died during the main American phase of the Vietnam War (1965-1973) outpaces the Cambodian genocide (among other things) by a healthy margin. It's hard to imagine that leaving Vietnam sooner wouldn't have saved lives, whereas staying in Vietnam longer would have gotten even more people killed before ending in the same result. Tons and tons of Iraqi civilians are getting killed or fleeing the country right now; continuing the war indefinitely won't help them. Photo by Flickr user Flydime used under a Creative Commons license Lessons LearnedSomeone I didn't notice that yesterday The Washington Post ran an editorial that didn't just endorse the Bush administration's loopy decision to label a branch of the Iranian government a terrorist organization, but actually said "it seems to be the least the United States should be doing, given the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq" and that the Revolutionary Guard "is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible." This stuff keeps driving me crazy. If Fred Hiatt (and National Review and Joe Lieberman) thinks we should attack Iran, they should come out and say it plainly and make the argument. That seems to be the obvious implication of the idea that Iran "is waging war" against us already, but nobody wants to draw the implication. Crisis? Opportunity!I always wonder how someone who can write such insightful narrative as Barbara Ehrenreich can also put forward such baffling analyses. In today's edition, for example, she seems to argue that the immiseration of the American working class as witnessed by a failure to make mortgage payments or afford even Walmart's low prices is a good thing because rich people suffer too: Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Uh huh. Absent from the column is any gesture at ideas that might help anyone in dire financial straights. Instead, we get the view that "There should be marches and rallies, banners and sit-ins, possibly a nice color theme like red or orange." Work for What?Megan McArdle argues in favor of the efficacy of torture: One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn't work, so why bother? That's tempting, but it's too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances. Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn't seem necessarily so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase. For some sense of "necessarily" this may be true, but this flies in the face of historical practice. It seems unlikely to me that torture's most famous systematic applications almost all come in the context of regimes specifically looking to generate spurious confessions. Stalin's Russia, North Vietnamese POW camps, the Spanish Inquisition, it's always the same story. It's not the case, however, that torture "doesn't work" -- Nikolai Bukharin and others confesses to all sorts of preposterous crimes exactly as Stalin wanted them to. The question is whether routinized torture of al-Qaeda suspects is a useful method of advancing any public purpose. Megan counterproses that "people take the hard stance and say 'Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.'" I think Megan thinks that people from the "torture doesn't work" camp are arguing in bad faith, but I'm really not. I don't think it makes any sense at all to say that there's a categorical moral against smashing people's fingers with a hammer or whatever other depraved acts of torture you may care to imagine. After all, I believe (as most people believe) that it's sometimes morally praiseworthy for the state to have its agents kill people with bullets, bombs, mortar shells, etc. so there's surely some end such that torturing someone would, if effective, be a just method of achieving that end. The difference is that despite the horrors of war, there's a very strong argument to be made that if good people systematically disavowed war-making as a practice that bad guys would run roughshod over us. When Hitler's tanks start rolling across Europe, someone's got to shoot back. By contrast, I don't see any examples of societies using routinized legal torture to gain a decisive advantage over their foes or any evidence that the current era of torture has been a net positive in fighting al-Qaeda. To say that a method of investigation works "provided that you can verify the information" is, after all, merely to beg the question. Consulting a psychic works provided that you can verify the information, but spending person-hours chasing down the psychic's "leads" isn't going to make the country safer. Analogy DayHere's a Guardian column on Bush's Asian analogies speech. I'll quote my own conclusion, then you can follow the link and see the reasoning: For months now, many conservatives have been fundamentally positioning themselves for the post-war era, readying the arguments that will blame the failure of the venture in Iraq on its opponents rather than its architects. That Bush himself has chosen to join them is, perhaps, on some level the clearest reflection of the reality that the president knows perfectly well that the war is unwinnable, and blame-shifting now the best hope for saving his historical legacy. While you're there, check out Spencer Ackerman on Carl Levin's irresponsible Maliki-bashing. Who, After All, Speaks Today of the Annihilation of the ArmeniansIt seems that apologetics for killing Armenians is more popular in hawkish "pro-Israel" circles than I'd realized. American Enterprise Institute scholar and contributor to various publications MIchael Rubin condemnts Abe Foxman here for changing his view to the genocide happened position. He also links to a couple of articles published in The Middle East Quarterly which he edits that deny the genocide. MEQ, in turn, is produced by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum. It bares mentioning that no less a figure than Adolf Hitler himself cited Turkey's success at evading accountability for what happened to the Armenians as part of his case that liquidation of European Jewry was feasible. Now, I doubt there's an actual causal link here (Hitler would have been Hitler either way) but it sure is an unseemly business. As I say, I don't begrudge the actual Israeli government its right to engage in some realpolitik here, but there's no reason for Jewish civil society groups to be going down this path. Did Karl Rove Lose Iraq?That's George Packer's theory: Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly. In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq. This'd be a kind of fun thing to throw into kitchen-sink style critique of the Bush administration, but I don't think it's very well supported. For one thing, it lacks explanatory power as an account of White House decision-making over the past 18-24 months. It was widely believed in late 2005 and early 2006 that Bush was going to start some kind of slow-motion downscaling of the American presence in Iraq in order to lessen the extent to which it was a millstone around the congressional GOP's neck, but it didn't happen. Similarly, Bush responded to electoral rebuke not by trimming on Iraq, but by doubling down. The evidence suggests that Bush pursued maximalist Iraq policies in 2002-2005 for the exact same reason he pursued them in 2006-2007 -- because of his maximalist views on Iraq. He was a maximalist when Iraq-as-wedge-issue cut in his favor, and he was a maximalist when Iraq-as-wedge-issue cut against him. That's not to say that within the parameters of the agreed-upon policy the White House political team didn't try to milk the issue for maximum political advantage, but that's a different matter. Of course, the question of "why the Iraq war has gone so badly" does admit of a few different interpretations. I would say it went badly primarily because the underlying concept of invading and occupying a diverse, medium-sized country in order to topple a long-entrenched dictatorial regime and replace it with a stable, pro-American one that would be a stepping stone toward larger regional transformation was fundamentally unsound. Any policy designed to achieve those goals was bound to fail. It probably did, however, go as badly as it did ("so badly") in large part because responsibility for implementing this policy was handed over to people who were too dumb, too crazy, or too irresponsible to realize what a mess they were making and abandon the policy objectives. The notion, however, that if Bush had just made Joe Lieberman Secretary of Defense, not pushed for further tax cuts, invited Paul Berman over for coffee, and given Joe Biden a hug that this all would have turned out well doesn't seem very plausible. Maybe had the administration not disbanded the Iraqi Army, not issued the de-Baathification order, and not made all kinds of noises about marching on Damascus and Teheran we could have installed a stable-but-repressive Sunni neo-Baath regime that made nice with the Gulf Cooperation Council states but liberal hawks wouldn't have been happy with that and I don't think it's clear that it would have worked anyway. The Democracy AgendaRoss thinks I've been too hard on Bush's democracy agenda: Meanwhile, both Matt and Hamid make the point that when Bush really wanted a policy course pursued - namely, the invasion of Iraq - the opposition from the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere was steamrolled. Which is true enough, and I don't think there's any question that invading Iraq was a higher priority for Bush than the larger reorientation of American diplomacy in a more pro-democracy direction. But I think the contrast between how Iraq played out and what's happened to the freedom agenda doesn't just speak to Bush's priorities; it also speaks to the unfortunate truth that it's become easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps. I really don't think that's right. To understand the difference here, let's take a look at this slice of Peter Baker's original article, something Ross labeled a "depressing bureaucratic anecdote[]": Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue. The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right. The president gave a speech about the democracy agenda, but he never put a democracy agenda together. In all policy areas, but especially in foreign policy and diplomacy, saying things isn't the same as changing policies. Like if you want to cut taxes, you can't just say "let's cut taxes" you need to submit budget documents, work with members of congress, do some calculations, etc. Even an operation as slipshod as Bush's domestic policy team manages to get this much done. On democracy promotion nobody bothered to say which policies, exactly, were changing. Presumably Bush didn't mean that the CIA should start arming Saudi opposition groups. But what did he mean? That Egypt should have its aid cut if it didn't hold free and fair elections? Well, he doesn't seem to have proposed any such legislation. These are complicated issues and I sometimes think people have unfairly criticized Bush for not "doing something" about autocracy in Pakistan but when it's not clear what should be done, but that's just the point it's not clear what should be done and if the president wanted a democracy policy he needed to, yes, have some meetings and figure out what that policy was. Vital InterestsI don't mean to lodge this as a specific complaint about John Edwards, but I was just having a conversation with Spencer in which he said people shouldn't be allowed to use the phrase "vital interests" in Foreign Affairs essays without giving some kind of which interests they see as the vital ones and, ideally, why they're so vital. Then he walked out the door and I read Ari Melber's blog post about John Edwards' Foreign Affairs essay and it contains, at a key juncture, the phrase in question: There is no question that we must confront terrorist groups such as al Qaeda with the full force of our military might. As commander in chief, I will never hesitate to apply the full extent of our security apparatus to protect our vital interests, take measures to root out terrorist cells, and strike swiftly and forcefully against those who seek to harm us. The essay is almost 6,000 words long, but Edwards doesn't name any vital interests. In his defense, Barack Obama's manifesto also says that "We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests" but doesn't say anything about which interests are the vital ones. And yet, this seems like an important question! Without answering it, these formulae take on a pretty tautological quality. The question isn't would you use force when you thought it was vital to do so, the question is when is it vital to use force? I think this now-meaningless phrase acquired its talismanic powers back during the Cold War when "protecting our vital interests" in some country or region was a thinly veiled euphemism for "not letting Communists take over." That doesn't mean that every statement made about "vital interests" was correct or reasonable, or that preventing a pro-Soviet regime in Angola really was a vital interest, but one at least knew what one meant. By contrast, when Edwards or Obama talks about vital interests I actually have no idea what they're talking about. You have a very wide range of substantive disagreement as to what our interests are (and, of course, which of our interests are the vital ones) as well as how best to advance them, and I also here people trying to stretch the notion of an "interest" to encompass other kinds of policy priorities like genocide prevention. An essay on the subject of "what I think America's vital interests are" (heck, even a numbered list) would tell us a lot more about where these candidates are coming from than do these essays. August 23, 2007The Vietnam DebateI think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets. Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds -- emboldened -- were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old. It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct. The application to Iraq should be clear enough, but in case it isn't here's Justin Logan's argument from February that the extent to which simply giving up in Iraq would damage our "vital interests" is vastly overstated. Thursday Vital Interests BloggingRick Perlstein emails to recommend this Corey Robin essay as "the most brilliant thing" he's read about the rhetoric of American interests. I think you can't actually read it unless you're a London Review of Books subscriber (or someone emails the text to you), but I offer the suggestion as food for thought. It's called "Protocols of Machismo" and appeared in the 19 May 2005 issue. My take is that the world really could use a brilliant examination of the rhetoric of "vital interests" in American political discourse but that Robin doesn't quite have the goods here. If others have suggestions for further reading on this topic, I'm interested. Best Reality Show EverI'm ready to endorse Alex Tabarrok's proposal that we make our presidential candidates participate in a kind of game show so that we can better evaluate their presidenting skills, and can also get behind Kathy G.'s addendum to add more gender equity into the mix. Shanghai Cooperation OrganizationI can't say I'm in the habit of reading Today's Zaman on a daily basis (indeed, I'm very unclear on what that means), but Brian Ulrich is right: "I've long wanted to read up on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which I see an awful lot of in my current affairs reading. Fortunately, Mehmet Ogutcu has put together a good overview of the group and its implications." Worst Case Scenario
Like a lot of people, I've looked at the polls and been a bit distressed at the prospect of a matchup between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. He is, I think, probably the Republicans' strongest candidate and she the Democrats' weakest. Giuliani's also the one I would least like to see be president. Chris Bowers compiled the most recent state-by-state polls, however, and came up with a map that underscores the fundamental political weakness of the GOP. In short, not only does Clinton project to absolutely wallop Mitt Romney (it's a 430 electoral vote landslide that has Democrats picking up Texas, Florida, Virginia, Missouri, etc., but she even projects to score the solid win against Giuliani that you see pictured above. Obviously, one shouldn't draw any particularly strong conclusions from this sort of early polling (the campaign does, after all, matter) but both Giuliani and Clinton are widely recognized figures and one's sense is that additional exposure to the Real Rudy is unlikely to boost his popularity in noteworthy ways. "Our Side"Joe Lieberman says that "Whereas a year ago, Iraq's Sunni Arab community was largely allied with the insurgency, more and more Sunnis are coming over to our side, to fight against al Qaeda." I don't know if Lieberman is ignorant or being misleading here, but this is badly wrong. There's not an "insurgency" that Iraq's Sunni Arabs have abandoned in favor of joining "our side." Rather, Iraq's Sunni Arabs are the insurgency -- a violent rebellion against the Shiite-dominated new political order in Baghdad. The US government spent years trying to suppress these insurgents before, eventually, we stopped doing that and started cooperating with the insurgency to fight al-Qaeda. The insurgents have not, however, given up the political ideals that have motivated the insurgency from the beginning -- namely hostility to foreign (be it al-Qaeda or American) domination of Iraq, and hostility to the Shiite ascendancy in Baghdad. What happened is more like us switching sides than the Sunnis switching sides. We stopped trying to kill insurgent groups and started arming them instead. Today, that seems to be working well as a means of fighting AQI. Tomorrow those guns will probably be turned against the central government and maybe against us as well. Question of the DayDoes Glenn Reynolds really not understand that this Romanesko item is tongue in cheek? Offseason BasketbloggingHaven't had an NBA post around here in forever, so am I crazy or is RZA wearing a Jared Jeffries jersey in this video? Does the world really contain Jared Jeffries fans? My dad, a Knicks season ticket holder, is not enthusiastic about the Zach Randolph Era. UPDATE: It seems that it's an Allan Houston jersey and the video's from back in the day. The Guns of AugustFor a few months now, I think it's been clear that Hillary Clinton isn't some paper tiger who's just going to melt away once her rivals for the nomination get better name ID. The question has been whether -- or when -- any of those rivals would decide it's time to seriously attack her. Barack Obama's been involved in some skirmishes, but Clinton's camp has usually shot first in those battles. Now John Edwards is on the attack, if not quite by name: The choice we must make is as important as it is clear. It is a choice between looking back and looking forward. A choice between the way we've always done it and the way we could do it if we dared. A choice between corporate power and the power of democracy. Between a corrupt and corroded system and a government that works for us again. It is caution versus courage. Old versus new. Calculation versus principle. It is the establishment elites versus the American people. There's much more to the speech, read the whole thing. The word "populism" gets tossed around a lot in politics, especially over the past five or six years, but in this speech Edwards is really living up to the term in a way most things that get labeled that way don't by explicitly connecting his critique of the economic status quo to a vision of a democratic economy: "Will corporate greed be all we value as we move further into the global economy, or will we put workers and families first, so that all jobs pay fair wages, every American has health care and corporate profits work for democracy and not the other way around?" I think it's a very strong speech. A lot of primary voters seem to me to want a more strictly partisan message than this, but I prefer the more properly ideological note that Edwards is striking here, trying to convince us that the crisis of Bushism is also an opportunity for sweeping change that we need to seize. Better Clerisy NeededThis was my plan for a blog post. I was going to observe that there are certain circumstances under which it might be a good thing indeed to have a "foreign policy clerisy." In particular, a bipartisan, yet also non-partisan, group of experts would be a useful thing to have on hand if, for example, both the President of the United States and a leading Republican candidate for President were to endorse a lunatic revisionist view of the Vietnam War. Members of this clerisy, Democrat and Republican alike, could set the country straight on the facts. Then I was going to observe that the clerisy we have has done no such thing and has, in fact, stayed utterly silent on this small question that happens to rest at the center of the Bush administration's justification of its policies. Then, being a responsible blogger, I sauntered over to the Brookings website to confirm my guess that there's be no commentary on this issue. Well, I was half right. There's nothing new up on their site, but there is a July op-ed by Senior Fellow Peter Rodman endorsing the lunatic revisionist view. Who's Peter Rodman? Why he was an Assistant Secretary in the Don Rumsfeld Pentagon. Why the Brookings Institution would look at the past five years and think that it ought to reposition itself on foreign policy further to the right by handing out sinecures to veterans of the Rumsfeld Defense Department is something I couldn't really speculate on. Dominos AgainRoss responds on the domino theory, and I'm totally unconvinced. I'll just say it again. The case for staying in Vietnam had nothing to do with Mozambique (and I think Ross's assumption of a tight causal link between events in Vietnam and events in Africa lacks evidence) and everything to do with American security. But as to the key issue of American national security, the hawks were completely wrong. Indochina going Communist had no deleterious effect whatsoever on the physical security or material living standards of Americans. The effort to prevent Indochina from going Communist, by contrast, had a large and very deleterious effect on the physical security of a huge quantity of Americans. Communist victory in Indochina was, obviously, a disaster for Indochinese anti-Communists, but by the same token US military involvement in Indochina killed and maimed vast quantities of Indochinese people. UPDATE: Check out Michael Hirsch's column. Praise and Worry About the UN CharterI'm very sympathetic to the view articulated by Brad DeLong and John Quiggin (here and here) that international law and the United Nations Charter essentially provide a sufficient basis for thinking about when the United States should and should not use force in world affairs. In particular, the seemingly commonsense objection that this is airy idealism that can't be put into practice because the bad guys of the world can't be trusted to play along turns out to hold very little water. It's true, of course, that the bad guys of the world can't be trusted to play along, but the Charter itself and international law more generally provides amply justification for the use of force to punish bad actors who insist on waging aggressive war. There's no question of seeking a "permission slip" to literally defend the country against attack, the question of permission slips acts, rather, as a constraint against more grandiose forms of meddling. I do, however, have two worries about this doctrine. One is that some of our thorniest foreign policy issues -- in particular Taiwan -- have a somewhat murky legal status. The other is that saying one should act in accordance with what the UN Security Council is prepared to authorize doesn't actually answer the question of what the United States, as a leading member of said Council, should be trying to get permission to do. In general, though, I'm very much in agreement with Quiggin about this question and especially with the points he makes in his followup. Lobbyists and LobbyistsThere are some areas in which I think people have become a bit inclined to overstate the difference between the political parties. I am, however, fairly certain that Garance Franke-Ruta is right about this: When it comes to campaign finance laws, the devil really is in the details, which can rapidly render even the best-intentioned reforms meaningless. That said, I can't imagine that any one of the Democrats now vying for their party's presidential nomination would be so corrupt as to appoint a former mining industry lobbyist as deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior, as George Bush did, with the predictable and enraging result that "The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal." The sexier war n' torture issues and the fraught political dynamics surrounding them have sometimes tended to obscure this kind of run-of-the-mill graft and gross perversion of public purpose that have characterized Bush's approach to domestic policy issues. The Fraud Caucus ContinuedAm I reading this right? John Warner thinks we should bring the troops home from Iraq but "said he still would not support Democratic legislation championed by [Carl] Levin that would call for Bush to bring troops home by a certain date." Now Warner has surely noticed that George W. Bush favors an open-ended US military presence in Iraq, and, in fact, believes that we never should have withdrawn troops from Vietnam. And Warner favors, in his capacity as a member of the United States Senate, giving Bush a free hand to conduct Iraq policy as he sees fit. Thus, if Warner gets his way legislatively, as many American soldiers as the Pentagon can logistically manage will be in Iraq in January 2009. Between now and then hundreds will die, thousands will be seriously injured, and hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent. Warner, unlike 99.999 percent of the American population, is actually in a position to stop Bush from carrying out his plan to prolong the war. But he intends to let Bush do it. Why on earth, if Warner really does think we need to withdraw troops, does he intend to do that? Fueling Civil WarAs Mark Kleiman says "More Iraqis will probably die of violence just after a U.S. withdrawal than are dying violently now," but "that's not a good enough reason to hang around, unless at some point it stops being true: that six months, or a year, or two years, or five years from now we would be able to withdraw and not have civil war and massacre follow. If all we're spending blood and treasure on is postponing a catastrophe we can't prevent, the "humanitarian" argument against a fairly rapid withdrawal collapses." It is, in fact, worse than that. Our continued presence in Iraq is probably making things worse. Take a look at this slice of counterinsurgency in action: Slowly but deliberately, U.S. forces are enlisting groups of armed men -- many probably former insurgents -- and paying cash, a strategy they say has dramatically reduced violence in some of Iraq's most dangerous areas in just weeks. [...] As far as Colonel Balcavage's area of operations is concerned, this is a smart policy. But the jigsaw puzzle doesn't fit together. The central government has no intention of incorporating these people into its security forces. Under the circumstances, as Greg Djerejian says: Arming Sunni militias (sorry, Concerned Citizens Programmes) rather than the national army, as nascent and pitable as it is, will almost certainly lead to more intensified Sunni--Shi'a fighting. Meantime, these bolstered Sunni forces (some of them simply ex-Baathists we supposedly went in to topple) will eventually be fighting for primacy against the very Government we've been trying to prop up in Baghdad. I find this mind-boggling in its short-sightedness and lack of overarching strategic direction (unless we've truly become Machiavellian, and are plotting to return the Sunnis to power to contain Iran!) And thus goes all the talk of "training" Iraqi troops. The longer we stay, the more guns and training we hand out to multiple sides of the brewing conflict. This stuff matters. There's a big difference between a civil war fought with sticks and stones and one fought with tanks and aircraft. Iraq is, obviously, somewhere in the middle. But as of now the one saving grace of the situation is that all the parties in Iraq (save the USA) are relatively lightly armed. With each passing month, though, we shift it to a deadlier and deadlier situation with better armed forces on all sides. We need to be doing the reverse -- moving our troops out, ceasing the arming and equipping of militias, and acting aggressively on the diplomatic front to try to make sure that other countries don't step into the armaments-providing breach. Saying What I MeanIlan Goldenberg calls me out over this post and he has the goods: In fact, that's exactly what they did. Ten minutes after the President's speech ended yesterday 40 reporters from many of the key mainstream media outlets got on a press call sponsored by the National Security Network with with General John Johns, General Robert Gard, Rand Beers, Larry Korb and Steven Simon (Of the hated Council on Foreign Relations). For over an hour these experts took the time to explain to the press why the President's comparison to Vietnam was bull. I'm afraid a bloggerish tendency toward sarcasm, in-group lingo and a proclivity to write in haste and a degree of anger got the better of me here. I wanted to make a point about Brookings and about Peter Rodman and I should have just made it and not gotten re-entanged in this larger and increasingly vague debate about clerisies. I think the people at the National Security Network do great work and deserve more support and attention. He's Got GameCampaigning in South Carolina, Barack Obama shoots . . . he scores! Via Marc Ambinder. August 24, 2007SurgingKevin Drum arranges some Brookings Iraq Index data into tables to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison of the summer 2006 to the summer of 2007 and discovers that the surge is working if your definition of "working" doesn't require a decrease in violence or an increase in the viability of Iraq's basic infrastructure. Of course, even if you saw continued deterioration on those fronts, you might still take solace in good news from the political front except that there . . . isn't any good news on the political front. Last, I would remind readers that the summer of 2006 was worse than the summer of 2005 which, in turn, was worse than the summer of 2004. Meanwhile, at the time the summer of 2004 was conventionally considered to be very bad situation. We've managed to fail to badly that less-intense forms of failure now look like progress if you squint hard enough. Given that Kevin's data just comes straight from the Brookings Iraq Index project, one wonders how it is that Brookings fellows like Peter Rodman, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack seem so unaware of it. Surely the Brookings communications staff should be capable of getting this information into the hands of the organization's own staff. By The BookHere's a passage from the Army's field manual on counterinsurgency: Of the preceding characteristics, knowledge of objectives, motivations, and means of generating popular support/tolerance will often be the most important intelligence requirements and the most difficult to ascertain. In particular, generating popular support/tolerance often has the greatest impact on the insurgency’s long-term effectiveness. This is usually the center of gravity of an insurgency. Center of gravity, it should be said, has a technical meaning in military circles derived from Clausewitz. The enemy's center of gravity is the thing you need to change to win the war. If the support of the population is an insurgency's center of gravity, then they key metric by which you want to measure a counterinsurgent's success is the counterinsurgent's impact on the attitude of the local population. Here's Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack trying to clarify exactly what they did on their July trip to Iraq: "Although we were able to meet with several dozen Iraqi civilians—from people on the streets to local shaykhs—because we were nearly always in the presence of American military personnel, we felt we had little ability to gauge the mood of the Iraqi people." Dower Versus Bush
In yesterday's speech Bush said: "'An interesting observation, one historian put it, 'Had these erstwhile experts' — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, 'Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.'" Avi Zenilman getting the historian in question to comment: A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday. The book is Embracing Defeat and, since as revealed in the Natalie Portman discussion, I took a class on modern Japan once, I've read the book. Were one so inclined, one could have subtitled this one "why analogies between post-war Japan and post-war Iraq are wildly inappropriate," though since it was published in 1999 that's probably not what Dower had in mind. Neoconservative IdealismI got a bit sidetracked into TNR-bashing when I tried to address this subject previously, but I'm interested in Jonathan Chait's view that neoconservatism used to be an honorable, idealistic enterprise that has only very recently become a kind of mindless militarism combined with support for torture, indefinite detention, etc. Now, of course, the original neoconservative foreign policy doctrine was to oppose Jimmy Carter's injection of a larger dose of human rights into US foreign policy and to argue in favor of more vigorous American support for anti-Communist dictators. But I assume we're talking here about what might be termed "second wave" neoconservative foreign policy -- neo-neoconservatism, if you will -- and for this I think it's useful to turn to the foundational document, Kristol and Kagan's 1996 essay "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy". Policy Failure: Good for the GOP?This is, I think, a disaster: "It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord. Two points in response. The first is that I think the Democrat best positioned to deal with GOP political mobilization in a post-attack environment is going to be the one who isn't reflexively inclined to see failed Republican policies resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Americans as a political advantage for the Republicans. The other is that I think there's a pretty clear sense in which the further one is from Bush's Iraq policy, the easier it is politically to say that the failures of Bush's national security policy should be blamed on Bush's failed policies. Obama has a straight shot ("this is why we should have fought al-Qaeda like I said") and Edwards (and Matt Yglesias) has a straightish one ("this is why we should have fought al-Qaeda like I think in retrospect") whereas I'm not 100 percent sure what the Clinton message would be. Most of all, though, I think the politics of national security call for a strong, self-confident posture that genuinely believes liberal solutions are politically saleable and substantively workable, not the kind of worry-wort attitude that says we need to cower in fear every time Republicans say "terror." Underexploited Crime OpportunitiesI wonder about this too sometimes -- why don't more bags get stolen from baggage claim at the airport? It's totally unsecured, and one could, if caught, even plausibly claim to have made a mistake. Republican Proposes Cutting Taxes for the WealthyIntuitively, if one were going to initiate a large program through which the federal government subsidizes health care expenses, you would want a disproportionate quantity of subsidies to go to people of modest means. People with very high incomes would get more modest subsidies. Or maybe everyone would get the same subsidy. Or you could be Mitt Romney: To help control costs, Romney would allow all Americans to deduct from their taxable income all of their health-care costs including premiums and most out-of-pocket spending. Now, only people with a lot of expenses can deduct the cost from their taxable income. As with all other tax deduction schemes, this has a highly regressive impact. Low-income Americans who pay FICA but not income taxes will get no help whatsoever. High-income people in the top bracket will get large tax cuts. People in the middle will get, well, a middling level of help. Turkey, Israel, and the ADLHere's a good piece by Haaretz on Turkish efforts to pressure Israel to pressure the Anti-Defamation League to take the view that there was no genocide of Armenians. Part of what this highlights, I think, is that there are some real dangers to both Israel and to American Jewish organizations from Jewish civil society groups coming to be too closely aligned with Israeli policy. Since the Knesset cannot, in fact, control the actions of the ADL, or the AJC, or any number of other Jewish institutions in the United States, the government of Israel has a fairly strong interest in not being held accountable on the international stage for the actions of these groups. Conversely, the ADL and similar groups aren't going to want to be leaned on in this way. More Kagans! More Surge!Fred Kagan takes to the virtual pages of The Weekly Standard to assure us that the recent NIE concludes that the "surge" policy Fred Kagan designed is succeeding. That every other media organization in the United States reached the reverse conclusion independently isn't something you should worry about too much (they hate the troops, dontcha know?) -- after all, who better to assess Kagan's work than Kagan himself? It does, however, make you wonder where Robert and Kimberly Kagan are on all this. . . . The Allawi SurgeIyad Allawi sure does seem to be spending a lot of cash on Republican lobbying firms. Personally, if I had $300,000 to spend I really, really, really wouldn't spend it trying to persuade the US government to install me as Prime Minister of Iraq, but some people are more power-hungry than others. Why Did The South Turn Republican?I think Paul Krugman is pretty wrong here: And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican. It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South. And for a long time the strategy worked. Democratic politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt loyally upheld white supremacy. The dam began to crack with Harry Truman, and then under Lyndon Johnson the national party decisively broke with this corrupt bargain. With that done, white southerners just took their conservative views on taxes and national security into the Republican Party where such views belonged. Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there. Putting Humpty-Dumpty Together AgainBrian Beutler asks: Here's a question that goes out to basically everybody--from liberals who think that the United States can't possibly create political reconciliation in Iraq to conservatives who think Maliki (and Iran and Democrats) are standing in the way. Is political reconciliation really enough? I'm pessimistic. In Ending Civil Wars Stephen Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth Cousens conclude that "Three factors are most commonly associated with a difficult environment" in stabilizing a country in the wake of a political agreement to end a civil war. Those are "Spoilers -- leaders or factions hostile to a peace agreement and willing to use violence to undermine it; neighboring states that are hostile to the agreement; and spoils -- valuable, easily tradable commodities." Internally, I see a high likelihood of spoiling. Even if you had a political accord uniting the two major Kurdish parties, the Sadrist, Dawa, SCIRI, and a sufficient number of Sunnis, the sheer quantity of factions would be a problem. If one Shiite faction felt others were ascending at its expense, it would have an incentive to deploy Shiite maximalism to undercut its rivals' positions. Similarly if one Kurdish party saw the other gaining the upper hand. Nobody even knows what the deal is with the Sunnis. Similarly, on the international front while it's certainly possible that pro-Western Arabs, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Israel would all loyally support a reconciliation accord it would require a substantial change in the regional diplomatic situation. At the moment, it seems inevitable that somebody would see events evolving in an unfavorable direction and seek to disrupt the accords. Last, Iraq is one of the most spoils-having countries on the planet. 20th century Iraqi history is chock-a-block with coups and attempted coups simply because a successful coup can make you very rich. Very Serious IndeedComing soon to an American Enterprise Institute near you, Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon will be sharing a stage with such luminaries as Frederick Kagan, Jack Keane, Danielle Pletka, Thomas Donnelly, and Gary Schmitt. This provides, I think, an opportunity to get a little more specific about blogger critiques of Very Serious People and clerisies and so forth. The crux of the matter is that we have here in Washington, DC a certain number of institutions working in the national security sphere that are essentially crackpot operations -- AEI, The Weekly Standard, the Project for a New American Century, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies come to mind. Now one can argue 'till the cows come home whether or not it should have been clear in August 2002 that these were crackpot operations, but over the past five years they've demonstrated themselves to indubitably be crackpot institutions. Meanwhile, a couple of ticks over to the left you have a series of basically establishmentarian organizations and individuals that, instead of doing what establishmentarian organizations are supposed to do and marginalize these crackpots, are mainstreaming them. The Saban Center at Brookings, CNN, and the opinion pages of The Washington Post are probably the biggest offenders here, but the rot has spread and to some extent afflicted other organizations as well. It's a problem. It's by no means something every single CFR member or center-left think tanker has contributed to, but too many have contributed to it, and until very recently too many others have done little to try to seize the mantle of authority from the people who keep mainstreaming crackpots whose theories have been tested and failed, over and over again, at a cost of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Birth Control and the CampaignAnn Friedman please once again for the press to ask the Republican contenders some clear questions as to where they stand on birth control, citing this op-ed from Cristina Page. What Happened in Vietnam?In narrow military terms, the US had the capacity in 1972 to prevent South Vietnamese collapse, and in some sense the South Vietnamese position was stronger than it had been during parts of the 1960s. But these facts are almost irrelevant to the conclusion of the war; the North Vietnamese weren't going to give up, and knew that they could force the US to pay a higher price than it was willing to by continuing the fighting. Everyone on all sides of the conflict understood these basic points, and only someone who utterly refuses to acknowledge the political dimension of military conflict could misunderstand the situation as badly as Rodman. I concur. I should add that I was taught this material by Stephen Peter Rosen who's something of a frothing right-winger. US military support for the Saigon regime had a fundamentally paradoxical quality to it. South Vietnamese forces had access to better equipment and training than did North Vietnamese forces, but they performed much worse than the North Vietnamese because their government lacked legitimacy. It lacked legitimacy because it was seen as a kind of corrupt quisling regime, a creature of French and then American imperialism. Massive external military support staved off military defeat, but made it completely impossible for Saigon to constitute itself as a politically legitimate alternative to unification under a nationalist regime in Hanoi. More SeriousnessOne key example of the mainstreaming of crackpottery that I mentioned earlier is things like the Max Boot. Here he is with a column explaining that George W. Bush's endorsement of goofy revisionist accounts of Vietnam was "a skillful bit of political jujitsu." He holds a variety of other crackpot views and has for years. His latest piece is in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, which are well-known venues for crackpottery and factually inaccurate claims. And, indeed, it was as a Wall Street Journal editorialist that he got his start. Meanwhile, he's now also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. That hardly means every other fellow at the CFR -- much less every "member" -- is a bad person with dumb ideas, but you can see why this sort of thing leads liberals to not have such warm feelings about the Council, especially when you consider that Boot tends to (undeservedly) have a much higher media than do worthier CFR types like Ray Takeyh. Friday Cardigans BloggingChris Hayes: "Ever wonder what happened to the Cardigans? Here’s your answer." Unfortunately, the video that Chris links to sucks. The truth, however, is that the Cardigans have some good post-"Love Fool" work, notably including "I Need Some Fine Wine" off 2005's Super-Extra Gravity: So there. In other music news I just got the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Is Is EP and I see no reason that other Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans wouldn't like it every bit as much as I did. Onward to HanoiRosa Brooks has the ultimate Bushite modest proposal -- let's re-invade Vietnam. August 25, 2007A Surge of Madness
I wasn't super-optimistic that the 2006 midterms were going to cause us to adopt a sound Iraq policy, but I did think it would result in a less unsound one. Instead, we got the "surge" -- our policy actually got worse. I never believed that the infamous September reports were going to make policy more rational, but now it seems to me that they're getting worse. Greg Djerejian looks at the longer version of Pollack & O'Hanlon's trip and it turns out to be not more nuanced than their op-ed, but more unhinged. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer is now O'Pollahan's best friend and leverages their findings into further support for the burgeoning Iyad Allawi boom. And here's more on that from Spencer Ackerman. And here as well. I find it hard to find words to describe what a disaster it may be if the US ends up engineering the return to power of a grossly unpopular ex-Baathist ex-Prime Minister. It's as if people are trying their hardest to come up with policies designed to end with Muqtada al-Sadr marching at the head of a crowd shouting "Death to America" into the rapidly abandoned Green Zone sometime in 2010. DoD photo by Sgt. Class Robert C. Brogan Iraqi Public OpinionHere's Michael O'Hanlon in the winter 2003 issue of The National Interest assessing the situation in Iraq about six months after the invasion: A third category of effort in any counterinsurgency, politics is harder to track using quantitative data. That is especially true because Iraq has local governments throughout almost all of the country at present, in addition to a national Governing Council. Hence, future progress will be dependent more on how well Iraqi leaders do their jobs and how quickly they establish legitimacy among the population than on increases in their ranks. An imperfect proxy for this is polling data showing how the Iraqi population feels about the foreign presence in its country and about the general direction of political life within the country. Here the verdict remains mixed. Recent Gallup polls show that a clear majority of Iraqis want coalition forces to stay and believe that life will gradually improve in the post-Saddam era. But the majority also feels frustrated and worried about internal political trends, and, as should be quite obvious, a sizeable minority with the potential to do great harm opposes the entire course of events. At the time, this seemed very wise to me. Why end an "occupation" in Iraq if the occupied people wanted our troops to say? Over the past two or three years, however, Iraqi public opinion has magically vanished from the debate in Washington. The Global Policy Forum does, however, have a nice compilation. We learn in this report that a whopping 6 percent of Iraqis have "a great deal" of confidence in US and British forces. An additional 12 percent have "quite a lot." 30 Percent say they have "not very much." And 52 percent say "none at all." The Iraqi police, the Iraqi army, local political leaders, the national government, and the local militia are all more popular than the American military. A clear majority thinks the US government, rather than the Iraqi government, is controlling the country. 46 percent of Iraqis "strongly oppose" the presence of American troops in Iraq and 32 percent are somewhat opposed. 69 percent say the American presence is making things worse. More Iraqis see Iran as having a positive influence on their country than see the US that way. For that matter, more Iraqis see Saudi Arabia as having a positive influence. More Iraqis see Russia as having a positive influence. 51 percent say attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. More people blame US forces (31 percent) or President Bush (9 percent) for violence in Iraq than blame al-Qaeda (18 percent) or Iran (7 pecent). I don't say, of course, that the Iraqi public is correct about all of this, but that's what they think. Under the circumstances, I just don't see how a counterinsurgency mission could possibly succeed. If we had just recently invaded the country and were facing initial skepticism then, sure, maybe better policies would win people over. But we're talking about the reverse. The initial reception we got was open-minded. That was years ago. Now the US military is very, very, very much disliked in Iraq and it ought to leave and go places (home, Kuwait, Germany, Turkey) where it's welcome. JournalismCheers to The New York Times's Michael Cooper: Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.” Now here's the next test. It's very nice to see an article that reports the facts, right up there in the lede, about a misleading portion of Giuliani's stump speech. The question becomes, however, will the Times find a way to report on this misleading claim with anything approaching the frequency with which Giuliani makes it? Will it be incorporated into the Times's broader narrative about Giuliani as a man whose campaign strategy integrally involves misleading people about aspects of his record as mayor -- not just fiscal policy, but also his record on immigration and other topics? War By MercenaryI'm just going to quote Jim Henley a bit: Deborah Hastings of Associated Press explains what happens to people who blow the whistle on corruption in Iraqi contracting: very bad things. One man was detained for 97 days and subjected to “fear up” interrogation. One woman was demoted and ostracized after a blameless 20-year civilian career with the Pentagon. A KBR contractor who blew the whistle on invoice-padding and diversion of resources was kept under guard until she could be ejected from Iraq. The federal government, which has happily joined Federal False Claims act suits for Medicare/Medicaid and domestic contracting fraud, has declined to sign onto even a single lawsuit against contractors in Iraq. Financial improprieties aside, I would further note that insofar as the rationale for our continued presence in Iraq is humanitarian, unleashing on the country a body of thousands of mercenaries who are subject to neither Iraqi nor American law seems like an odd way of going about that. O'Hanlon + Post = Well, The SameSomeone at The Washington Post editorial pages decided that despite the fact that Michael O'Hanlon (PDF) "has appeared on the major television networks more than 150 times since September 11, 2001 and has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and FOX some 300 times over that same period" that what the world needs is more media exposure for Michael O'Hanlon. Thus, they gave him the chance to respond to his critics. Now, were I an editor I might well have done the same thing. Certainly, at this point it's a newsworthy exercise. So, yeah, I would have given him the space. Given it to him, that is, were he inclined to actually address the substance of the criticisms that have been raised. But we don't get that. On the much-disputed issue of Iraqi civilian casualties he simply reiterates that "the Pentagon showed us data illustrating that overall death tallies from all forms of sectarian violence were down about one-third from last winter's average." People have suggested that this should be seasonally adjusted. O'Hanlon has no response. What's more, while O'Hanlon says he's seen the data, the Pentagon hasn't released it to the public for scrutiny. Leila Fadel reported earlier this month for McClatchey that "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." Does it seem plausible that the Department of Defense has really solid, favorable data about its own activities that it's keeping hidden from public scrutiny? Not to me. And it's on like that. Thousands of words have been spilled criticizing his New York Times op-ed and he hasn't responded to a single one of them. He's just re-iterating his views in a new venue, and though he says this "would be a sad time to conclude we have been defeated," he also concedes that "our strategy for Iraq probably cannot work absent major national political cooperation across sectarian lines." But if our strategy probably can't succeed, then this seems like an ideal time to conclude that we should abandon our strategy. There's no such thing as a non-sad time to admit you've failed, after all. Faint Praise for Mad Men
I can't really say that anything Sacha Zimmerman says in her diatribe against Mad Men is precisely wrong, but the tenor seems way off base to me. The show exhibits the flaw of not having any interesting stories. And this really is a serious flaw. Indeed, it's fatal. People will never look back on Mad Men as one of the peaks of human aesthetic achievement. That said, the show is acted decently enough and the storylines aren't stupid to the point of enragement, they're just dull. And it is, as Zimmerman says, gorgeously designed with a meticulous eye for detail. At the end of the day, it's not as if there's some huge roster of better period dramas from the current issue of quality television. HBO and the BBC took a stab with Rome and now AMC's giving it a shot with Mad Men and both combine some real virtues with some significant flaws. Someday someone will do it better, and they'll probably look back on these shows as important precedents. In the meantime, it's not as if the Summer of 2007 is providing a bounty of alternative televised entertainment -- it seems like an eminently reasonable thing to keep on one's DVR. More on Civilian CasualtiesIlan Goldenberg points out that not only is Michael O'Hanlon's source for the factoid that Bush administration policies are succeeding in reducing civilian casualties in Iraq a bit unreliable (i.e., the administration itself), but they appear to be going out of their way to make it impossible to verify their claims. We do, however, have pretty solid information to note that the number of refugees is on the increase. Reading ComprehensionThe Forward did an interview with Max Blumenthal in which, among other things, they ask him a question about why he thinks he gets a bigger response from videos he makes than from articles he writes. He replies: I wrote in 2005 a piece on the College Republican National Convention, and I asked participants the same question. While the reaction was immense, it wasn’t the same. I think for so many people, reading is just such a rigorous mental exercise; they just can’t handle it. They respond much more to my videos. That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through. In short, he's not sure, but he does think that video reaches a broader audience than he's able to reach with print. Thus, one reason he makes videos is to reach an audience outside of the "liberal intellectual bubble" comprised of the print outlets he's written for. Jamie Kirchick, guest-blogging for Andrew, somehow manages to completely misconstrue this: Portraying himself as a truth-telling hero for capturing the wignuttery of Christian Zionists, this part of the interview is particularly laughable:That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through.Because as we all know The Nation and The Huffington Post are bastions of objectivity and politically diverse readerships. What's the sarcasm for here? I'm baffled. The Fifteen Years' WarRep. Jan Shakowsky took a trip to Iraq: But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus's words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. " 'We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,' " Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time." It really is striking how un-optimistic the more optimistic views of Iraq are when you get down to it. Michael O'Hanlon thinks our strategy "probably can't succeed" unless the political situation in Iraq magically alters. General Petraeus thinks he's making so much progress that the war will need to continue twice as long again as it's already gone on. More to the point, once you're looking at that kind of time frame, all forecasts are nonsensical. We could leave tomorrow and ten years might be plenty of time for Iraq to descend deeper into civil war, for the civil war to end, and then for stability to emerge. There's just no telling. Petraeus is saying that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Casualties in IraqGood deeds from the Associated Press: This year’s U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago. Obviously, someone forgot to tell the AP that Michael O'Hanlon has seen some secret data the Pentagon put together which proves them wrong. They did get this: However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq “has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006.” But who needs statistics to back up a claim like that when unsupported assertions made by interested parties can do just as well? |
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