Here I am reading David Sanger's New York Times account of the latest twists and turns in the White House's Iraq policy, and eventually he's compelled to mention that "circumventing a central government that the United States itself set up is unlikely to prove easy." Similarly, we hear that "Bush and his commanders weighed whether to reward the Sunnis with early provincial elections, restoring a degree of political power to them." This, though, needs to be followed up with the revelation that "calling elections is no longer within the power of the United States."
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the article, however, was an anonymous Defense Department official using the term "bottom-up reconciliation." I see through Google that the term is a big hit already on hawkish blogs and Pentagon talking points. And, indeed, Spencer called it a couple of weeks ago:
In response to the inability of the national government to resolve Iraq's multifaceted sectarian wars, over the last several months, administration mouthpieces have changed the subject. Baghdad politics is outré. The new fashion is what's called "bottom-up reconciliation" -- that is, political advances in Iraq's 18 provinces meant to reveal a new spirit of Iraqi brotherhood. Expect to hear a lot about bottom-up reconciliation in next month's congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. And expect it to be as disingenuous as every other portrayal of political progress in Iraq.
The crux of the matter is that bottom-up reconciliation isn't reconciliation at all. It's the Anbar Awakening business given a new label in the hope of confusing people. But while Sunni Arabs falling out with AQI is welcome, it's by no means the same thing as Sunni Arabs reaching a political accommodation with Shiite Arabs. Rather, while the Sunnis once thought that their best hope of regaining Sunni supremacy was to ally with AQI in fighting an American/Shiite front, they now think the best hope is to get America on their side and use our guns to fight Shiites later.
Meanwhile, you can see in this circumventing talk that the nature of the mission in Iraq has changed yet again. WMD are done, democracy is done, and now even stability is done, and we're trying to circumvent the central government that, 18 months ago, we were desperately trying to bolster.
The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. [...]
When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won.
Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can't leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that'll happen without us around.
Just in case I haven't said this yet -- driving Larry Craig out of the Senate but leaving David Vitter in place is ridiculous. Also -- making it disorderly conduct to hit on a guy in a public place seems deeply at odds with the non-criminal nature of hitting on a woman in a public place. Yes it makes sense to make it a crime to have sex in a bathroom, but no sex was had. I won't miss Craig as a Senator -- he was a lousy one -- but his successor's not going to be any better.
The New York Timestakes a look at some Palestinian boys in Hebron who earn a living by digging through the local Jewish settlers' trash to find salvageable objects.
Okay, Team USA Basketball got the job done in the FIBA Americas Tournament, and we're now guaranteed an Olympic berth. That we had to play for the spot at all is, however, a mere testament to how far the program has fallen after its disappointing performances in '02, '04, '06. To celebrate, a clip from the glory days, Vince Carter's dunk of death:
Onward to Beijing. Basketball's one sport they won't need to cancel due to air quality concerns.
I just saw Superbad last night, and along with Knocked Up it seems to mark a trend (two makes a trend in blog terms) in the direction of a very odd thematic juxtaposition. On one level, these are movies telling guys that what you need to do to get the girl is basically to stop acting like such a fucktard. And in that sense, in addition to being funny movies, they're both movies that have a kind of worthy social message.
On another level, however, both movies seem to imply that there are tons of gorgeous women out there, seemingly intelligent and kind, who are just chomping at the bit for the opportunity to go out with fundamentally unlikable losers if they can just pull themselves together and act like average human beings for a minute. The primary focus is really is on the first theme, but this secondary element is vital to the plot mechanics, and seems to substantially undercut the intended message.
Well, obviously, there are a lot of reasons a person might want to own a home. The question is less why would one want to own a home than why the country has so much public policy aimed specifically at encouraging homeownership. Roger Lowenstein's New York Times Magazinearticle on the housing market doesn't directly address this point, and neither does the chart from that article that I've reproduced to the left. Still, look at the chart.
The highest homeownership rates are in West Virginia, Michigan, Delaware, and Mississippi. I couldn't say for certain, especially since I don't know much about Delaware, but the common factor here seems to be economic stagnation leading to relatively low housing costs plus relatively small numbers of new people moving to the state. Now, it'd be dumb to say that high levels of home ownership are making Mississippi so poor (try history) or causing Michigan's current economic woes (try to auto industry) but it does seem to indicate that boosting homeownership rates doesn't produce any miraculous consequences.
If we didn't subsidize howmownership, people would own less home and own more stocks and bonds instead. Some of that owning "less home" would come from people renting rather than buying, and some would come from buyers simply buying smaller houses. That's be good for the environment, and more capital would be available for business operating in non-housing sectors. Meanwhile, I feel like if we weren't specifically encouraging an ideology of home ownership ("American dream" and all that), you might get less of the risky behavior that seems to be causing trouble of late. I feel like there are a lot of people who would never dream of doing something so exotic as margin trading who've been basically willing to do the same thing with their investment in the housing market. If anything, it seems to me that we should be work at the margin to discourage people from treating their homes as speculative investment commodities.
Nick Confessore and Sarah Kershaw report on fraud in New York State's largely unregulated home health care industry. I don't know anything about that subject except what I read in their article, so you might as well read it rather than pay attention to me. This did, however, kind of leap out:
“To make someone else’s home fabulous, you need a license and your name goes in a state registry,” said Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for the state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. “But to care for someone in their home who is old and infirm, there is no central registry.”
Doesn't it seem like at least half the problem here is that you need a license to be an interior decorator? In general, the amount of seemingly unnecessary small business regulation on a state and local level is fairly mind-boggling and one suspects that 70 percent or so of it is totally unnecessary and only serves the interests of incumbent operators looking to throw roadblocks in the path of potential competition.
What makes Washington special? Every day you can meet someone who turns out to be the smartest, most well-informed person you’ll ever know on a given subject. It’s like living in the best university in the world but without all those essays to write.
Indeed. On the other hand, Washington also kind of sucks. If you could take the people, and the whole "the government's here and so's your job" thing, and put it all someplace else, that'd probably be better.
There is an eerie echo to the President's words today. Five years ago, he made a misleading case to the American people that the trail to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden somehow led through Iraq, and too many in Washington followed without asking the hard questions that should have been raised. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that failure of candor and judgment, and the President is using the politics of fear to continue a wrong-headed policy. It's time to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney strategy and conventional Washington thinking, remove our combat troops from Iraq, mount a long overdue surge of diplomacy, and focus our attention on a resurgent al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Similarly, one plausible (albeit frightening) interpretation of what's happening here is that the Bush administration is blocking legislative efforts at an approach to Iran centered around sanctions and carrots specifically in order to be able to proclaim that the diplomatic approach "failed" and military strikes are needed. So, okay, I don't think Obama's trying to grease the skids for war. At the same time, his Daily News op-ed did get the head and subhead "Hit Iran where it hurts: Democratic presidential hopeful takes a get-tough stance against tyrant of Tehran." Writers don't pick their own headlines, but you've got to imagine that the campaign signed off on that framing on some level. What game is Obama playing? Well, according to the Jewish Week:
Capitol Hill insiders say Obama genuinely believes in the necessity of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions — but also that his championing of the Iran divestment measure is part of a concerted effort to reassure Jewish voters that began with his March speech to a Chicago gathering of AIPAC.
“There are soft spots in his campaign,” said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn. “He doesn’t have a long record; he got negative attention for suggesting he would negotiate with Syria and Iran. So he wants to stake out a piece of the Mideast question where he knows he’s not going to get any Jewish flak.”
Basically, there seems to be one policy here, namely that curbing Iranian nuclear ambitions is an important priority that needs to be accomplished through a greater commitment to diplomacy on both the carrots (willing to hold talks without preconditions) and sticks (sanctions) front, and that a war with Iran would be a bad idea. But there also seem to be two messages here, one about a "get-tough stance" that's supposed to "reassure Jewish voters" and another about an "eerie echo" that's aimed at other people. I'm not sure how long an Iran message divided against itself can stand. I'm also not sure what the evidence is that Jewish voters (as opposed to AIPAC board members) have unusually hawkish views on Iran.
I mentioned this in a sarcastic mode, but Kevin Drum's right that it's worth considering the possibility that the essential "plan" in Iraq is just to stay there, in force, vaguely allied with whichever side (or sides) we perceive to be willing to ally with us, until, eventually, the civil war ends, a brilliant victory is portrayed, and the hippie peacenik scum are told to beat it. After all, civil wars do end if you just wait long enough.
On the other hand, the Tamil Tigers have been fighting for about thirty years and there's no particular sign of Sri Lanka's civil war coming to an end. Peace does seem to possibly be dawning in Northern Ireland (although not totally) but the current phase of fighting there's been going on for almost forty years. Meanwhile, at times it seems to me that the US military is leaning in the direction of exacerbating problems by introducing more and deadlier weapons into the area while tending to fragment political authority as elites lose authority (but gain guns) through association with us.
But it also has a certain delicacy, in particular in its openness to alternative histories, alternative political arrangements. “It is worth considering how the Middle East might have evolved had Arab rulers accepted the partition of Palestine,” [Ruth Wisse] writes. There would have been some voluntary shifts of population. Arab Palestine might have federated with Jordan. Regional priorities would have dictated new patterns of trade, commerce and development. Jews and Arabs who wanted to live in the other’s land could have traveled back and forth.
I'm not sure about the Palestinians federating with Jordan, but this basically seems right to me. The world would have been a much better place had the Arab states accepted the UN partition plan. But Kirchick runs with this observation in a weird direction:
Indeed, imagine how history might have changed had the Arab powers accepted the mere presence of a Jewish state in their midst. Devastating wars would have been averted, radical Islam would not have the appeal it currently does, economies would be on the rise. Why is the existence of Israel such a big deal, not just for the Arabs, but for gullible and guilt-ridden Westerners who insist that the Palestinian issue must be solved before any other Middle Eastern problem can be tackled?
The establishment of Israel was a big deal to the Arabs because of the legacy of imperialism. Similarly, many Westerners think progress on the Palestinian issue is vital to making progress on other issues in the region because this is a very big deal to Arabs. I don't think friends of Israel do themselves any favors by refusing to recognize these basic facts.
In this effort, Rice's bond with Bush has emerged as her key asset -- but possibly also her critical weakness. It has made her the president's top foreign policy confidante and helped her cultivate a public image imbued with power and influence. But at the same time, friends and former colleagues marvel at how Rice has been transformed by the president she so devotedly serves -- from a hardheaded foreign policy "realist" to a wholehearted supporter of Bush's belief in the power of freedom and democracy.
But, of course, this wouldn't be a weakness at all if the beliefs to which Rice converted herself hadn't proven to be catastrophic failures. But into that context, Rice's critical weakness is less her loyalty, than her advocacy of incredibly misguided policies.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Braden Cox's take on post-sale restrictions of the first sale doctrine. Braden did a good job of explaining why limiting the first sale doctrine would be good for software companies. But he did not, as far as I can see, provide any explanation for how limiting the first sale doctrine would benefit society as a whole, which is what copyright is supposed to accomplish.[...]
But the fundamental issue here is that the convenience of the software industry is not a sufficient argument for any given change to copyright law. The copyright system is supposed to promote "the progress of science and the useful arts," not to make Steve Ballmer's life easier. The two aren't always in conflict, of course, but they're also rarely in perfect alignment.
It's really impressive that IP owners have done such a good job of obscuring the basic point of intellectual property law. Impressive as a PR achievement, but also extremely unfortunate. It is, however, an important point. The nation's IP regime is supposed to serve the public interest, not the business models of today's IP-creating companies. Keep that in mind as you ponder magazine cover stories about whether or not Rick Rubin can save the music industry. Even if he can't save Columbia Records -- even if nobody can save any of the major labels -- their fate isn't identical with the fate of music, or even the fate of the music business. Once-dominant firms like IBM and AT&T fell very far without that in any way meaning the collapse of the computer or telecom businesses.
Steve Clemons has more than you probably want to read on the subject of different presidential candidates' positions on US-Cuba relations. The main point, though, is that Chris Dodd has boldly challenged the status quo, Barack Obama has put forward more modest proposals for change, and Hillary Clinton and the Republicans all support the status quo policies that have been failing for decades.
John Edwards wins endorsements from the Steelworkers and Minworkers unions. This reminds me that I forgot to post on Hillary Clinton's endorsement by the Machinists union last week. I found this kind of puzzling. Word on the street was that they did this because they think she's going to win, and they wanted to endorse the winner. That makes some sense to me, but if that's what you're going to do then it really seems like you need to do a better job of pretending that's not why you did it. Sending the message the machinists sent -- "we think you're not the best choice on the merits, but we'll support you anyway because we're desperate for access" -- seems designed to minimize the union's leverage.
It seems to me that if your union likes Edwards but thinks Clinton is going to win, then the right thing to do is to stay neutral. Or, even better, is to follow the Firefighters and find a second-tier candidate who's rock-solid on your key issues, though the match between Dodd and the Firefighters was unusually good.
Nir Rosen's super-pessimistic take is a useful corrective to the happy-talk prevailing in the District. Of course, maybe Bush's surprise visit to Iraq will singlehandedly inspire the troops to acquire magical powers that conjure up forces of liberalism and compromise, thus laying the groundwork for stability.
"Matt," asks commenter Fletch, "Do you have any immediate family that were actually union members?" Nothing beats the old challenge to authenticity. But, actually, yes. My immediate family contains three people. My younger brother is a college student and not a union member. My late mother was, however, a member of the Newspaper Guild for a time (itself a sector of the CWA) as was my father's mother. My father's been a member of the Writer's Guild of America - East (an AFL-CIO affiliate, unlike the other Hollywood unions) for many years and has held union offices, participated in collective bargaining, etc.
Arguably, none of this is especially "blue collar" but one can also argue that it's experience with these sort of unions -- unions for professional workers in information age industry -- that makes me well-aware that the union concept isn't a dinosaur of a past era, but a vital part of the quest for a democratic economy. My father's father, meanwhile, eventually became a writer but when he was young was deeply involved (as was his entire family) in labor agitation in the cigar factories of Tampa, Florida. Studs Turkel recorded some of him talking about this for his books on the Depression and I believe the oral history is available here.
The Washington Posttakes a look at the final days of shooting on The Wire and reveals a little bit of irony: "For the past two years, a good chunk of "The Wire," the HBO show that critics have praised for the grittiness of its inner-city vérité, has been filmed in an anonymous soundstage in the burbs -- a soundstage that reportedly will be turned into a massive Wegmans Food Market."
Yes, it's a bit like picking sides in the Iran-Iraq War. Nevertheless, in light of the President's efforts to convince the country that he has no idea why the Iraqi Army was disbanded, Paul Bremer's decision to unleash the documentary evidence to The New York Times is certainly of interest. Bremer seems to have the goods here:
“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” Mr. Bremer wrote in a letter that was drafted on May 20, 2003, and sent to the president on May 22 through Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense.
After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.
One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”
Of course, maybe when Bush said Bremer had his "full support and confidence" as he conducted these measures he had his fingers crossed behind his back and didn't really mean it. Bet the liberal media didn't consider that angle.
I almost missed the key point because the article's written in feature style rather than with a standard inverted pyramid lead, but Sudarsan Raghavan's story in The Washington Post contains what certainly looks like a well-documented charge that General Petraeus is creating Potemkin villages in Iraq:
Nearly every week, American generals and politicians visit Combat Outpost Gator, nestled behind a towering blast wall in the Dora market. They arrive in convoys of armored Humvees, sometimes accompanied by helicopter gunships, to see what U.S. commanders display as proof of the effectiveness of a seven-month-long security offensive, fueled by 30,000 U.S. reinforcements. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military leader in Iraq, frequently cites the market as a sign of progress.
"This is General Petraeus's baby," said Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, 24, of Winfield, Kan., as he set out on a patrol near the market on a hot evening in mid-August. [...]
Even U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Petraeus's showcase remain skeptical. "Personally, I think it's a false representation," Campbell said, referring to the portrayal of the Dora market as an emblem of the surge's success. "But what can I say? I'm just doing my job and don't ask questions."
The article goes on to make clear that though visitors see what they're told is a marketplace returning to life thanks to American security measures, no such thing is actually happening. The marketplace is, in fact, kept safe through a combination of massive influx of American manpower, severe restraints on the operations of the Iraqi police, and draconian security measures. These last ("Vehicles are not allowed inside for fear of car bombs. Customers are body-searched at checkpoints") render the marketplace non-viable as an actual venue for commerce. Many of the 300+ stores are said not to sell any meaningful goods, and the whole thing only stays open for a few hours. The businesses are viable under these conditions because of large American cash subsidies and direct expenditures on capital improvements. Thus, when visitors are brought by during the market's few open hours, they see what appears to be a viable marketplace, even though it is, in fact, no such thing.
I read Greg Sargent's trenchant analysis of the media's coverage of the "surge" the other day, and while I agree with essentially all the points he made, it is worth saying that the past couple of weeks have seen quite a few great articles like this one from Raghavan, the AP and McClatchey looking at casualty counts, etc. This really is one of those times when press critics in the blogosphere would have basically nothing to run with if not for our ability to leverage other, better articles like Raghavan's against the worse coverage.
Another day, another Mike O'Hanlon op-ed in The New York Times. Looking at his chart and comparing August 2006 to August 2007, it's shocking how non-impressive the quantifiable measures of progress are. O'Hanlon once again doesn't address criticisms of his civilian casualties figures. He acknowledges that the political situation is FUBAR. He doesn't remark on whether he sees the dramatic rise in the number of Iraqis held captive by the US -- from 27,000 a year ago to 60,000 today -- as progress or what.
Ilan Goldenberg counts the ways. It seems that when a Shiite kills a Shiite (as happens frequently in the south) that doesn't count. Similarly, when a Sunni kills a Sunni, that doesn't count. Nor does it count when the death was caused by a car bomb since, obvious, well, um, I couldn't even say. The exclusion of Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence seems like a clever-if-underhanded exploitation of critics' tendency to deploy the phrase "sectarian violence" even though there's a lot of politically motivated violence that isn't sectarian in nature. The car bomb exclusion seems entirely unprincipled.
Shannon Brownlee's guest-blogging at The Washington Monthly about the aspect of the health care issue I don't see any politicians wanting to tackle -- the fact that doctors frequently overtreat patients in ways that are sometimes directly harmful and even when not harmful per se, contribute to a terrible maldistribution of health care resources. That's not to say that America has "too much health care," but rather that at the same time as many Americans have too little health care other Americans are, in fact, getting too much. Doctors are, in essence, prescribing all the treatment that will get paid for -- which means too much treatment for people with a large ability to pay, and too little for people with little ability to pay.
Brownlee's alternative is to turn doctors into salaried employees charged with doing the job of keeping people healthy, rather than into fee-for-service professionals whose level of compensation depends on how much treatment they prescribe. That seems appealing to me, but it's considerably more radical than anything being contemplated in the political system right now.
Related to today's Bremer versus Bush sniping, check out The Atlantic re-posted December 2005 James Fallows article "Why Iraq Has No Army" (short version: because Bush is a bad President, and his key subordinates are also bad at their jobs).
Edwards, IMHO, enters a crucial period between now and Halloween. He somehow needs to shake things up. He should take some chances -- perhaps a junket to Afghanistan to remind Americans about our abandoned efforts there and that whats-his-name who masterminded the September 11 attacks, or he might pair up now with a vice presidential running mate to earn some free media. There's not room in the Democratic primary for two Hillary-alternative candidates, and if Edwards wants to steal that mantle from the far better funded Barack Obama, now's the time for him bust some moves.
Honestly, this doesn't seem like brain surgery to me -- the chance-taking, things-shaking-upping position to take would be to join Bill Richardson in calling for a real withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The fact that none of the main three candidates have engaged with each other on the Iraq issue and, instead, all seem to have combined to prevent efforts by Biden (from the right) and Richardson (from the left) to make this a big deal seems pretty weird to me.
Speaking of the weird Iraq debate inside the Democratic primary, one notable characteristic has been a tendency by some of the candidates to plead logistical incapacity to leave quickly. As Lawrence J. Korb, Max Bergmann, Sean Duggan, and Peter Juul argue in a Center for American Progress report, this is basically BS: "It is certainly possible to conduct a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces, in perhaps as short a time as three months if the U.S. military (in the words of Iraq war veteran and military analyst Phillip Carter) were to effectively conduct an 'invasion in reverse.'" That said, I also tend to agree with them that a somewhat more measured pace of redeployment would be wiser, if only because it can be conducted in a more orderly manner:
Deciding between a swift or extended redeployment, however, is a false dilemma. While both options are logistically feasible, this report will demonstrate that an orderly and safe withdrawal is best achieved over a 10- to 12-month period. Written in consultation with military planners and logistics experts, this report is not intended to serve as a playbook for our military planners but rather as a guide to policymakers and the general public about what is realistically achievable. A massive, yet safe and orderly redeployment of U.S. forces, equipment, and support personnel is surely daunting—but it is well within the exceptional logistical capabilities of the U.S. military.
The full report is here in PDF and here's an MP3 of a conference call on the report.
In the course of diavlogging with Reza Aslan, Eli Lake takes on the $3 billion question: What is the United States getting in exchange for its money? Eli's initial answer is to try to argue that Israel is performing valuable services for the United States by serving as a part of the broader military-industrial complex, working on the development of new armaments. This doesn't really make sense, since defense contractors -- American, Israeli, French, whatever -- get paid for their work as is, so it's not clear why the Israeli government would need extra payment. And, indeed, in the course of talking about this, Eli seems to turn around and come to a position that I think is more accurate, namely that the integration of Israeli firms and IDF priorities into American military R&D and procurement strategies is further assistance to Israel on top of the money we give them.
Eli later floats another idea, namely that Israel is providing us with valuable counterterrorism training. It's certainly my understanding that there are a number of Israeli firms with expertise in things like bomb-proofing buildings that now have an expanding North American client base. Here, though, it's again unclear why it would be necessary to give the Israeli government money in order to do this. Foreign companies sell things in the United States all the time. Things like AIPAC's December 5, 2006 memo "United States Looks to Israel for Homeland Security Expertise" (PDF) don't make a particularly compelling case:
A year after establishing the partnership, both sides agreed to further commit to developing new technologies by creating the first of its kind Maryland-Israel Development Fund, a $1 million fund to support joint product development projects between high-tech companies in Maryland and Israel. The fund is managed by the Maryland-Israel Development Center, a non-profit organization established in 1992, along with Maryland's Department of Business and Economic Development and Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. [...]
The agreement was signed at the beginning of a week-long Illinois trade mission to Israel during which representatives from Illinois-based homeland security companies met with Israeli security industry leaders to explore future business opportunities. During the mission, the two governments also announced a business oriented exchange program to bring entrepreneurs from Illinois and Israel together to commercialize research and develop new technologies. These initiatives were launched by the Illinois Homeland Security Market Development Bureau, a government organization charged with attracting homeland security companies to the state, and the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.
These sound like fairly banal state-level business initiatives that, insofar as they're a good idea, can get by on their own terms. Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor is, presumably, interested in exploring commercial opportunities wherever they can be found. It's hard to see Israel cutting these programs off if aid were reduced.
Meanwhile, Eli also concedes that he "can't make the argument that Israel really needs that aid." But there's the core part of the Walt-Mearsheimer argument that I agree with (some of their other ideas, particularly about Iraq and Syria, seem wrong to me and their brief, deliberately one-sided account of Israeli history seemed like overkill). You have all this money going to a country that doesn't really need it, and that country doesn't do anything of particular value for us in exchange for that. Why? The existence of an unusually powerful domestic lobby on its behalf. Meanwhile, because the aid's existence is tied to a lobby that's very influential, particularly on the Hill, it's very hard for American presidents to use the aid as leverage, the way one normally would with a proxy.
The nation is now readying itself to assess America’s Iraq policy against the progress report General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker present to Congress. On September 13, leading Brookings experts representing a uniquely broad spectrum of views will examine the implications of a pivotal Iraq progress report. Specifically, they will review the details of the surge report card; assess if President Bush’s “surge” strategy is working; should be modified or abandoned; and provide an assessment of the way ahead in Iraq.
Participants will include Philip H. Gordon, senior fellow; Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow; Kenneth M. Pollack, senior fellow and director of research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy; Bruce Riedel, senior fellow; and Peter Rodman, senior fellow. Brookings President Strobe Talbott will provide introductory remarks. Carlos Pascual, vice president and director of Foreign Policy Studies, will moderate the panel. After the program, panelists will take audience questions.
UPDATE: Bruce Reidel, it should be said, is a good guy. Still, this overall situation is absurd. Would it really kill them to invite people representing an actual broad range of views?
Kay Steiger had some difficulty fitting her box spring up her staircase and found some instructions about how to cut it and reassemble it. I actually had a similar problem with my own box spring when moving into our current abode. Kriston and I were, however, able to solve the dilemma with the following technique:
Try for a while, fail, and give up.
Finish moving the other stuff with the help of your friends.
Sam Rosenfeld and I used to have a joke, based on Gene Sperling's book, about writing a counter-intuitive pro-Stalin tract called The Original Pro-Growth Progressive. It hasn't come together, but according to Andrew Bacevich the world now does have a somewhat different new pro-Stalin tract: "While frankly exploring the full extent of Stalin’s brutalities and their impact on the Soviet people, Roberts also uncovers evidence leading to the stunning conclusion that Stalin was both the greatest military leader of the twentieth century and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world."
This comes via McMegan. Meanwhile, Bacevich unleashes a level of shrillness I was pondering this afternoon at the gym: "In this sense, Stalin’s commitment to 'freedom and peace between peoples' bears comparison with President Bush’s post-9/11 commitment to eliminating tyranny." In some ways, though, I think this may be too hard on Stalin as his plan for Soviet domination of Eastern Europe at least actually did result in decades of Soviet domination. Bush can't even get the oil pumps working in Iraq.
For the rest of us, though, it's a very good book. Indeed, it's put into my mind some disquiet with the sort of economist-bashing that some of my cronies like Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes seem to have decided (figures like Max Sawicky and Dean Baker, themselves economists with credentials are, needless to say, influential here) is integral to the project of progressive economic policy. One effect of the sort of characterizations of mainstream economics that you get from Chris and Ezra is to, in effect, propagate the notion that conservative economic policies are well-supported by a professional consensus inside the economics world.
Chait's book very convincingly shows that on the key dogma of present-day Republican Party policy thinking -- a monomaniacal obsession with cutting taxes -- this simply isn't the case. The ideas the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, and all the rest are working with are marginal, crackpot notions that are being mainstreamed through relentless message discipline. There isn't some army of orthodox neoclassical economists out there who think that returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that sound education policy requires expended tax breaks for rich people etc.
Now, Ezra liked the book, too, so maybe there's not a ton of tension between these two arguments at the end of the day. But insofar as there is, I tend to see Chait's strain of argumentation as the more important one. It's be fine to see the politics of the economy conducted as a discussion among reasonable people who put a different weight on the reality of market failures, on the one hand, and the problems of public choice theory and regulatory failure on the other. What we have instead is a situation where, as Chait shows, vast areas of the policy debate are dominated by liars and crazy people like The Wall Street Journal's editorialists.
A New York Times article on Iran by Michael Slackman argues that we're seeing an instance of the familiar phenomenon where international isolation and efforts to cripple the Iranian economy are strengthening the hand of hard-liners. There's a solid case, in my view, for certain kinds of sanctions on Iran where the sanctions in question are narrowly tailored toward the objective of impeding Iran's nuclear program as such. Broader campaigns of economic warfare, by contrast, don't really have a great track-record of success.
One sometimes suspects that the best way to topple a repressive regime like the one in Teheran would be to kill it with kindness. A more prosperous Iran would be a country with more and better televisions, computers, radios, cell phones and therefore access to information and ability to disseminate it. It would be a place where people had more money to spare for civil society groups, and perhaps more leisure time available with political -- or politicizable -- activities. Of course, that's hardly guaranteed to work either (look at China, or Singapore) but outside of the rather unusual case of South Africa, it's hard to see this kind of economic coercion persuading a regime to change its nature.
For more limited goals, though, you can imagine it working much better. Hence the fatal ambiguity of America's policies toward Iran. Getting Teheran to agree to verifiable nuclear disarmament would be extracting a big concession from them. But it wouldn't threaten the regime in a core way. Economic coercion could work. But if we really do want to move forward on that limited goal, we would need to adopt a posture suggesting that our goals really are limited and that a disarmed Iran would get normal diplomatic recognition, a full end to economic coercion, and a healthy respect for its interests in Iraq and Iran. Most generally, it would mean agreeing to treat Iran as a potential ally of convenience against al-Qaeda rather than as an integral part of some ill-defined "mean Muslims" menace.
The Bush administration has, of course, steadfastly refused to do so. And that's what makes it so hard to evaluate things like Democratic support for ever-increasing levels of coercion. Those kinds of policies could be good or could be bad all depending on the context. Meanwhile, it's hard to know what kind of broader context different Democrats see as appropriate since it's not considered politically wise to talk about things like Iran's various spurned peace initiatives over the years.
It looks like Larry Craig may not resign after all. I have mixed feelings about this. On the merits, nothing Craig has done -- being gay, tapping feet in Minneapolis -- seems to me to warrant resignation or even to be wrong at all. The hypocrisy rankles, of course, but I don't see being a hypocritical anti-gay politician as any worse than being an earnest one. And in some ways the weird, covert nature of Craig's gay life suggests the possible existence of a level of sincerity and authenticity to his his anti-gay political convictions -- perhaps both are driven by a very real conviction that some of his deepest desires are deeply immoral and require repression by the state. Who knows? I'd never vote for Craig, but my reasons for not voting for him have nothing to do with what happened in Minneapolis.
But, of course, Craig isn't mounting that sort of bold defense that admits he is what he is and denounces the "pre-Stonewall morality fable" unfolding here. Instead, he's rather implausibly denying that he ever went in for anonymous gay sex. At this point, Craig becomes a liar and a buffoon in ways that seem to be firing offenses on their own terms.
Meanwhile, Senator Vitter who at least seems to have committed acts that violate laws that Senator Vitter seems to support, is sitting pretty in his Senate seat.
It's somehow become incredibly gauche to point this out, but most indications are that either George W. Bush isn't very bright and doesn't really understand the issues he's dealing with. Take this excerpt from Robert Draper's new book:
"The job of the president," he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, "is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can't play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You've gotta think, think BIG. The Iranian issue," he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin, "is the strategic threat right now facing a generation of Americans, because Iran is promoting an extreme form of religion that is competing with another extreme form of religion. Iran's a destabilizing force. And instability in that part of the world has deeply adverse consequences, like energy falling in the hands of extremist people that would use it to blackmail the West. And to couple all of that with a nuclear weapon, then you've got a dangerous situation. ... That's what I mean by strategic thought. I don't know how you learn that.
Draper's being mean about the food. But Bush isn't misspeaking here or making some gaffes. He's laying out the view that Iran is a strategic threat to a generation of Americans. The nature of this threat is that Iran is a "destabilizing force" and that this destabilizing force is threatening because instability in that part of the world could lead to oil fields coming under the control of "extremist people" who "would use it to blackmail the West." Long story short, his entire vision of the strategic threat from Iran is driven by fear of the oil weapon.
Do we think Bush has rigorously studied the considerable discussion of this issue in the policy community? After all, for Iran -- or even a new "Greater Iran" that's extended its influence over Iraq -- to attempt to blackmail us with its control over oil supplies would be the equivalent of me threatening to chop my head off and then bludgeon you with it. What's more, as a means of hedging against the risk of Iranian irrationality, massively expensive military engagement in the Persian Gulf seems like a poor choice. Why not instead invest hundreds of billions in alternative energy research? Research that would prove useful not only in the unlikely event that Iran tries to blackmail us, but also just in terms of cleaner air.
I agree with Robert Farley that America's involvement in the "Anbar awakening" business needs to be understood as an abandonment of real state-building goals in Iraq, but I'm not sure the name "anti-state building" works. We're not, after all, building an anti-state. We're unbuilding the already barely-there Iraqi state. It's state destruction.
Looking back at it, I always thought this was the flaw in Thomas Ricks' otherwise brilliant book, Fiasco. In order to highlight the destructive nature of the policies pursued during the early phases of the war, Ricks will often shed light on some localized successes where smart commanders build sound relationships with existing actors. Counterinsurgency done right, in other words. What Ricks never gets into is the question of whether or not such approach ever had any hopes of long-term viability. I tend to have my doubts. The problem is that the local elites over here tended to have visions of Iraq that were incompatible with those of the local elites over there. Iraq's Sunni Arabs wanted -- and by all accounts still want -- Sunni supremacy. Meanwhile, Iraq's Shiite Arabs really did want far-reaching de-Baathification and other anti-Sunni measures.
At any rate, you might think I'm wrong about that counterfactual. Maybe factional feelings wouldn't have hardened as much if the whole thing had been better-organized in the first place. But I think it's a reasonable concern. And given that we didn't organize it that way in the first place, and that feelings have now hardened after years of civil conflict, I think it's a crucial one. Under the circumstances, Petraeus' strategy amounts to fueling several of Iraq's main conflicts.
Some points in the wake of Germany's apparent foiling of an apparently serious terrorist attack:
We're seeing here once again that the big risk factor is the presence of a large, deeply alienated Muslim population in your country. That means the locus of the short-run problem is Western Europe rather than the United States. It also means that we need to put a high premium on understanding the aspects of America that make the country relatively friendly to Muslim integration and strengthen them.
It seems slightly perverse to worry that an al-Qaeda sanctuary might emerge in some part of Iraq when, right now, there are al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan where it seems these guys trained.
Stopping terrorist plots turns out to involve an awful lot of police and intelligence work. You can't take these guys down with a DD(X) or an Osprey or a Raptor.
It still seems to be the case that nobody is anywhere near approaching the sophistication or lethality of a 9/11-scale plot. Back in the fall of 2001, I, at least, was very afraid that there might be much worse things in the works.
Other than that, who knows? Oftentimes, these stories have ended up looking different a week after the arrests than they did on the day of, but it seems legit to me.
Robert Farley raises the politically awkward point that Pentagon calculations of deaths in Iraq don't count up how many Iraqis are being killed by the American military. Nor, one assumes, are whatever contractor-inflicted casualties that occur being counted. It seems unlikely that General Petraeus has eliminated all human and mechanical error from the war-fighting process.
Mr. ElBaradei has responded to similar problems by turning on Iraq's accusers. In his first report to the council, Mr. ElBaradei argued against the logic of Resolution 1441, saying that inspectors could be used to contain Iraq even if Saddam Hussein didn't cooperate. He has used his two subsequent presentations to dispute evidence offered by Britain and the United States, while coming close to declaring Iraq free of any nuclear program. Last Friday, Mr. ElBaradei made headlines by denouncing one secondary piece of evidence, about an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain fissile material from Niger, as a forgery. But the allegation is not central to the case against Saddam Hussein, and it did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council. Such diversions have lamentably become the substitute for U.N. oversight of real Iraqi disarmament; weeks or even months more of them may help unify the international community, but can yield little else.
Fortunately, the president took the Post's advice, ignored ElBaradei, and invaded Iraq, thus dismantling Saddam's advanced nuclear weapons program leading to the deaths of tends -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of people at a price of hundreds of billions of dollars. The war also had the perverse consequence of speeding Iran's nuclear weapons program, leading to today's Post editorial slamming ElBaradei once again for, once again, failing to fall in line for the war parade:
Mr. ElBaradei was lionized by opponents of the Iraq war for debunking Bush administration charges that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear program before the 2003 invasion. Emboldened, he has now set himself a new task: stopping what he considers to be the "crazies" in Washington who "want to say, 'Let us go and bomb Iran.' "
Hiatt just can't imagine why anyone might regard the Bush administration's Iran policy as anything other than a good-faith effort to resolve the nuclear standoff diplomatically.
I watched a ton of political coverage on MSNBC yesterday, and there was this one really maddening part where a whole bunch of talking heads kept saying that with his formal announcement, Fred Thompson would now start getting more scrutiny. But nobody offered any scrutiny. He's got what seems like a good ad to me:
Still, though, I wonder about the scrutiny. My recollection was that in 1994, Republicans were swept into office. They then attempted a series of legislative initiatives that became incredibly unpopular. They lost a lot of seats in 1996, and Bill Clinton pummeled Bob Dole with ads grounded in the "Dole-Gingrich" record. Things like "The Dole/Gingrich budget tried to cut Medicare $270 billion," or "President Clinton strengthened school anti-drug programs. Dole/Gingrich tried to slash them fifty percent." Then Republicans lost ground again in 1998. Then, in 2000, they picked a nominee whose main qualifications were that he had high name recognition but wasn't associated with the 90s-vintage congressional GOP. Indeed, this very nominee lambasted congressional Republicans for their efforts to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor."
At any rate, I don't really remember any of this because I was 15 during the 1996 campaign, but I'm not aware of any evidence that a record of Medicare cuts and slashing school anti-drug programs has become more popular over the past ten years. This seems like a potentially giant problem for Thompson as a general election candidate.
It turns out that Megan and I aren't the only Atlantic folks who've taken note of Geoffrey Robert's Stalin’s Wars. Ben Schwartz took it up in the course of a review essay in the May issue, where he makes the very good point that a kind of Allied egomania and preference for neat morality tales leads conventional English language histories to wildly understate the significance of the Eastern Front:
For four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in an unrelenting series of military operations over a front extending more than 1,000 miles. (At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehr‑ macht divisions.) Eighty-eight percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht’s capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, “the one name,” Davies properly asserts, “which all historians of the Second World War should remember.”
All quite right. Schwartz concludes:
To be sure, part of Stalin’s accomplishment lay in his allowing his most talented subordinates to do their job, an attribute of all great warlords. From late 1942 on, he encouraged greater initiative and flexibility within the high command, and he presided over a military organization that fostered increased operational and tactical dynamism and innovation. But the new accounts—which even draw on transcripts of telephone and telegraphic conversations with his front-line generals—all go further than that, and put Stalin at the center of the Soviets’ awesome military achievement. Davies’s conclusion, that the victory was Stalin’s, would seem inarguable. Roberts’s unpalatable one, which goes one step further, will confound those who like their history neat:
To make so many mistakes and to rise from the depths of such defeat to go on to win the greatest military victory in history was a triumph beyond compare … Stalin … saved the world for democracy.
I kind of like this ironic idea, but I imagine one could wriggle out of it. To say that Stalin "saved the world for democracy" seems to imply that had the Red Army not performed as well as it did in 1943 and '44, that the Allies, too might have perished. But in any counterfactual of the war in Europe, the crucial period is the summer of 1945, when the United States perfected the art of the nuclear bomb. A Nazi triumph at Kursk wouldn't have allowed the Germans to invade the British isles in time to stop the United States from commencing the nuclear destruction of German cities. Now, obviously, the world would have been a very different place in this scenario, but democracy still lives even without Stalin.
Um . . . does Greenpeace really want to be suggesting that they're planning on unleashing some kind of youth-driven terrorist campaign if congress doesn't act swiftly on climate change?
I could, however, see this as a promising movie concept. It's 2011, there's still no carbon tax or cap-and-trade system in place, so a bunch of 16 year-olds band together to sabotage the global economy gleefully killing oldsters wherever they find them. For ideological balance, you could work a Social Security angle into it.
I have to say that I found McMegan's attacks on Paul Krugman to be pretty weak. Apart from pointing to some shortcoming of his New York Times columns that are intrinsic to the format, the gripe is, I guess, that he doesn't write "about economics" anymore. But Megan also derides his writing about health care and inequality. Or maybe she's lumping those into the "not economics" category because she doesn't agree with his conclusions. We also seem to be dealing with the view that it's incredibly gauche of Krugman to be going on and on about how George W. Bush is really bad at running the country.
This, though, is a pretty important topic!
And though Krugman's position on the "does Bush suck?" question is a fairly banal one in September 2007, he's been consistently -- and presciently -- adhering to this view even in times like September 2003 when it wasn't a popular one. And, yes, he writes about non-economics subjects sometimes, too. He wasn't, after all, hired to write the "economic scene" column, he was hired to be an op-ed columnist. Basically, I think Megan wishes Krugman were less liberal. Or would write less about the topics he has liberal views on. He still does, after all, do some long format writing like thisNew York Review of Books piece on health care, this one on Social Security, this piece for The Nation on class stratification, thisRolling Stone essay on inequality, etc.
Richard Cohen sure is weird. In the course of a totally unfunny satirical column, one item is "A survey of political bloggers showed that 94 percent of them had never been out of the country or read anything other than a Harry Potter book."
This seems like a curious premise for a joke. Political bloggers, being wealthier and better-educated than the general population, are surely much more likely to travel abroad and read books than are the general public. Certainly the idea that bloggers don't read anything at all is ludicrous. All high-volume political bloggers do is read! Mock us for our poor social skills if you must, but we certainly read.
"Women 'choosier' over partners" reports the BBC. What's more, "Men look for beauty, while women go for wealth when it comes to assessing future partners, researchers say." Shocking stuff. Kay Steiger points out that these conclusions are based on . . . a study of "the behaviour of 46 people taking part in a speed-dating session." That's pathetic.
But it's also emblematic of what's wrong with so much research in this vein. Even the flimsiest of experimental results will get pursued and widely publicized if it just so happens to have the virtue of re-enforcing our traditional stereotypes about gender behavior, and then get swiftly pronounced as providing confirmation for "evolutionary theories in psychology." Now, there are so many stereotypes about gender difference that it's almost a mathematical certainty that some of them are grounded in reality. But the way proper science normally works is that it turns out to confound many of our expectations (heavy objects fall at the same speed as light ones; time changes when you speed up) while also explaining why it is that things seem to be the way they are (air resistance; you need to move really, really fast to notice it). So much research in this vein, however, is just incredibly sketchy and obviously designed to confirm what's already conventional wisdom.
At any rate, unlike a lot of my political fellow travelers I don't think this kind of inquiry into the evolutionary basis of human behavior and the potential to discover meaningful, innate differences in the average distribution of mental traits between men and women to be inherently wrongheaded or absurd, but I think people need to be much more careful about this stuff. To have an entire research program that seems dedicated to upholding old-timey folk wisdom is odd and an awful lot of the specific empirical research turns out to be incredibly hollow. I'd highly recommend David Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature for more in this vein.
David Aviles, Ian Ebert and Lauren Tombari all ask (to quote Mr Aviles), "If [Indians] had such a large population, why hadn't they developed as much as other countries?" The answer to this very important question is complicated, but part of it surely is that evaluating relative levels of technological development is not so easy, and that it isn't at all clear that native peoples were less developed in this area than Europeans or Asians. As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.
And there you have it. This, of course, meshes nicely with the point that Europeans didn't so much defeat the native population with superior war-making abilities as they did simply take advantage of massive levels of epidemic disease which killed off most of their foes.
One of the points that Jon Chait's book, The Big Con makes is that the central element of the Republican Party's tax policy -- lower taxes rates will lead to higher tax revenues -- is a discredited crackpot notion. Megan McArdle takes on the interesting task of denying that this is, in fact, an influential idea:
His primary exhibits for the nefarious influence of supply-side policy are: Larry Lindsay, Dick Cheney, Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski, and George Gilder. Cheney I give you, but Larry Lindsay was drummed out of the administration in disgrace (for unrelated reasons) even before Bush's major tax cut, and Chait somehow neglects to mention the more conventional economists who have occupied the job since. Jack Kemp hasn't had access to serious power since I was snoring my way through Algebra I, and what power he did have was over HUD. Moreover, though I agree that Jude Wanniski and George Gilder are barking moonbats, they have, to put it kindly, limited influence on today's Republican party; which is hardly surprising given that Wanniski was kicked out of the party in disgrace before he died in 2005, and George Gilder has turned his attentions to that hugely influention Republican mouthpiece, the Gilder Technology report. This motley collection of names is hardly proof that the Supply Siders Have Taken Over the Building.
Chait's point, however, was that the very same ideas espoused by these crazy people continue to control the GOP policy agenda. To get around this point, Megan seems to elide the small fact that Dick Cheney is Vice President of the United States. One other believer who has some impact on public policy is a fellow by the name of George W. Bush:
You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase. See, some people are going to say, well, you cut taxes, you're going to have less revenue. No, that's not what happened.
The ranks of the supply-siders also include prominent syndicate columnist Robert Novak who also reminds us that Tony Snow is "an ardent supply-sider as a columnist and commentator." There's also these guys:
Likewise, the Washington Post reported that “on February 8, press secretary Ari Fleischer said the [new tax] plan would pay for itself.” In the same vein, Congress Daily reported on January 8 that House Majority Leader Tom Delay, referring to the “growth” package, “told reporters that the long-term revenues generated by tax relief would more than cover the price tag of the cuts.” Congress Daily also reported that Senator John Sununu (R- NH) stated “that the tax cuts would actually bring long-term deficits down.
And, of course, in addition to this insignificant crew of presidents and congressional leaders, there's people like Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. As Greg Mankiw put it "fealty to the most extreme supply-side views is de rigeur in some segments of the Republican party." Those segments just happen to include the party's entire national leadership.
Along with having all of the politicians endorse this view, these "segments" of the Republican Party have also created a parallel intellectual infrastructure, so that we have Heritage Foundation stuff endorsing this and AEI fellows writing articles called "Art Laffer, Righter than Ever" for National Review. And, of course, there's The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Larry Kudlow's television show.
Now maybe Megan's point is that neither the leading conservative weekly magazine nor the leading conservative biweekly magazine nor the leading conservative opinion daily nor the country's leading conservative politicians nor the country's leading conservative think tanks actually believe what they're all saying about taxes. Probably at least some of them don't. I think Jon's basic point doesn't really hinge on the sincerity politicians may or may not have in espousing nutty views. The point is that the views are widely espoused, and a central part of the contemporary right's political agenda of upward wealth redistribution.
I think it's possible that Tim Lee's post hailing my post suggesting that licensing requirements for interior designers are too onerous may have overstated the extent to which this stance really is "at odds with lefty orthodoxy." After all, I got an approving link from Atrios. That said, he reminds me that it's instructive to actually look at the requirements. Here's New York State, where "To be licensed as a certified interior designer in New York State you must" do the following:
be at least 21 years of age
meet education and examination requirements
meet experience requirements
be of good moral character
And what are the education and experience requirements?
You must accrue at least seven years of acceptable education and experience credits, including the following:
At least two but no more than five years of postsecondary education in an approved program of interior design, including an associate degree or its equivalent; and
At least two years of interior design work experience satisfactory to the State Board for Interior Design. To be acceptable for licensure your practical experience must:
be under the direct supervision of an interior designer, architect, or professional engineer;
within the bounds of interior design practice as set forth in section 8303 of the Education Law, demonstrate diverse experience in all aspects of project planning and execution;
and reflect increased levels of professional growth.
On top of that, "You are required to pass all three sections of the National Council for Interior Design Qualification (NCIDQ) Examination which is administered twice yearly in April and October." These are fairly onerous requirements and I think it's pretty clear that their main purpose, like that of the Guild policies of yore or a lot of what the American Medical Association does today, is to erect barriers to entry into the profession, which is good for existing interior designers.
I don't have a link, but in my inbox is Rep. Ike Skelton's prepared statement for a House Armed Services Committee hearing at which David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, is going to give testimony on the GAO's dismal report on the state of things in Iraq. It's nice to see an old bull like Skelton unintimidated by the surge of propaganda. He observes that "When the President announced the surge, it was intended to improve security to create space for political progress" and that hasn't happened. Under the circumstances, he says "It is not clear to me why we should continue to move ahead with this strategy at the cost of American lives and dollars if the Iraqis are not stepping forward."
Meanwhile, Skelton's not representing some kind of hippie district. If he can say it, so can everyone else.
Brian Beutler recalls "Nancy Pelosi catching hell for the 'excessive' security detail she enjoys on her trips to and from California" and points out that it's nothing compared to what Bush and entourage took to Australia. Apparently, Air Force One plus two backup jumbo-jets wasn't enough, so they also brought two giant military transport planes to accommodate helicopters, a fleet of cars, etc., etc., etc. And this was for a trip to Australia, a small, rich, pleasant, friendly country. The possibility that this is just SOP for a presidential traveling party seems apparently, but Brian says at least one former Clinton aide he's spoken to says "that this sort of thing didn't happen when he worked at the White House."
Frank de Libero put together the chart you see reproduced above. It compared GI deaths in Iraq in any given month of 2007 to the deaths in the corresponding month in 2006. In summary, January '07 was deadlier than January '06. February '07 was deadlier than February '06. March '07 was deadlier than March '06. April '07 was deadlier than April '06. May '07 was deadlier than May '06. June '07 was deadlier than June '06. July '07 was deadlier than July '06. And August '07 was, well, deadlier than August '06.
That shouldn't come as a surprise, as the "surge" strategy specifically contemplated risking higher American death rates (and having Americans kill more people) in order to accomplish some larger political goals. Unfortunately, those goals weren't achieved so we just have more dead people.
Bruce Ackerman was fretting the other day about the deployment of General Petraeus and other high-ranking military officers as political weapons by the White House. This, he felt, imperiled the idea of civilian control of the military. The New York Sun, by contrast, want to see Petraeus deliver a speech ending with this bold paragraph:
What I cannot countenance is for you today to commend my skill and bravery in Anbar and Baghdad and then tomorrow to hold votes on how futile this struggle is. So let me make this choice easy for you. I believe we have a good chance to drive Al Qaeda and Iran's network from Iraq and stand up in due time a functioning democracy in Baghdad. I am prepared, even eager, to command our forces in this battle-- but only on one condition: That you signal that you share my goal of victory. If you think I am mistaken and wish to continue your efforts to undermine me, then I cannot command. Absent that signal, I will resign, effective immediately, and take my case to the voters in a run for the presidency on a campaign to finish the work of winning the war and redeeming the sacrifice of so many Iraqis, allies, and our own GIs
Dave Weigel tries to point out that there's no actual indication that Petraeus is a popular figure -- his favorable/unfavorable split is 24/34 -- but Dave's missing the real point here which is that Petraeus is extremely popular among journalists and among think tankers who appear frequently on cable television.
UPDATE: Ooops! When I wrote the title to this post, my intention was to append a brief short story about David Petraeus appearing before congress to denounce the war, denounce Bush, and declare his intention to stage a coup. Then I decided it wasn't nearly as witty as I'd thought it was and just left the post you read above. But I forgot to change the title, which is now hyperbolic and not really appropriate to the post I wrote.
One of the weirdest things I've read in a while is this Norm Ornstein "diarist" column in TNR. He starts out by observing that, recently, he sees his name pop up now and again on lists of deranged neoconservatives who are destroying the country. He points out that this is wrong -- anyone who knows his work knows that he's a very smart guy of seemingly moderate views, deeply committed to procedural integrity and good government. That said, it's obvious why people might make this mistake: He works for the American Enterprise Institute, an outfit that's full of lunatics.
Where it gets weird, is that instead of complaining that guys like Kevin Hassett and John Lott and Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen are starting to ruin his good name he complains that liberal bloggers don't realize how awesomely moderate AEI is and suggests at one point that people who confuse his views with those of his colleagues are anti-semites.
So as an abstract principle, I agree with Steve that Norm Ornstein and others of independence and integrity at AEI (some would name welfare scholar Doug Besharov as another example) bear no responsibility for the views or activities of their neoconservative or fraudulent (e.g., Lott) colleagues, any more than I am responsible for Steve’s views (such as his curious gullibility to Hillary Clinton fundraising letters), or someone on the Harvard faculty is responsible for, say, Harvey Mansfield’s views. However, Harvard is an institution with a purpose – education and scholarship – and AEI is an institution with a different purpose. At one time, AEI’s purpose was honest analysis of policy from a broadly heterodox conservative perspective; over time its purpose has been moving in the direction of reinforcing the interests of its donors and of the conservative power structure, right or wrong. At some point, the sheer number of Lotts and Hassetts, the more explicitly political purpose, and the the large-scale deception perpetrated by Ledeen and the AEI neo-cons becomes the essence and purpose of the organization.
I mean, there's an obvious solution to Ornstein's problem: Quit AEI, say he's quitting AEI because he doesn't want to be associated with these charlatans, and get a job elsewhere. He's one of the best-respected people in Washington, I'm sure he could get a new one. Having good people at bad institutions just makes it harder to marginalize the lunatics in the way they ought to be marginalized.
The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends. [...]
The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."
Chait, and others writing in this vein, refute the strongest claims of the supply-side movement: that tax cuts produce astonishing growth, or that cutting taxes can increase tax revenue. Then they imply that they have thereby refuted all the economic claims in favor of tax cuts, which they haven't, not even close.
I don't think this is what anyone's doing. Rather, what Chait's doing -- and what I'm doing here -- is noting that there is this huge grotesque error lurking at the heart of the Republican Party's political agenda. Brendan Nyhan has a big ole list of instances of Bush and Cheney citing the notion that tax cuts will pay for themselves if there's still any doubt as to the centrality of this notion. Meanwhile, the reason people like Jon and I and other liberals spend so much time pointing out that this claim is false is precisely the same as the reason conservatives spend so much time defending it: it's an extremely potent political claim.
There's a systematic effort by the right to convince people that tax cuts are not merely beneficial in some ways or beneficial all things considered but that there are actually no tradeoffs whatsoever. Getting that idea taken seriously in the press is very powerful politically, so those of us who don't approve of the tax cutting policy agenda are very upset about the ability of conservatives to get away with making it, over and over and over again.
Meanwhile, Megan's comparison of this phenomenon to the idea that Bill Clinton has been known to, for example, overstate the role of Urban Empowerment Zones in spurring the economic growth of the 1990s is a little say. The point about the supply siders isn't that politicians sometimes lie. The point is that a vast superstructure has grown up around this particular lie. Most national leaders in the Republican Party subscribe to it. Those who don't, meanwhile, keep quiet about it. The major conservative opinion publications propagate it, as do the conservative talk shows on radio and cable, as do many conservative newspaper columnists, and the major conservative think tanks.
This is a weird phenomenon. If Hillary Clinton got up at the next presidential debate and said "I believe a policy of 'Medicare for all' could save enough money to pay for a universal preschool program and more generous Social Security benefits," Barack Obama would say she was out of her mind, major liberal commentators would agree, and if she started angrily defending the claim against all comers it would be big trouble for her campaign. By contrast, were Mitt Romney to attack John McCain's embrace of supply-side dogma, that would swiftly destroy Romney's campaign as all the major institutions of the right moved to expel him from the movement.
Tyler Cowen linked the other day to a study which showed that countries whose leaders have formal training in economics don't perform better economically than countries whose leaders lack such training.
There are obviously all kinds of reasons why this might be the case, but it's a reminder that, to me, the very most important attribute in a policymaker isn't to have a ton of knowledge about the issues but, rather, to understand the limits of his knowledge. If I were asked to make an important decision about a subject where I knew I didn't know what I was talking about, I would try to survey some informed people, pick out the areas of broad consensus, and try to make a decision based on the idea that the consensus points are true and the others are uncertain. This is a good, if imperfect, heuristic. By contrast, if you're asked to make decisions about some subject where you have a lot of information, you're going to be inclined to push your pet ideas, and your pet ideas are probably wrong.
This is what's so dangerous about things like Bush's notions about Iran. It's be one thing for the president to be ignorant about Iran, the Persian Gulf more generally, energy markets, etc., if he realized he was ignorant. Instead, though, he seems to have convinced himself that his ignorance is some kind of virtue, exhibiting a deeper level of strategic understanding.
I was pretty unconvinced by David Brooks Tuesday column about Iraq (watch me gripe here) but it did involve the innovative argumentative tactic of conceding that "The big change in the debate has come about because the surge failed, and it failed in an unexpected way." Under the circumstances, and since Brooks has historically been a big John McCain booster, I wonder what his take is on this exchange from the GOP debate:
McCain was ready and eager to stress his muscular position in favor of the "surge" in Iraq, and he had plenty of opportunity to do so. The key moment came after Romney said the surge was "apparently working," and McCain challenged him. "No, not apparently, it's working," McCain responded sharply.
To me, this is McCain, formerly the thinking man's mindless warmonger, acting like a petty goon. But Fred Barnes sees McCain helping himself with these comments while "Mitt Romney hurt himself." It seems like a really weird mentality on the right.
It should be said, that though belief in "tax cuts will pay for themselves" type theories is frequently expressed by Republican Party politicians and Republican-oriented columnists, talk show hosts, and think tankers, I do think it's unlikely that this theory actually causes Republicans to advocate for tax cuts. For that, you need to look to something more like Jason Furman's testimony today (PDF) before the Ways and Means Committee.
Here's a chart that summarizes his main conclusions and, I think, basically explains Republican thinking. If the image is too small for you to read, click and you'll get a bigger one:
What we're seeing here are dynamic analyses of the effect of tax cuts on the income of people at different income levels, under different scenarios. The top selection shows what happens if you pay for tax cuts via decreases in spending -- i.e., what conservatives typically say should be done. Most households -- 74 percent of them, in fact -- wind up worse under this scenario than they would have been without the tax cuts. But 57 percent of families in the top twenty percent benefit. And 99 percent of families in the top one percent benefit. If, by contrast, the tax cuts are paid for simply by a future re-raising of taxes, then 76 percent of households wind up worse off, but 43 percent of households in the top one percent benefit.
In the real world, of course, you're likely to see a mix of spending cuts and tax increases used to close deficits (so indicate the precedents of the major deficit reduction packages of the past) so that Republican Party advocacy of tax cutting does, according to Furman's analysis, probably achieve its purpose of further enriching the richest Americans, albeit at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. For some of the movers behind this policy, it's a question of self-interest (they're rich or being paid by the rich to serve their ends) and for others it's a simple question of justice -- a not entirely trivial minority of the population regards the fact that the very richest Americans aren't even richer as deeply immoral.
Chris Bowers notes that 59 percent of Democrats believe that John Edwards is proposing to withdraw all US forces from Iraq within nine months. 71 percent believe that Barack Obama is proposing to do this. And 76 (!) percent believe Hillary Clinton is proposing to do so. Needless to say, none of them are, in fact, proposing anything of the sort -- though I wish they would.
Kenneth Walz: "To say that militarily strong states are feeble because they cannot easily bring order to minor states is like saying that a pneumatic hammer is weak because it is not suitable for drilling decayed teeth."
Cato's Neal McClusky ponders student loan reform: "How can you love an auction because it supposedly uses market forces, while simultaneously supporting the gargantuan market distortion that is the overall federal student aid system?" I feel like the answer has something to do with being neither a communist markets in some things nor a libertarian.
Frustrating as it is that the major Democratic presidential contenders won't just adopt my views on Iraq, it's even more frustrating that they're all pretending to share my views. Here's a neat video Matt Stoller put together highlighting the differences between Hillary Clinton's "end the war" rhetoric on the campaign trail and her actual policies:
Probably the best guide we have to the thinking of people likely to advice Hillary Clinton on national security issues is CNAS's "Phased Transition" plan which I believe is what Stoller references in the video.
Thomas Edsall reports on who's in Obama's camp and who's with Clinton and what it means: "The well-publicized contrast between Hillary Clinton's early backing of the Bush administration's war effort and Barack Obama's early opposition, has to a degree been replicated in the less visible network of foreign policy advisers that each candidate has cultivated -- the early war opponents by Obama, and the one-time hawks by Clinton." There's more, including some nuance.
What Paul Krugman said about General Petraeus' upcoming testimony. This is why I'm glad he doesn't just write about economics anymore. Someone needs to be saying this stuff in the Times. The paucity of liberalism on a liberal op-ed page is pretty shocking.
Of course, if the alternative to Krugman being a general political columnist for the Times was that, say, I got to be an NYT columnist, then it'd be a whole different story. But I'm not sure the world needs more Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd.
As everyone knows, one of the major things we're doing in Iraq is fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which has a major presence in Sunni areas. The reason we're giving money and weapons to Sunni insurgent groups that were killing Americans a year ago and still wish to overthrow the majoritarian Shiite government we installed is that they're helping us fight AQI. Even Democrats agree that we can't withdraw all our troops from Iraq, because we still need some to do counterterrorism (i.e., fight AQI) and training (so that AQI doesn't take over). But Andrew Tilghman, Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes 2005 and 2006, writes in "The Myth of AQI" that this is mostly BS:
But what if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated. [...]
Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view. Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. "It was kind of a running joke in our office," he recalls. "We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda." [...]
How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization." [...]
he view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate? The reason is that alternate views are running up against an echo chamber of powerful players all with an interest in hyping AQI's role.
Seems like an important point.
DoD photo by Staff Sargent D. Myles Cullen, U.S. Air Force
In "Long-Run Changes in the U.S. Wage Structure: Narrowing, Widening, Polarizing" (PDF), Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin argue that growing inequality in United States is mostly due to skill-differentials but isn't due to the dread skill-biased technological change. Rather, "the growth of the supply of skills slowed considerably after 1980 and the wage structure, in consequence, widened. The slowdown in the relative supply of skills of the working population came about largely from the slowdown in the growth in the educational attainment of U.S. natives for cohorts born since around 1950."
It bears mentioning that this week has seen a bunch of very strong John Edwards statements on the developing Iraq showdown, starting with this on the GAO report, then this on civilian casualties, and this on Bush's stunt trip to Iraq, all building up to the call for a congressional agenda of "no timetable, no funding -- no excuses".
That, in turn, was followed up with a good ditty on the insane (but seemingly popular with the Democratic leadership) notion that what Democrats need to do is come up with meaningless compromise language on Iraq that will simultaneously doom us to thousands of additional American deaths at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars while also providing political cover to vulnerable Republicans.
The Tenuous Tenuousness of the Tenuous Case for Patience
This came up in my diavlog debate on Iraq with Jon Chait, but I find it striking how much the non-demagogic arguments in favor of staying in Iraq sound like arguments in favor of leaving. You get things like Anthony Cordesman's much-discussed tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq which presents what is, I think, an excellent analysis of the situation followed by what struck me as the slightly bizarre conclusion that we ought to basically just hold on or hope for the best. Or here, Fred Kaplan describes a conversation with "Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a key proponent of the patchwork-quilt strategy." What does Biddle think? Well:
Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years—and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."
Kaplan gets at some of this, but if your analysis is that we should accept a "long-shot gamble" that entails 100,000 American troop serving in Iraq until 2027 then you owe us some kind of explanation of what the payoff is supposed to be. The cost of doing what Biddle's analysis suggests is necessary would be enormous. The benefits, meanwhile, don't seem especially high even if you ignore the "long-shot" nature of the odds. Plug the odds in, and the whole proposition looks ridiculous.
I respect Biddle enormously, and think his argument against a middle path in Iraq is absolutely solid. His analysis of what staying would entail also seems solid. I just can't understand why he doesn't see that the obvious upshot of his analysis is that we should leave. To conclude anything else it seems to me you'd need to put a near-infinite value on the prospect of salvaging something to label "success" in Iraq.
No link here, just the observation that it seems to me that Verizon is working with a strangely unambitious business strategy. Basically, they've got themselves the best cell phone network out there. Their calculation seems to me that, given the superiority of their network, they ought to put forward a product that's inferior in other respects, secure in the knowledge that their network will always give them a healthy market share. A much better strategy, it seems to me, would be to offer the best network and the best phones and just drive everyone out of business. They seem to have reconciled themselves to trying to be like Toyota in the auto industry when they could achieve Microsoft-esque levels of domination if they wanted to.
Andrew seems to see more than I did in Sidney Blumenthal's report into information the president apparently got from Naji Sabri about Saddam's WMD programs. The essential problem here is that Sabri was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister. Obviously, in retrospect we know that Sabri's claims that Iraq had no WMD were completely accurate. But given the context, the fact that Sabri said Iraq had no WMD had no real probative value. In particular, the headline "Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction" seems incredibly overblown. What Bush "knew" was that Saddam's foreign minister said Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, which isn't at all the same thing.
The emphasis Blumenthal puts on the notion that this allegedly vital Sabri information was withheld from congress seems to me to let members of congress who voted for the war off the hook way too easily. Nobody who believed Saddam had an advanced nuclear weapons program would have been shaken from this belief by Sabri's denials. Meanwhile, anyone who read the information that was provided to congress could have seen that the White House was significantly overstating the case on a variety of fronts. The problem was that all-too-many members of congress either didn't check the information, didn't care about the truth, or didn't want to know too much lest it trouble their conscience as they cast votes out of political opportunism.
Presumably OBL is going to emphasize how eager he is to drive the US out of Iraq, thus bolstering Bush's argument that we need to stay in Iraq, thus continuing the weird years-long collaboration between Bush and bin Laden where both men do everything in thor power to keep the US stuck in Iraq forever.
If the WHO says that circumcision helps halt HIV transmission, I'm not going to challenge them on the science or take issue with African groups who decide that they need to encourage circumcision, but I have to agree with Dana Goldstein that there's something preposterous about the idea that the US government would be promoting circumcision as a solution while still not encouraging condom use, given that the latter approach is clearly more efficacious.
Kate Sheppard takes note of Oprah Winfrey's incredible abilities as an opinion-leader and wonders if her endorsement will give Barack Obama a big boost. Kay Steiger, pondering the same, has some concerns:
I'm frankly a little disturbed by the influence Oprah has over people. By having candidates "sit on her couch and chat," as Kate put it, she's actually encouraging people to evaluate candidates based on their charisma and personalities instead of thinking about what policies they support. That's a method I don't think is particularly valuable.
I agree that personality-based evaluation isn't a great idea, but I think things like appearances on Oprah's show are in some ways an improvement over the alternative. When a candidate appears on a large-audience program and voters make an appearance based on the candidate's charisma, they're at least being swayed by the candidate's actual charisma or lack thereof (I, for instance, saw Hillary Clinton on Ellen last week and found her charming) whereas the main alternative isn't careful evaluation of the issues, but instead a seemingly arbitrary media filter wherein a prickly egomaniacal recovering alcoholic becomes the kind of guy you'd like to get a beer with. Or you hear a ton about the Edwardses fancy house and nothing about how the Romneys, Giulianis, and Clintons are actually richer.
At APSA last weekend, biddle indicated that his personal view was that we should leave. But for Very Serious reasons, he feels he should maintain that the surge is an intellectually serious longshot (with a 10% chance of success he hazards) for those who think the costs of leaving are unbearable. More fairly, he also wants to cut the ground out from under the middle options, in the hopes that people will draw your obvious conclusion.
That strikes me as a bit of an odd approach. Also: Did Biddle really say that? I'm pretty sure more than one reader of this blog was at APSA.
So it turns out that Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle both seem really impressed that Martin Feldstein has some research showing tax cuts are teh awesome.
So now, what, I can go Google and take us back to the time when The Economist did an "informal poll" of economists and found that "More than seven out of ten respondents say the Bush administration's tax cuts were either a bad or a very bad idea, and a similar proportion disapproves of Mr Bush's plans to make his tax cuts permanent." What's the probative value of an informal poll like that? I have no idea, but The Economist is a pretty rightwing outfit on economics and even employed Megan in the past and Will currently, so it's not clear what motive they might have to shade the results in a lefty tilt. And of course yesterday I had Jason Furman's table. And we're all familiar with Brad DeLong's blog. And Atrios' for that matter. According to Bryan Caplan (PDF) "economists tend to be moderate Democrats."
I guess I'm honest enough to concede that none of that proves my more anti-tax friends and colleagues wrong, but the point is that their tendency to try to make it out to be that only economic illiterates disagree with them is ridiculous. They're free to take up an unpopular minority viewpoint, but that's what it is. There are plenty of cranks and a vast sea of corporate lobbyists who back the general thrust of the modern Republican Party's approach to taxes; the reputable economic researchers who agree with them, though real, are also relatively few in number.
"To conclude," bin Laden says, "I invite you to embrace Islam." He goes on to say: "There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.”
In paradise, not only do you get 76 virgins, but there's no deadweight loss.
For some reason, John Edwards delivered this brilliant speech on fighting terrorism on a Friday afternoon so my post about it is going up on a Saturday and I'd really rather discuss it on a day when people read the blog. But for now:
His idea to build a new, global, multilateral organization focused on terrorism scratches the same itch that's led a lot of people to talk about a Concert of Democracies but it's a much better idea on the merits.
This semi-buried line is perhaps the most important thing I've heard any candidate say about national security policy: "And I will lead an international effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons."
He's also now differentiated himself from Clinton on Iraq: "As president, I will redeploy troops into Quick Reaction Forces outside of Iraq, to perform targeted missions against Al Qaeda cells and to prevent a genocide or regional spillover of a civil war."
I do have one important complaint, to be addressed later.
Long story short, though, it's really good. Long story at greater length on Monday.
George Packer absolutely nails the Groundhog Day quality of the Iraq debate:
This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.
The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.
Yes, precisely. One could add that at each point we've seen a certain faction of timid Democrats or quivering liberals who manage to forget everything they've learned about Bush, about Iraq, and about the dynamics of the war. At some point, though, it needs to stop.
I'm really not sure that, all things considered, I would want to see Bill Richardson be president of the United States. But as long as he's the only one publishing op-eds feature clear calls to actually end the war in Iraq I would, at a minimum, definitely tell a pollster that I'm voting for Richardson hoping to, if nothing else, try to prompt the other Democrats into shifting in favor of his position.
In both political and policy terms, I think all of the candidates should consider that in the real world they need not Iraq policies that will make sense in the fall of 2007, but Iraq policies that will make sense in January 2009 after over a year of additional political stalemate in Iraq, continued bloodshed and refugee flows, and continued deterioration of the readiness of the American military.
Given what happened to John McCain, I can't help but think that as the Republican electorate learns more and more about what Rudy Giuliani really thinks about immigration, he's going to be in big trouble. He managed to somehow pass himself off as an opponent of the comprehensive immigration measure, but the reality is that as mayor he turned New York City into a giant "sanctuary city" and sought vigorously through the courts to preserve that status. This was all unremarkable in what's probably the most pro-immigration jurisdiction in the country, but it's really, really, really not where the GOP base is.
I was interested to see Charles Krauthammer concede today that important "strategic errors" were made in Iraq, "most important, eschewing a heavy footprint, not forcibly suppressing the early looting and letting Moqtada al-Sadr escape with his life in August 2004." Previous to this column, Krauthammer had only mentioned the looting once, in is June 13, 2003 "Hoaxes, Hype and Humiliation". The only point he made in the column was to argue that the story of the looting of Iraq's national museum had been initially overstated. Or, as he put it in his typically measured manner, "You'd have to go back centuries, say, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find mendacity on this scale." He referred also to the "narcissism" and "sheer snobbery" of people like Frank Rich who were concerned about the looting.
He then noted that after the stories of widespread looting in Iraq had been debunked (this would be the same looting he now says was a key strategic error) "The left simply moved on to another change of subject: the 'hyping' of the weapons of mass destruction." Ha, ha, silly left.
As for Sadr, back in April 2004 at the height of fighting between the US military and the Mahdi Army, Krauathammer was confident. Back in his April 16, 2004 column "This Is Hardly Vietnam" he observed merely that "the Shiite establishment has been negotiating on our behalf with the Sadr rebels." In his May 14, 2004 column "The Abu Ghraib Panic", Krauthammer said that "The Sadr insurgency appears to be waning." Sadr, whose survival in 2004 Krauthammer now sees as the key turning point in the war, then goes unmentioned in his columns for almost two years.
And such is the war in Iraq as seen through neocon lenses. Mistakes are always in the past. The current policy is always working. When the mistakes are being made, those who point out the mistakes are tarred as near-treasonous. Then, after another year or two of pointless, futile bloodshed, it's conceded that mistakes were made in the past. But now we're right on track. And the liberals, once again, just don't get it.
Okay, well, readers will be aware that I'm not an especially close student of the college football game. That said, I'm well aware that Michigan is supposed to have a good football team. Instead: They suck. Like really, really, really badly. But why are they so terrible?
And what's wrong with the rankers that they had this stinker of a team listed at number five. Meanwhile, Bob Farley point out that had Appalachian State lost last week, then today's Oregon victory would have done much more to vault Oregon forward in the standings. This sort of thing, to me, is a big part of what makes college football dispiriting compared to properly organized sports.
I didn't really agree with Osama's case for tax cuts, but I have to admit that this part of his message (PDF) seems to me to be asking a good question:
Why are the leaders of the White House keen to start wars and wage them around the world, and make use of every possible opportunity through which they can reach this purpose, occasionally even creating justifications based on deception and blatant lies, as you saw in Iraq?
I don't think bin Laden's answer ("those with real power and influence are those with the most capital") really makes much sense, but it really is a good question.
You won't be surprised to learn that I'm not super-impressed by the US Institute of Peace's plan to end American military involvement in Iraq in five years. The release did, however, pique my curiosity about the USIP board. The only name I recognized was of the late Seymour Martin Lipset, who was a great political sociologist before dying last year.
excerpt from Jonathan Chait's 
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Heads in the Sand
