I had sort of guessed that this "war on Christmas" business was one of those only in America things, but according to Polly Toynbee you've got the same BS over in the UK, where the Rev Jules Gomes explains that:
Here is the good chaplain's Christmas message: "More Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other period of church history. Yesterday's Herod is today's Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee, seeking the total extermination of all forms of Christianity. The great irony is that the greatest opposition to Christ comes from so-called broad-minded people who seek to ban Christmas so that people of other faiths are not offended."
As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins' work in this field but the difference between writing mean books and killing people is pretty clear. And, of course, nobody's seeking to ban Christmas! It's weird how so many people want to use this holiday to work themselves and their constituents into fits of anger over nothing. Hardly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the event.
Photo by Flickr user laffy4k used under a Creative Commons license
Alissa Rubin and Damien Cave of The New York Times take a good hard look at the Sunni "awakening" strategy and how, shockingly enough, a policy of handing out cash, training and guns to whoever's willing to work with us could wind up backfiring:
How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out? How can the men’s loyalty be maintained, given their tribal and sectarian ties, and in many cases their insurgent pasts? And crucially, how can the movement be sustained once the Americans turn over control to a Shiite-dominated government that has been wary, and sometimes hostile, toward the groups?
Despite the successes of the movement, including the members’ ability to provide valuable intelligence and give rebuilding efforts a new chance in war-shattered communities, the American military acknowledges that it is also a high-risk proposition. It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war — in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.
Yes, right, exactly. In a society full of rival armed factions contending for power, you can't achieve peace by just building opportunistic alliances with a whole bunch of separate factions. If our commanders and troops are nimble enough -- and they very well might be, as they've demonstrated a good deal of nimbleness recently -- they may be able to keep playing this dangerous game and keeping the US deployment viable, but it doesn't really achieve anything. Achieve anything, that is, beyond a welcome reduction in American casualites. But going home would reduce casualties further, faster, and cheaper.
If you watched The Table, you'll have seen me express the view that the Clinton-Obama race has gotten locked in a "beer track" versus "wine track" dynamic in which Clinton is bound to win as the "beer track" candidate always does. But now Obama seems to be experiencing a New Hampshire surge driven by working class voters, as predicted by Noam Scheiber some time earlier.
Via Andrew Sullivan, Eric dePlace notes that "You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car." And so you do. A 15 MPG car would require 1,000 gallons of gas to drive 15,000 miles while an 18MPG car could get it done in just 833 gallons. That saves 167 gallons of gasoline. By contrast, since a 50 MPG only uses 300 gallons to go 15,000 miles, upgrading to 100 MPG can't save that much gas -- the super-efficient car uses 150 gallons.
One moral of the story is that the MPG statistic is probably misleading a lot of people who aren't quantitatively sophisticated. In policy terms, meanwhile, the upshot is simply that it makes more sense to focus on raising the efficiency of the least-efficient vehicles than creating new super-cars. Of course, the genius of pricing carbon through a tax or through auctioned emissions permits is, once again, that is spares people the burden of trying to do all the math in our heads and just lets price signals automatically find the most economical way of reaching the targets.
I adhere to a lot of outré notions about the desirability of introducing massive socialism into our health care system and not satisfying ourselves with a lot of tinkering around the edges with subsidies and regulations and just having the government provide health care to people as a public service, just as we have roads and police departments and all the rest (and just as you can hire a security guard or build a driveway, people could also do whatever). There is, after all, tons of evidence in favor of such a system -- from the awesome cost-efficiency of the UK's National Health Service, to the massive amounts of ineffective spending, to, of course, the excellent quality of the VA system.
I remember reading Philip Longman's Washington Monthly article that he later expanded into a book on the VA system and expecting the end to be something like "so, as you can see, even though it's not politically practical at the moment what we really need to do is adopt massive socialism." Instead, though he waxed all pragmatic. Which I guess is fine. But still, the ponit should be made that we really ought to adopt massive socialism.
Fortunately, someone or other got the widely respected Congressional Budget Office to do some research into the VA system, leading to this (PDF) interim report. CBO Director Peter Orszag summarizes:
In general, VA’s experience underscores the potential for improving performance in a large and relatively integrated system through a sustained and comprehensive effort that involves indicators of quality, financial incentives that are aligned with those objectives, and the use of health information technology. It is important to note, though, that the combination of these factors — a large, relatively integrated system; well-designed incentives; performance measurement; and health information technology — likely creates much more substantial opportunities for improvement than any of the pieces taken by themselves. The applicability of VA’s experience to other parts of the health system, which often have a much different structure than the VA system, is therefore unclear and will be explored in CBO’s final report (which will be published next year).
In short: massive socialism works, but the applicability of its success to other models is "unclear." Thus, the case for massive socialism. But, yes, nobody wants to hear it.
Somehow, Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin managed to turn George Crile's grimly fascinating book about Rep. Charlie Wilson and his involvement in the clandestine funding of Afghan mujadedeen into a mildly amusing political satire. On one level, it's a pretty extraordinary achievement since nothing about the book really screamed out "this would make a good movie" to me.
The really interesting part of the story, at the end of the day, is the totally-unfilmable micro-level detail about how, exactly, a backbench member of congress with a middling level of seniority gets the necessary legislating done. That's pretty much all telescoped out of the book in a way that's understandable, but winds up leaving the time frame murky and it's not really clear what the story's even about without it. You get some funny moments out of the whole thing, but it gives you no real sense of anything. Mostly, I hop it juices sales of the book, which is must-reading.
The whole saga of this period in US policy toward Afghanistan is worth keeping in mind as we watch the Sunni awakening unfold. I think one can understand why people who happened upon a way to deliver relatively cheap body-blows to the Soviet Union were willing to do so without totally understanding who was getting the guns and what the ramifications of it all might be down the road. The Cold War was serious business and there were no cost-free options available. The current strategy in Iraq, by contrast, seems to have all of the pitfalls of what was done in Afghanistan but nothing even close to the same upside. It's pretty clear what the CIA and Rep. Wilson and others were trying to do in Afghanistan. They wanted to put weapons in the hands of people who were shooting at the Red Army -- a rival superpower. What's the comparable objective in Iraq?
I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.
It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.
Seth Roberts read the account and made some musings about human evolution:
This shows something non-obvious: We are hard-wired to avoid drowning and like all good safety systems, the system kicks in well before damage occurs.
For such a system to evolve, humans must have spent a lot of time in water deep enough to drown in. We don’t now, of course. The sheer fact of Scylla’s post — the fact that waterboarding is torture isn’t obvious — shows this.
All this — Scylla’s initial ignorance, what he experienced and concluded — is consistent with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and inconsistent with alternatives to that theory (e.g., the savannah theory), which assume no long aquatic phase. Belief that the aquatic ape theory was probably true was one reason I started omega-3 self-experimentation, which led to the discovery of very clear experimental effects.
Well, someone else read that post and used Google Reader's new "share" function to flag it and then I read the post and though I already knew waterboarding was torture, I'd never heard of the Aquatic Ape hypothesis before so I've been looking into that (it seems that most scientists reject it for what sound to me like good reasons) ... all in all an excellent way to waste some time while semi-watching the Giants play the Bills.
Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped . . . When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state's first-in-the-nation primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we'll know it. Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.
This makes me wonder why you don't see "undorsements" like this more often. In a multi-candidate field, this sort of thing -- who shouldn't win -- is often a more salient question than is the who should win issue.
There are definitely times during Ron Paul's Meet The Press interview where you wonder how it is that Paul got to me the protest candidate while Russert is the voices of sober-minded sensibleness:
MR. RUSSERT: So if Iran invaded Israel, what do we do?
REP. PAUL: Well, they're not going to. That is like saying "Iran is about to invade Mars." I mean, they have nothing. They don't have an army or navy or air force. And Israelis have 300 nuclear weapons. Nobody would touch them. But, no, if, if it were in our national security interests and Congress says, "You know, this is very, very important, we have to declare war." But presidents don't have the authority to go to war.
Of course, Iran also lacks a land border with Israel so unless their uranium enrichment program winds up leading to the development of a teleportation device (or, more precisely, the Heisenberg compensator you'd need to make it work) we probably don't need to worry. On the other hand, though, you get this:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about race, because I, I read a speech you gave in 2004, the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. And you said this: "Contrary to the claims of" "supporters of the Civil Rights Act of" '64, "the act did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of" '64 "increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty." That act gave equal rights to African-Americans to vote, to live, to go to lunch counters, and you seem to be criticizing it.[...]
MR. RUSSERT: You would vote against the Civil Rights Act if, if it was today?
REP. PAUL: If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations. It just happens, Tim, that I get more support from black people today than any other Republican candidate, according to some statistics. And I have a great appeal to people who care about personal liberties and to those individuals who would like to get us out of wars. So it has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.
Now Paul is right to say that this is just an area where libertarian ideology and white supremacist ideology just so happens to overlap, but there you have it -- overlap
with white supremacist ideology. And then there's this:
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."
REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
Obviously, yes, there were better ways to end slavery. That's why Abraham Lincoln didn't run on a platform that said "let's have a bloody civil war!" Rather, his idea was to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories and try to nudge the country in the direction of compensated emancipation. The South, though, decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.
Photo by Flickr user Jayel Aheram used under a Creative Commons license
It's really too bad that David Rohde, Carlotta Gall, Eric Schmitt, and David Sanger did all this reporting only for The New York Times to bury their story in a Christmas Eve edition of the paper that few people will read. At any rate, we learned back in November that our aid to Pakistan was basically big bundles of unaccountable cash, more like bribes to Pervez Musharraf and other top officials than aid as such. The Times team went looking after where it went and the answer turns out to be: not where it was supposed to:
In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.
Along with various things about the need for oversight, etc., I think this underscores the point that we've underinvested in diplomatic efforts to try to reduce India-Pakistan tensions. Pakistan's sense of beseigement vis-a-vis its largest neighbor is like an acid that keeps eating away at our efforts to convince them to prioritize a fight against radical groups. And understandably so -- as long as Pakistan is adjacent to a larger, richer, nuclear-armed hostile country that fact is going to be the defense establishment's top priority. It's obviously not something we can wish away with a magic wand, but it's worth putting some effort into since the payoff would be very large and absent progress on that front it's hard for any incentive package to be cleverly-designed enough to really work.
My colleague-who-I've-never-actually-met Mark Bowden writes in defense of waterboarding for The Philadelphia Inquirer and, I think, misstates the "torture doesn't work" thesis in the course of it: "Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information."
This is a strawman that's easy enough to knock down. The thesis that "torture doesn't work" isn't the thesis that one can never torture a guy into saying something that's true. In the limiting case, if you capture a guy who you think is a terrorist but who is not, in fact, a terrorist and then torture him into giving up information about plots the victim will, at some point, plead that he doesn't know anything. The question, though, is whether or not torture enhances your overall knowledge of the situation. The problem with torture isn't that it's some kind of truth-negator that makes people lie. The problem is that it just makes people talk and talk and talk and talk until you stop torturing them. Will some of the information be good? Possibly. Will any of it be reliable? No.
If you thought about it for fifteen minutes you could see that introducing heavily-armed unaccountable mercenaries into a combat zone where you were trying to conduct a delicate counterinsurgency mission was a bad idea. But according to The Washington Post, the Bush administration even got repeated and specific warnings that the Blackwater situation was out of hand. At which point, naturally, they did nothing.
With the McCain surge the press has long been calling for now showing signs of actually emerging, it's worth pointing out that a McCain nomination would be bad news for Democrats . . . the press loves the guy, he does well in early polls, and while he has terrible policy views he doesn't have much in the way of the sort of trivial slip-ups that really hurt you in a campaign. Folks should read Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.
If this overview in The Wall Street Journal reflects the content, though, it seems fairly banal. As everyone with any awareness of American political history knows, for about 100 years starting in the mid-19th century, the Democratic Party was the vehicle of choice for the white supremacist agenda that dominated the politics of the white south and that vast majority of the leading villains in the story of race in America were Democrats. That said, starting in the New Deal, the Democrats also became the preferred party of urban northern African-Americans and white liberals. That created a lot of intra-party tensions which played out over the next 30-40 years and resulted in a decisive victory for the racial liberals.
Meanwhile, in a parallel development, "new right" insurgents -- most of whom were, like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, opponents of civil rights legislation -- took control of the Republican Party. During this time, the white south became the electoral base of the GOP, while the much-shrunken Dixie faction of the Democratic Party became biracial. I don't think there's anything about this history that would upset modern-day Democrats -- obviously, Abe Lincoln and the GOP was the right way to go in the 1860s and Woodrow Wilson's record on racial issues was terrible but that was all quite a long time ago.
Ezra Klein, who's much more sympathetic to the anti-Obama cause than I am, says much of what needs to be said about Paul Krugman's overreaching effort to paint Barack Obama as an anti-union candidate. But a few additional observations:
One: This kind of thing is why I'll be glad when this primary race is over. The nominating contest creates large incentives to overstate one's case. In retrospect, I think I've been guilty of this with regard to Hillary Clinton. I prefer other candidates on foreign policy grounds. That's not to say, however, that she'll be the second coming of George W. Bush which I think I've wrongly implied in the past due to over-investment in some internecine disputes. Similarly, it's one thing to say that you prefer Edward's and Clinton's views on health care and Social Security but that's a far cry from Obama deserving the label of an "anti-change" candidate.
Two: John Edwards is clearly the most pro-labor candidate in this race. If I were a single-issue voter, this election wouldn't be a close call. And it's really too bad that more unions didn't line up behind Edwards. Instead, many shied away from him on the theory that he was doomed to lose and that Clinton was inevitable. That, of course, has something of a self-fulfilling prophesy dynamic to it and created problems for Edwards in terms of fundraising and national press. Now, as a non-supporter of Clinton with strong Edwards sympathies, I'm worried that an Edwards win in Iowa just leads to a Clinton victory; whereas an Obama win in Iowa leads to an Obama victory. Had the unions all just lined up behind the most pro-labor candidate in the field, I don't think we would have that problem.
Three: I don't see any need for liberal pundits to get in the business of denying that labor unions are, in fact, "special interests." Indeed, it's impossible to understand the dynamics of American politics without acknowledging them to be special interests. They're special interests who sometimes take the "wrong" side of policy debates when what's "right" for the country is "wrong" for the sector in which they work. The CWA often takes bad positions on telecommunications issues because it wants to advance the interests of unionized telecom firm vis-a-vis the interests of non-union firms. Similarly, various unions have in the past clashed with environmental groups and will certainly do so again in the context of a serious push to curb carbon emissions. There's nothing wrong with that, and liberals should strongly resist the line of inference from "unions are sometimes wrong on public policy questions, therefore we should embrace policies designed to hasten the decline of union membership." But still, unions are groups that seek to advance the interests of their members. As such, they're a vital check on what would otherwise be corporate influence run amok. But sometimes the interests of a given union's members run against the general interests of the country and there's no sense in denying this.
To return to point one, though, the whole Krugman-Obama feud started over the issue of health insurance mandates. If you think that electing a president who favors an Edwards/Clinton-style individual mandate is likely to lead to a better substantive policy outcome than is electing an opponent of such a mandate, then this constitutes a perfectly good reason all on its own to vote for Edwards or Clinton rather than Obama. It's an important issue! There's not really any need to drag additional implausible charges into the mix.
UPDATE:"On health care, Obama is consistently running to the right of his rivals" is a much more accurate characterization of the complaint. I don't think the legislative prospects for a really awesome health care plan in 2009 are very good no matter who wins the election, so I don't find this reality incredibly distressing. But it's an accurate complaint.
Photo courtesy of John Edwards 2008 used under a Creative Commons license
This is a graphic treatment of an issue mentioned yesterday -- the somewhat misleading nature of the miles per gallon statistic. If you use MPG as your main metric of fuel efficiency, then a change from a 20 MPG vehicle to a 30 MPG vehicle sounds like a smaller advance than does a switch from a 40 MPG vehicle to a 60 MPG vehicle. But if you assume a constant distance to be driven, the former switch reduces fuel consumption more.
Now, obviously, a 20 MPG reduction is still better than a 10 MPG reduction, all else being equal. But "all else," crucially, isn't equal. You get much more bang for your buck by improving performance at the low end.
Matt's reaction is exactly what I expected from the left. Since the history cannot be denied they will sweep it under the rug as old news--and boring news at that. But considering the recent flap about Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi speech in 1980, I don't think liberals can dismiss my argument without also dismissing their own efforts to use 27 year old speeches to damn the Republican Party for racism. They can't have it both ways. Either history matters or it doesn't.
No, no, no! I don't think the history should be swept under the rug at all. What I think is that the history reflects well on present members of the Democratic Party. The political views of the Southern Democrats were unconscionably evil, and the corrupt bargain national Democratic Party figures struck with them was a terrible thing. But in a series of intense political battles, the Democratic Party eventually broke decisively with that heritage, prompting breakaway segregationist campaigns in 1948 and 1968 and eventually leading the bulk of the white supremacist constituency to drift to the Republican Party.
The significance of the history of race in America -- and of the centrality of the Democrats' corrupt bargain with white supremacy to American political history -- really shouldn't be minimized. But what it shows is that the Democratic Party's decision to embrace the civil rights movement and the Republican Party's decision to embrace opposition to civil rights has been integral to the Republican Party's political successes toward the end of the 20th century.
In news sure to bring a smile to Tom Schaller's face, it seems that of the DCCC's top forty targeted congressional districts only four are in the South and all four of them are in Florida. Basically, the view is that the Democratic Party has a lot of growth potential in the Midwest and the Southwest, but that nothing's doing in Dixie.
I doubt anyone's surprised that Scott Skiles got fired, but doing it on Christmas Eve just seems mean. What's more, the team was actually improving -- they started 2-10 and they're 9-16 now, so the new coach may well wind up getting credit for an improvement that was already happening.
Meanwhile, John Paxson might want to consider firing himself. I supported the Ben Wallace signing at the time, but it obviously hasn't worked out very well. But trading away Tyson Chandler for nothing never made sense on any level. Then I've never heard of a team flirting with so many deals to acquire a superstar and then come away with nothing.
I'll be celebrating by watching the NBA doubleheader, going to Chinatown Express, and watching Alien Versus Predator: Requiem. And, probably, writing more blog posts. The rest of you do whatever it is y'all do....
As everyone knows, American Jews celebrate Christmas with a meal composed of the North American Ashkenazi Diaspora's traditional cuisine, Chinese-American food. Thus, Jeff Weintraub directs our attention to two key documents. One, Brandon Walker, "Chinese Food on Christmas":
You may recall that last year, Ethiopia launched a major invasion of Somalia timed for right around the Christmas holiday so that nobody would notice. Or else, you may not recall since Ethiopia timed it for right around the Christmas holiday and thus nobody noticed. With this story out of Kurdistan, I wonder if we're starting to see a new under the radar military action Christmas tradition:
Two Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq hit more than 200 targets and killed more than 150 rebels, the Turkish Army said Tuesday. [...] Turkish officials have not commented reports by the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq that two more airstrikes took place on Monday and early Tuesday. But Turkish surveillance planes were spotted early Tuesday flying over Cukurca in the Hakkari Province of Turkey’s far southeast, along the border with Iraq, and also above the Kanimasi region in northern Iraq, and shelling was heard, the semi-official Anatolian news agency reported.
Meanwhile, suicide bombing seems to be back in style in Iraq.
Annoyed by the incredibly horrible "Citizen Soldier" recruiting ad / song / music video that plays in many movie theaters these days? Well, never fear, Brian Beutler's identified the antidote: "The music's equally terrible (possibly worse?) but the message is deeply anti-war."
I'd been under the impression that Mitt Romney had thus far resisted the urge to claim falsely that reducing tax rates is likely to increase federal revenue. Brendan Nyhan shows me that it's not true. Romney's explained that " you lower taxes enough, you create more growth" and "if you create growth, you get more jobs" and thus "You get more jobs, more people are paying taxes. You get more taxes paid, the government has more money by charging lower tax rates."
This is not only bad economics, but seems to indicate a failure to grasp some of the basic principles of logical inference.
I'd known that in the modern period just five states -- Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri -- were responsible for some huge proportion of total executions (see map) and that, in general, the death penalty is obviously being applied very differently from place to place. But Adam Liptak points out that in 2007, Texas alone accounted for 60 percent of total executions in the United States.
I used to be a death penalty proponent. And I still think, in principle, that it's not always wrong to execute people. But at the systems level, actually existing capital punishment in the United States is clearly a mess. Your odds of dying for your crime have much, much, much more to do with where you committed your crime and your socioeconomic status than anything about the nature of your crime. In theory, I think you could have a fair system that involved some number of executions. In practice, though, it barely seems doable and Harry Blackmun's conclusion that he had to simply refuse to "tinker with the machinery of death" seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on.
You've laughed at the hilarious excerpts on Sadly, No! but now Spencer Ackerman gives you the in-depth analysis of Liberal Fascism you've been waiting for. Using non-standard definitions of both "liberal" and "fascism" seems important to this project.
The New Pornographers, “Myriad Harbour,” Challengers
The National, “Mistaken for Strangers,” Boxer
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, “La Costa Brava,” Living With the Living
Arcade Fire, “Keep the Car Running,” Neon Bible
M.I.A., “Boys, Kala
Feist, “1 2 3 4,” The Reminder
Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina,” Night Falls Over Kortedala
Spoon, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Justice, “D.A.N.C.E.,” †
That's in no particular order. I don't really believe in ordinal rankings and have no idea what it would mean to claim that "D.A.N.C.E." is 'better' than "A Postcard to Nina."
Here's a telling bit from The Washington Post's account of yesterday's bombings in Iraq: "U.S. military commanders have said that major military efforts in and around Baghdad have pushed fighters to the areas north of the capital, often to rural or mountainous hideouts, where there are fewer troops pursuing them."
Two morals from this story. One is that aside from the "surge" -- the temporary increase in the overall number of American forces in Iraq -- we've seen a surge-within-the-surge, an increase in the Baghdad-centricity of our deployments. The other is that outside of this surged areas, there haven't been any security gains. There's no change, in short, in the nationwide dynamic.
So what happens when we start de-surging?
Well, things will just get worse again. After all, when the goal of the surge was outlines as creating space and time for national political reconciliation, that wasn't something Bush and Petraeus just pulled out of their asses. A temporary increase in force levels aimed at creating a temporary increase in security doesn't, after all, sound like much of a strategy. So they said that the temporary increase in troops would lead to a temporary increase in security which would lead to political reconciliation which, in turn, would lead to sustainable security gains. But it hasn't happened. So when we start desurging, we're just going to find that nothing's changed and nothing's been accomplished.
Kevin Drum reads a New York Timesarticle about holiday retail sales and bangs his head against the wall as he observes the story citing nominal sales figures: "Question: why does this happen so routinely?"
It almost certainly happens so routinely because many reporters and editors don't really understand what they're doing. Reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have almost no understanding of quantitative methods. I recall that Larry Summers observed in his inaugural speech that "We live in a society, and dare I say a University, where few would admit—and none would admit proudly—to not having read any plays by Shakespeare or to not knowing the meaning of the categorical imperative, but where it is all too common and all to acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth." Journalists, being basically a species of writer, tend to come from humanities backgrounds even though we deal with quantitative issues all the time. Journalism schools might help close the gap by making people take "math for journalists" classes (the concepts of statistical significance and margins of error in polls come up constantly, for example, and are often dealt with very poorly) but as best I can tell they normally don't.
Ezra Klein pronounces himself basically happy with the three major Democratic candidates. Matt Stoller responds with a proclamation of unhappiness, citing a variety of objectionable elements of the status quo than none of them dare tinker with. Matt's right, I think, to outline an agenda that goes well beyond the list of things Democratic Party politicians are prepared to tackle -- the related problems of America's crazy drug regulation regime and America's horrific prison system are, rightly, going to look like huge scandals to future generations and the odds of any of the major Democratic contenders doing much of anything about any of it are tiny.
That said, happiness is relative. All three of the potential nominees seem like they would make the country a better place. Hence the "fairly common sentiment among both Democratic base voters and Democratic elites" that Stoller bemoans. "Better than what we've got" seems like a kind of low bar to cross. And yet, in politics it's really the only bar that matters.
It seems that there's a tradition of the Queen of England making Christmas broadcasts. And, now, those broadcasts are available on YouTube via The Royal Channel. It's interesting stuff, but apparently embedded video is too revolutionary for the monarchy so you'll have to click the link to see it.
Clicking around the internet, it seemed to me that a curiously large number of people were putting LCD Soundsystem on various top ten lists. Metacritic confirms this -- the critics love LCD Soundsystem. On some level, this is just something I refuse to believe. I mean, I went to see LCD Soundsystem play at the 930 Club one time and I'll happily grant you that it was a totally awesome evening -- vodka + dancing = fun even in famously danceaphobic Washington, DC. But one of the best albums of the year? Really? The GuardiandeemedSound of Silver "dance rock for grownups," which I guess is right, but doesn't strike me as a particularly laudable achievement. Why do we need dance rock for grownups?
Charles Murray loves Liberal Fascism: "'It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion,’ Jonah Goldberg writes near the beginning of Liberal Fascism. My first reaction was that he is engaging in partisan hyperbole. That turned out to be wrong. Liberal Fascism is nothing less than a portrait of 20th-century political history as seen through a new prism. It will affect the way I think about that history--and about the trajectory of today’s politics--forever after."
Sudarsan Raghavan's lengthy Washington Post article about the conflict between Muqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and, in particular, the way the latter's fortunes seem to be on the rise, will warm the heart of hawks. Here, after all, is a long newspaper account of American military success:
This year's U.S. military offensive and dramatic shifts in tactics by both Sunni and Shiite groups are redrawing the balance of power across Iraq. With less violence between Sunnis and Shiites, festering struggles within each community may come to define the nature of the conflict. In the Shiite-dominated south, Sadr's main Shiite rivals are taking advantage of the surge in U.S. troops, as well as Sadr's imposition of a freeze on operations by his Mahdi Army militia, to make political gains.
What one wonders, however, is if this is good news, what's good about it? Hakim's group is the one that's willing to work with Americans whereas Sadr's is the group that's trying to kick us out. But it's not as if the Supreme Council are a bunch of nice liberal democrats. What's more, the extent of their "pro-American" sentiments seems to extend precisely as far as we're willing to help them acquire power -- it's not a case of deep resonances of values and interests.
Alien Versus Predator: Requiem is by no means a good movie. But if Juno left an unduly upbeat & happy taste in your mouth, the old-fashioned bloodiness of this romp does help cleanse the palate. What's more, unlike the catastrophic Alien Versus Predator, the sequel really does deliver on the basic promise of lots and lots of fighting and killing. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum -- you're supposed to just know all the backstory, sit back, and watch a whole bunch of acid blood fly around while tons of people are killed.
On the flipside, it's hardly worth pointing out the many, many, many levels on which this movie didn't really make sense. I will note, however, that it's a bit unfortunate to see them appear to screw around with the alien life cycle such that the time elapsed from when a facehugger grabs you to when a new alien pops out of your head appears to be greatly compressed. In a larger sense, it's really too bad that all these silly sequels now can't help but detract from the fact that Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies that don't really deserve to have been conscripted into this low-grade franchise.
I just realized that Google Reader has a "recommendations" function whereby Google makes suggests of new feeds "generated by comparing your interests with the feeds of users similar to you." Their number one recommendation is . . . my blog. Basically, I have the reading habits typical of someone who would read my blog. Which makes sense, of course, but still seems a bit odd.
Paul Krugman observes that "Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed until, say, 2005 that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed earlier — or, worse yet, you caught on to the administration’s essential mendacity right from the beginning — it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment. It shows that you were an irrational Bush hater."
Indeed, a bit like the concept of the premature anti-fascist it's considered a bit disreputable to have been too right, too early on. After all, the "logic" seems to go, a dogmatic pacificist would have been opposed to invading Iraq from the get-go, and dogmatic pacifism is wrong, "therefore" early opposition to the war is probably a sign of unsound views. It's absurd and it's a problem.
I'll note that in politico-media terms, I think this would be an underrated reason to welcome a Barack Obama Administration. His ascendancy would, as such, end the marginalization of early war opponents by bringing a bunch of them -- including himself -- into top positions. A Hillary Clinton Administration, by contrast, even if it governs extremely effectively will also serve to perpetuate the idea that the smart money is always on war irrespective of the circumstances.
When I went to a Capitals game in February I came away with the view that professional hockey needs some kind of equivalent to the cheerleaders of football or dance teams of the NBA. Commenters drew my attention to the fact that some teams do actually do this. Here, for example, are the Dallas Stars Ice Girls:
Went to the Caps game last night, though, and still no ice girls. Pretty thrilling win,t hough. From an NBA-fan perspective it's a bit sad to see how much more engaged and knowledgeable the crowd at the Caps game is compared to the Wizards' fans. I almost feel like we need Gilbert Arenas to contribute to the team by offering pregame seminars and when you're supposed to cheer and boo and so forth.
Turns out a professional political blogger really ought to check the newspaper before putting up posts about ice girls because even during the holidays big stuff can happen like Benazir Bhutto being assassinated in part of a larger attack that seems to have killed over a dozen people. As usual when there's a big breaking story like this abroad, there's probably not a ton I can usefully say about this in the short term but, clearly, it's a big deal that seems to bode ill for stability in Pakistan and the world in general.
This paper tests the predictions about the relationship between racial prejudice and racial wage gaps from Becker's (1957) seminal work on employer discrimination - something which has not previously been done in the large economics discrimination literature. Using rich data on racial prejudice from the General Social Survey, we find strong support for all of the key predictions from Becker about the relationship between prejudice and racial wage gaps. In particular, we show that, relative to white wages, black wages: (a) vary negatively with a measure of the prejudice of the "marginal" white in a state; (b) vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution, but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state; and (c) vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black. We show that these results are robust to a variety of extensions, including directly controlling for racial skill quality differences and instrumental variables estimates. We present some initial evidence to show that racial wage gaps are larger the more racially integrated is a state’s workforce, also as Becker's model predicts. The paper also briefly discusses familiar criticisms and extensions of the standard Becker model, including an argument of our own which, like some recent work, shows that the model's main predictions can be shown theoretically to survive the effects of long run competition.
On the other hand, seven of America's leading phrenologists assure me that wage gaps are due to inherent genetic inferiority and anyone who says otherwise is a creationist.
Via Steve Benen, it looks like the major Democratic presidential candidates are moving to start paying consultants in a rational manner rather than using a dumb percentage system that's frought with bad incentives and conflicts of interest. Of course, from the point of view of a citizen, this is really the least-bad aspect of the consultant racket on the Democratic side since on some level if politicians want to waste their money that's on them. But it highlights the extraordinary level of power that an entrenched and not-especially-successful circle of campaign consultants has inside the Democratic Party and if the money situation's turning around that may mean that out-of-control consultant power as a broader phenomenon is on the way out.
For more on the general phenomenon see this from Amy Sullivan and my review of Bob Shrum's book.
Florida contains several of the parts of the country that are worst-hit by the housing bubble, so Peter Goodman's New York Times article on Cape Coral shouldn't be taken as typical. What it is, as Jared Bernstein says, is illustrative of the broader situation. The extreme locations highlight the general sorts of things that go wrong in affected areas. It isn't this bad in most place, but it shows the direction of change. And since there's a good chance things will get worse, more places will wind up like Cape Coral in the months to come.
Incidentally, the Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic will have a brief piece by yours truly looking at some of these foreclosure issues, though my Florida exemplar was a suburb of Miami.
One hears from a lot of secular people worries that the country is plunging over the edge into theocracy. At the same time, the press often seems to feel that the country is experiencing a massive religious revival that it needs to cover by hiring new "religion" correspondents. The truth, as shown in the above chart based on National Election Survey data, is more like the reverse -- more people than ever say "other" or "none" when asked about their religious beliefs.
It's this, rather than an intensification in fervor, that's made it possible to mobilize conservative Christianity for political purposes. Back in 1960 there were so few avowedly irreligious people out there that trying to rally opposition to the perils of secularism was a non-starter.
I'm broadly in agreement with what Megan has to say about the quest worker question. As Megan says, for those of us who would like to see a more liberal immigration regime, it's really not clear what problem this is supposed to solve. Politically, the imperative at this point is clearly reducing the number of illegal immigrants. The question, then, is whether this can be done in a humane and pragmatic way that involves a path to citizenship for some of the people already here, or whether it's going to be a purely punitive issue.
However that shakes out, if we can get to a point where the government's doing a reasonably good job of keeping the number of people who actually come to the US to something in the vicinity of the number of people who are allowed to come then, maybe, the conditions will be set to increase the volume of legal immigration. Having some or all of that increase come in the form of a guest worker program only seems to create additional practical and ideological challenges with little upside.
Is it just me, or has the holiday week and the attendant decompressing of the media pressure-cooker had the result in decreasing the level of fevered campaign speculation even as Iowa Draws Near? I'm not sure I fully appreciated exactly how sick I was of the primary season until I had the opportunity to take a brief time out from primary related arguments -- it's like the lifting of an enormous annoying burden. But the reprieve's over, I suppose, as there's now just one week left before the votes are cast and the press chooses an arbitrary post-Iowa narrative on which to seize (my guess is that however many votes/delegates/whatever John McCain gets will be deemed above expectations, thus feeding the looming surge in New Hampshire).
That's not quite right, I think, because you can run a coal plant irrespective of the weather so a megawatt-to-megawatt comparison is kind of misleading. That said, the point remains that renewable energy is not some outlandishly expensive hypothetical alternative. If the much-poorer United States of 1957 could afford coal power, the much-richer United States of 2007 can afford solar (and wind, etc.) power. And if the rich world decisively commits itself to renewable electricity, the number of firms trying to find cost-effective ways to deliver this sort of electricity will skyrocket, developing the sort of methods and technologies that can be viable on a mass basis in India and China.
This email from Joe Lieberman found itself in my inbox:
I know that it is unusual for someone who is not a Republican to endorse a Republican candidate for President. And if this were an ordinary time and an ordinary election, I probably would not have done so. But this is no ordinary time -- and this is no ordinary election -- and John McCain is no ordinary candidate.
In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great, the threats we face too real, and the opportunities we have too exciting for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.
Of course, left unmentioned here is that a huge proportion of the great "problems that confront us" are the direct results of the Bush/McCain/Lieberman effort to replace traditional internationalism with the daft "rogue state rollback" that McCain campaign on during the 2000 primary. There was at least a point in time when George W. Bush seemed to recognize the folly of this, but it's always been McCain's passion.
Obviously, I have no idea who in the US would benefit politically from a worsening situation in Pakistan. Unlike others, I won't even pretend to know. A different question is who deserves to benefit. That'd be whoever has the most sensible ideas about Pakistan. Who's that? Well, it seems to me that we desperately need to break away from the "trouble abroad, let's turn to hawkier hawks!" mode of organizing our politics. After all, there was a strategic choice undertaken by the United States of America during the year 2002 to refocus our attention away from Central Asia and the Pakistan/Afghanistan area and toward the Persian Gulf. That was, of course, the "tough," "strong," "serious" thing to do.
Then throughout 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 it's been the case that the "tough," "strong," "serious" thing to do is to maintain a massive strategic focus on Iraq in particular and the Persian Gulf in general. Vast quantities of troops, money, and attention lavished on the Gulf was Central Asia languishes. Only cowardly cowards like Brian Katulis though it was more import to focuson Pakistan. But of course when things go wrong in Pakistan, everyone's stomach lurches in a way that doesn't happen with problems in Iraq. In Pakistan, after all, you've got real nukes and more radicals -- trouble there is big-time trouble. But, presumably, there'll be a lull in the situation at that point. Maybe during that lull people can try to remember that these things are all linked together and that choosing toughseriousness is what led US policy in the region to fall into such a state of drift in the first place.
Looks like Russia's alternative to GPS is now nearing completion at least as far as coverage of Russian territory is concerned. Plans are underway to further expand the system. This doesn't seem like a big deal, really, but it's a signal of how other countries are coming to chafe under American hegemony and looking for practical ways to undercut it.
At the end of the day, that kind of trend is very bad for us. Consider, say, Iran. If Moscow and Beijing look at Iranian nuclear activities and think to themselves "nuclear proliferation is bad" then we're in good shape. If they look at Iranian nuclear activities and think "if checks the Americans, it's okay by us" then we're in terrible shape. But both ways are valid interpretations of the situation. Under the circumstances, it's vitally in our interests to create the kind of climate of international cooperation where the odds favor major foreign powers seeing events through the proliferation frame rather than the "check America" frame. Thus far, we're not doing a very good job of it.
I didn't want to irresponsibly speculate that the country is heading for a deep recession based on a single trip to the mall, but since Kevin Drum's the very model of sober-minded blogging, I'll quote him on holiday sales:
As for myself, I have no data to offer on holiday sales, but I do have an anecdote. I went out to a gigantic new local shopping center today and business was.....normal. I had no trouble parking, no trouble walking right into the movie theater (Charlie Wilson's War, flawed but still lots of fun), and the crowds at Borders, Best Buy, and Whole Foods seemed about like normal Saturday levels.
The Saturday before Christmas, I found myself through poor planning driving past a whole bunch of exurban Virginia shopping centers and, similar, things looked distinctly uncrowded. Not empty by any means, but very calm for a Saturday -- to say nothing of a pre-Christmas Saturday. There were also tons and tons and tons of half-sold new developments standing around along with a bunch of half-built ones that I suspect may not actually be completed for some time.
Via Scott Lemieux, Robert Dallek reviews a new book on Condoleezza Rice:
Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.
By the same token, if earth's yellow sun gave me the powers of a kryptonian, I'd be a super hero. If my blog had Engadget's traffic, I'd be the most popular political blogger. If George Bush could breath underwater, he'd be a fish.
Andrew links to S.L. Price's Sports Illustrated account of playing basketball with Barack Obama. By the time Price took him on, though, Obama was already a presidential candidate. For real fake insights, what you want is Marshall Poe's recollections of playing against Obama in the late 1980s.
I promised Dave Roberts last night that I would write a post about the evils of coal, so, yes, coal is evil. On the one hand, of course, coal emits enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. One politically popular notion is that we need to do away with this problem through a combination of carbon pricing and massive subsidies for "clean coal" efforts that will transform coal into a low carbon alternative. This is dumb. Carbon aside, coal is really terrible for the environment. The particulate emissions from coal plants have terrible health consequences -- in probability-adjusted terms it's probably worse than the risks of a nuclear meltdown. But the process of actually acquiring the coal is a whole other environmental disaster on top of that. If you spent a ton of money on subsidizing renewables, you'd have all this clean renewable energy. If you spent a ton of money subsidizing low-carbon coal schemes, you'd have sunk a ton of cash into a power source that's still bad for the environment and created a whole new series of issues about storage, etc., etc. It's a dumb idea.
I think people, in general, underrate the human capacity for change. There was a time when the Western way of life was dependent on long-distance wind-powered ships who required for their masts certain kinds of very tall, very straight pine trees that you had to get from the Baltic region. The strategic importance of pine trees was hard to overstate. So was the economic importance. Pine trees were vital. You couldn't possible get along without them. Until suddenly you could.
Photo by Flickr user LHoon used under a Creative Commons license
It seems the owner of the Washington Capitals has a blog and he's taken note of my ice girls advocacy. I know purists hate it but, eh, hockey purists should probably move to Canada.
Some time ago, I wrote an op-ed which noted that "Lee Feinstein, a former deputy director of the policy planning staff at the State Department and now Clinton's top national security staffer, wrote in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs that 'the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.'" The article, which can be found here, was cowritten with Anne-Marie Slaughter who objected to the way I used that quotation and my general construal of her piece. Since the same clause from the Foreign Affairs article then wound up in a Frank Rich column I thought it'd be best to get in tough with Professor Slaughter and clarify her views rather than debate the quote and its context. She's written back (speaking for herself):
I would not rule out unilateral action under any circumstances; a nation that had chosen to try unilaterally to stop the genocide in Rwanda in the face of both global and regional inaction would be hard to condemn. Similarly, it is imaginable that the United States or any other nation could conclude that it had absolutely no choice but to use force to defend its vital interests. But the entire point of our article was to minimize the likelihood of either of these situations ever occuring by embracing doctrines in the humanitarian and the non-proliferation area that would spur non-military collective action early in the game and would ensure global or at least regional authorization of force if it came to that. It is worth remembering that Kofi Annan himself told the General Assembly in September 2003, after the invasion of Iraq: ““It is not enough to denounce unilateralism, unless we also face up squarely to the concerns that make some States feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action. We must show that those concerns can, and will, be addressed effectively through collective action.” Lee and I had been running a roundtable for the American Society of International Law and the Council on Foreign Relations called "Old Rules, New Threats" for several years before the invasion of Iraq; this article was the outgrowth of a lot of that thinking.
As far as the desirability of collective action, almost certainly short of force, to check nuclear proliferation I'm in complete agreement. I also should say that I definitely agree that "the United States or any other nation could conclude that it had absolutely no choice but to use force to defend its vital interests." This, though, is one of those cases where I think the phrase "vital interests" obscures more than it reveals. Unilateral force to secure vital interests? Sure. But which interests are the vital ones? The UN Charter recognizes the inherent right of a state to act in self-defense. If Hungary starts launching air strikes on Ukraine tomorrow, no number of Security Council vetoes change the fact that it's legitimate for Ukraine to fight back. Similarly, the Charter recognizes a right to collective self-defense. If a country is attacked somewhere, the United States is within our rights to come to that country's assistance. And, indeed, we're arguably obliged to come to their assistance.
Slaughter's proposal is that we should try to develop new international legal norms that would strengthen collective commitments to non-proliferation rules (no disagreement from me) but also legitimate unilateral action in certain case to pursue non-proliferation goals. My strong guess is that if pursued in good faith this project is just going to prove unworkable. One doesn't want to see a new interpretation of international law gain strength that would legitimize an Arab League preventive attack on Israel and its nuclear program. Nor would one want to see a unilateral Indian assault on Pakistan.
If you go back and read the original Foreign Affairs article, the authors seem to be aware of this problem and include language designed to make sure that those cases aren't covered. Which is good. But it's also, I suspect, too transparent. The international community isn't going to accept a new principle of international law that's very narrowly tailored to US policy priorities. But the US doesn't actually want to unleash unilateral preventive war as a major force in the world in general, it's only a tool we would want to have under narrowly tailored rules or else (as in the Bush doctrine) as a straightforward matter of double-standards.
That said, understood the way Slaughter lays it out in the blockquote above, I'm not sure there'd be any harm in trying to explore the possibilities in this direction and negotiation and dialogue on this general issue should, if pursued in good faith (an important proviso), generate something useful on the international scene.
Here's some more from a mysterious Economist blogger on the subject of guest worker program. As he says, "In the end, immigration reform did not fail in America due to liberal quandaries on the ethics of guest worker programs; it failed because the Republican Party took a hard right turn on the issue." The question, then, is whether there's reason to think that greater reliance on a guest-worker program (or, to be more precise, on a large expansion of current law's very modest guest-worker allowances) would defuse some of the opposition.
The answer, I and the Mystery Blogger both agree, seems to be "no." None of the things that bother people about immigration would be substantially less bothersome in a guest worker scheme than under a more liberal immigration regime. If anything, you'd see the reverse. Trade unions have often been hostile to immigration. More recently, they've decided that their interests lie in organizing immigrant workers and seeking legal status for members of the workforce who are currently here illegally. Guest workers are essentially impossible to unionize, so a large bloc of guest workers is something unions -- currently supportive of immigration liberalization -- would be duty-bound to oppose. On the merits, I think both Reason and The Economist would welcome any effort to further crush the American labor movement, but it doesn't make sense to advocate something so patently anti-labor as a second-best political tactic. All it'd do is push unions into the restrictionist camp and totally doom the prospects for liberal reform.
Clearly, political assassinations are a bad thing. Equally clearly, political assassinations in a place like Pakistan seem to herald instability, and instability in Pakistan is frightening. That said, I think it's worth being clear about something -- from the perspective of someone who's never spoken to Benazir Bhutto or any members of her inner circle, it seems like she was a really bad person and a terrible political leader. The main thing she did when in office was steal. A lot. Of money. From her extremely poor country. You have, basically, tens of millions of incredibly poor people in Pakistan. You have shitty infrastructure. You have a shitty school system. And you're the Prime Minister. What do you do about it? You steal an incredible sum of money, while helping your associates likewise steal an incredible sum of money.
I'm not aware of anything changing for the better in Pakistan when she was running things. And as far as her credentials as a democratic opposition leader, it's worth noting that she's not the democratically elected leader who was deposed in Musharraf's coup -- her rival Nawaz Sharif was. Her plan was to use her strong base of support in the US to cajole Musharraf into some kind of power-sharing agreement with her. And if she'd gotten a bigger share of the power, she would have used it to steal more money.
Now, of course, the trouble is that I don't know what I'm talking about. But the vast majority of people who do know what they're talking about know what they're talking about . . . based on talking to Bhutto and members of her political party. Bhutto was well-connected in the West. Her party is less Islam-inflected than its main rivals, which is appealing to westerners. She went to western schools as did a lot of her associates. They know people. But being "well-informed" about the situation through close ties with a partisan actor inside Pakistan is arguable no better than being totally uninformed. What you want is real expertise -- in-depth knowledge of the Pakistani situation, ability to speak to players who don't speak English and don't attend Western universities, wide-ranging associations with Pakistanis and ability to follow the Pakistani press.
But almost nobody has that. Which is why most of all, I sympathize with this statement from Zbigniew Brzezinski:
I think the United States should not get involved in Pakistani politics. I deplore the absence of democracy in Pakistan, but I think admonitions from outside, injecting exile politicians into Pakistan, telling the Pakistan president what he should or should not wear, that he should take off his uniform, I don't really think this is America's business and I don't think it helps to consolidate stability in Pakistan.
I don't know whether or not it's "our business" but the point is that we're unlikely to be able to do this effectively. The US, being rich and strong, has a good deal of influence to throw around in Pakistan. But it's much easier for Pakistani actors to manipulate US policy than the reverse. We don't have the know-how, we don't have the expertise, and we never will. What we need to do is focus on what we can know -- what are our key interests in Pakistan -- and articulate them clearly and consistently combined with the proviso that we're willing to work with whatever kind of leadership Pakistan has on ways to advance our interests. Trying to pick the "best" faction and then shift things around so they wind up in power seems like a doomed mission. In general, the idea that the correct response to 9/11 was for the United States to start engaging more vigorously in efforts to micromanage political outcomes in Muslim countries seems badly mistaken. We need to make our policies more robust against internal political disagreements in the Islamic world, not do a better job of picking sides.
The Center for American Progress' Brian Katulis is one of our key actually serious experts rising on the scene, and conveniently enough he's just been in Pakistan for three weeks talking to a wide variety of players. His commentary on the current situation is worth paying attention to:
All too often in recent years the United States has looked to elections in other countries as the primary indication for success or failure in a country's progress toward political reform. The US has also become singularly focused on individual leaders like Bhutto. Her murder is a tragedy, and Musharraf has called for a three-day mourning period. As the world remembers her contributions, it should also keep her record in perspective. Under Bhutto, Pakistan provided support to the Taliban in the 1990s. Some observers note that Bhutto was not the saviour of democracy she claimed to be, including Bhutto's niece in a recent, biting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. And it was also in part on Bhutto's watch that Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father Pakistan's nuclear programme, built an international network that led to dangerous transfers of nuclear technology.
As Pakistan enters an even more complicated period, US policymakers should resist the temptation to see the situation in simplistic, black-and-white, freedom-versus-terror terms. Past experience in Pakistan and elsewhere demonstrates that putting our hopes on a single leader or a single election rarely makes Americans safer or advances stability and prosperity in other countries.
I think that's well-said. You can find more Katulis here and also here: "Earlier this month in Lahore, an official in a leading opposition party complained to me about U.S. policy's almost singular approach and obsession with individual leaders rather than institutions and the whole society: 'Why does President Bush say, "Mr. Musharraf is my friend?" Why doesn't he say, "Pakistan is our friend"?'" To put that question in a non-rhetorical context, I think it reflects the legacy of imperialism -- it's an effort to approximate the concept of "indirect rule" by cultivating mutually beneficial relationships between the US and individual foreign political leaders rather than mutually beneficial relationships between peoples.
The Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager is one of those things I start playing around with obsessively for a few hours and then completely forget for months. But Dana Goldstein's brought it back to my attention, using her own name to create this chart which illustrates the phenomenon of name sex changes where a name starts androgynous but then reaches a tipping point of girlishness and falls into disuse as a boy's name.
Thank God. A new Kenneth Pollack article! About Iraq! In The New Republic! Yes! It seems that the surge is working. Or, more precisely:
The bottom line in Iraq remains complicated. We should be heartened by recent progress, but we should not assume we have won yet, either: Failure is still at least as likely as success. But all is far from lost in Iraq, and the outlines of a successful strategy are finally appearing. Nevertheless, if the Bush administration is going to engineer lasting achievements from the accomplishments of the surge so far, it still has a lot to do and little margin for error.
There are a few flies in the ointment. For example: "the country's central government remains a highly counter-productive force." That's no problem, though. Rather than deal with the central government being a highly counter-productive force rather than a useful partner by leaving Iraq, we could just order up a new government: "by substituting one coalition for another within the current Council of Representatives (COR), but by advancing the date for elections (from late 2009 to late 2008 or early 2009) to get an entirely new COR." We can also help out by speeding the dismembering of the Iraqi state: "it may be necessary for Iraq to move to something closer to a cantonal system along Swiss lines."
At any rate, it's important to keep the stakes in mind:
As both of these examples illustrate, such campaigns require lots of time. In Iraq, several important factors, including the fortuitous and well-exploited "Anbar awakening," in which large numbers of Sunni tribes turned on their former allies in Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other Salafi extremist groups, has speeded progress. But there are three hurdles the United States must clear if it is to convert initial success into victory and leave Iraq as the next Northern Ireland, instead of the next Vietnam. This will still require considerable skill--and not a little luck.
To be honest, all you ought to need to say to make the case for withdrawal is "according to the proponents of staying, Northern Ireland is the best case scenario." I mean, that's crazy.
But to note a couple of analogistic points, they speak English in Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland is tiny, and the idea of just importing the Swiss political system to a foreign country with totally different traditions (and geography!) is silly.
I was vaguely contemplating the idea of making a playlist of songs I have that mention specific roads in them. Then I thought "Matt, you should really use Google before you do that" so I did. And what did I discover but an official Federal Highway Administration list of songs that mention specific roads. Take that, libertarians! These are the government services I need.
A remarkable quantity of dumb stuff has been said since Benazir Bhutto's death. I think, though, that K-Lo's post on how this shows we should ban abortion may be the worst in terms of its substantive logic. David Ignatius, on the other, seems determined to humiliate every one of us out there who's been known to chafe at the "name-dropping Harvard asshole" stereotype as he seeks to sub
