4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.
Pelosi has certainly said and done some things that have "signaled" this, as we say in DC, but I think that insofar as it's really true that she and "other leading members of Congress" think this, they need to communicate it more clearly.
After all, consider the situation in Pennsylvania. All indications are that a clear majority of Pennsylvania Democrats would prefer for Hillary Clinton to be the nominee than for Barack Obama to be the nominee. But there are few indications that they understand the real structure of the race -- that a miracle Obama comeback in PA would mean that Democrats enter May with a nominee and a financial advantage, whereas a sizable Clinton win in PA may mean that Democrats don't get a nominee until August and that that nominee, who'll almost certainly be Barack Obama anyway, will have a much tougher time winning in November. I think if voters better-understood the situation, they'd be much more inclined to vote for their second-favorite Democrat in the race, much less eager to do volunteer work for Clinton, much less inclined to donate money to her campaign, etc. But people won't understand the dynamic unless it's explained to them by credible party leaders.
Here's wishing an enjoyable holiday to the Christians in the audience! I find Peeps sort of bizarre, but I'm hoping to find myself some chocolate in a bunny shape later today.
The Campaign for America's Future proudly emailed this attack video against John McCain to me the other day, and frankly it's disappointing stuff:
There's just no evidence that McCain did anything wrong here. He was on the side of the angels in helping to investigate some dirty dealings in the contracting process for this tanker back in 2004, and the idea that Boeing should have a permanent monopoly on Air Force contracts because to work with rival firms would be "shipping jobs to France" is absurd. If people don't want to go after McCain for something real, they should go after his shabby treatment of his first wife or make fun of him for being so damn old or something. Or go after him for something real! But this ignorant and silly.
It all started innocently enough. UCLA's Burkle Center hosted a conference last week on the best way to deal with rogue states. On a panel proffering advice for the next administration, I disagreed with the American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka over policy priorities. Pletka urged the next president to emphasize democracy promotion and the spread of human rights among rogues. I suggested that counterterrorism and counterproliferation merited greater attention.
this point, Pletka accused me of being on the far left. This amused my friends at the conference, since I am a Republican who acted as an informal advisor for the 2000 Bush campaign. When informed of my party status later, Pletka replied, "Well, he's not like any Republican I know!"
Dan's obviously got a problem here, as does the country, but if a desire to focus on counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation issues rather than overthrowing foreign governments is not the sign that you're on the "far left" then I think those of us on the left are in pretty good shape going forward.
The Wright/Obama story and the Hagee/McCain story are imperfect parallels in several directions, but surely John McCain's successful efforts to court the endorsement of an anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish preacher who admires McCain's foreign policy as likely to bring about the apocalypse deserves more than no coverage whatsoever from the country's major newspapers.
It took so long into this New York Times story about congressional efforts to bring some regulatory oversight to the unregulated elements of Wall Street that it actually brought a smile to my face when we finally arrived at the inevitable "But industry groups warn..." part of the article. After all, I was curious, what will industry groups warn? What dire menace would it propose to the Republic if financial institutions that get bailed out like banks when they go bust, and now get access to the discount window like banks, also get regulated like banks before they do things that could force the government to step in and clean the mess? What should a politician eager to the bidding of firms who've bribed him pretend to be worried about?
The answer is: But industry groups warn that heavy-handed regulation could dry up investment capital just when the economy needs it most.
Because, of course, had new regulations been proposed 18 months ago, industry groups would have leapt at the chance. But now's not the right time!
Malik Rose comes off the bench to deliver a team-high twenty points on 8-13 shooting in New York's 93-114 loss yesterday to the mighty Minnesota Timberwolves.
Via Radley Balko, the latest item on the list of things to keep in mind when considering where anti-American populists like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales get their electoral support:
The latest affront, they say, is a recommendation this month from the UN’s drug enforcement watchdog, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), that Bolivia and Peru criminalize the practice of chewing coca and drinking its tea. The move has provoked widespread anger and street protests in the two countries, especially among the majority indigenous populations. For them, coca has been a cultural cornerstone for 3,000 years, as much a part of daily life as coffee in the U.S. (La Paz is home to perhaps the world’s only coca museum.) From the countryside to swanky urban hotels, it is chewed or brewed to stave off hunger or exhaustion or to ease the often debilitating effects of high-altitude life in the Andes. It is also “used by healers and in ceremonial offerings to the gods,” says Ana Maria Chavez, a coca seller in La Paz, who refers to her product as “the sacred leaf.” Pope John Paul II even drank coca tea on a 1988 visit to Bolivia. It is, says Chavez, “part of who we are.” [...]
Even as the INCB was issuing its report, the Bolivian government was reaffirming its desire to increase Bolivia’s legal coca crop limit from 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) to 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres). The Bush Administration has warned that the latter move would put Bolivia in violation of its international agreements — it is “not consistent with Bolivia’s obligations,” said the State Department — and risk tens of millions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Obviously, if we get our way on this the whole cocaine problem in the United States is going to go away. Hahaha. In broader strategic terms, it's no coincidence that the regions of the world that have most consistently been subjected to an imperial approach from the United States -- Latin America and the Middle East -- is where you see the most hostility to the United States. Portions of the world that have received more dignified, respectful treatment generally return the favor.
I see that the Amazon page for Heads in the Sand is telling me that people who buy my book might also enjoy Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. Indeed, you can buy both simultaneously for just $41.88.
As it happens, I just got to read the first 15 pages or so of Nixonland yesterday before relinquishing Spencer's copy back to him, and it's eye-opening. While Rick's been slumming it up as a blogger and pamphleteer, I'd sort of forgotten what an engaging, evocative narrative writer he is. Somewhat confusingly, the book's not about Nixon, it's about the "Nixon era" of American politics starting in 1966. But buy the book. And buy my book, too. Buy them together.
I find it striking that, as presented in episode two of John Adams, the case for independence is distinctly underwhelming. In particular, the point that a rebellion which can only succeed with foreign assistance is as likely to result in domination by France as in freedom from Britain seems like an important cautionary note. What's more, favored by hindsight and the example of Canada and Australia, the imagine of a non-independent America as destined to be slowly-but-surely ground into a state of tyranny looks wrong.
Conversely, however, the British seemed to be badly missing the big picture as the crisis approached -- risking a very valuable series of possessions over some relatively trivial policy issues. Taking the long view, independence looks more like the somewhat tragic result of short-sighted thinking on both sides than like a heroic triumph for the forces of liberty.
Which is a long way of saying, is there a book out there about the revolutionary era people would recommend that's not in the "no this guy was the best founding father!" genre?
To to tell the guys responsible for attacking the Green Zone with 20 mortars that the surge has been an enormous success. Similarly with whoever planted the homemade bomb in southern Baghdad that killed four American soldiers. I hope things manage to stay on roughly this plateau until through the election and when we get a chance to start bringing the troops home, but I think you've got to fear that as spring turns to summer and we can't maintain the full-size surge deployment that violence is going to keep crawling back up.
"Sustainment" is one of the uglier neologisms I've heard in quite some time, but Shawn Brimley's short article advocating "A Grand Strategy of Sustainment" is one of the better quick takes on forward-looking strategy that I've read in some time. Highly recommended.
Note that beyond an end to the exclusion of voices who were right about Iraq in 2002-2003, what we really need is more diversity of ideas about American foreign policy and more strategic thinking that, like what Brimley's written here, reflects a real alternative to the years of hubris.
Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a seix-year world war in which fifty million would perish.
Elisabeth Bumiller does us all the service of focusing some attention on McCain's flirtations with becoming a Democrat, first in 2001 when considering switching parties to flip control of the Senate, and then in 2004 when considering running as VP on John Kerry's ticket. McCain naturally decided to sweep all this under the rug when he decided to hug Bush and start positioning himself to run as a Republican in 2008 but his staff was taking this stuff seriously by most accounts.
I think it's pretty clear that McCain's been less-than-totally honest about this stuff, but beyond that, what's the point? I'm not really sure what the point is, myself. On the one hand, to some extent it highlights McCain's unseriousness about the bulk of domestic policy issues that he's drifted around so much on those topics and was willing to consider basically jettisoning his entire record. But at the end of the day, he didn't do it and (especially in 2001) domestic issues were presumably at the center of that. He really does have a conservative record and a conservative self-conception, and wanted to stick with that.
There's absolutely nothing in the world I find more baffling than the right's continuing critique of liberal bias in Google logo choices. Do I need to recommend some reading on free markets?
Paul Krugman notes that not only is John McCain going to be an absolute nightmare on the need to reimpose some kind of regulation on our financial system, but both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are maintaining an eerie silence on these issues and one has to suspect that the generous contributions the scions of high finance have made to both Democrats is playing a role here. It's not directly on point, but the relevance of my old boss Bob Kuttner's book on Squandering of America is clear; or see Noam Scheiber's review.
Part of Jim Henley's accounting of how he got Iraq so right is that he recognized that Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge:
I could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war - how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren’t going to be that.
In my view, these considerations remain a huge challenge for counterinsurgency optimists looking forward in Iraq.
The New York senator said the panel should be led by financial experts such as Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary in her husband's administration, and former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.
Obama's campaign is noting that they called for something similar a year ago, and according to the campaign "One key difference, however, is the diversity and representation that Obama called for – not just some of the same people who helped to create these problems or have a direct financial industry stake in the outcome." Specifically, he called for "summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge."
That doesn't seem like an earth-shattering difference in initial policy, but Obama's certainly picked up a certain tone-deafness in the Clinton "let's get together the people who caused the problem!" approach.
Everybody knows that Barack Obama was against invading Iraq in 2002-2003 whereas Hillary Clinton was for it. But what does that mean today and what does it mean for the future? Obama says "I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place" but, again, what does that mean? Spencer Ackerman spent some time talking to Obama's inner circle of foreign policy advisors trying to figure it out and came away very impressed with the Obama Doctrine.
Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license
Via Nick Beaudrot, Granite Prof generates an "elite score" for various Democratic contenders based on their performance in different parts of New Hampshire. Nick comments "As you can see, yes, Obama is the wine track candidate, as are all insurgent challengers. But he is less wine track-y than almost all other challengers."
Throw in the fact that the wine/beer balance is shifting over time in the Democratic party in favor of wine, and that Obama has tremendous strength among African-Americans of all tastes in beverages, this explains how Obama becomes the insurgent who wins.
In an odd way, the most outrageous of Jeremiah Wright's statements are also the easiest ones for an Obama supporter to deal with -- it's clear enough that Obama doesn't believe those things, and rightly so. The difficult problem of Jeremiah Wright is really with his less outrageous statements, with things like "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." This is too hot for US Presidential politics, and I certainly don't think it makes sense to think of 9/11 as justified divine retribution for Nagasaki, but the attempted puncturing of the cult of American self-righteousness here is spot-on.
You just can't say those sorts of things! Or of course you can easily say them on your blog, or even in your lefty magazine article, but when you step into the practical political arena in the United States, you enter the Self-Righteousness Zone where loving your country entails a staggering level of obtuseness. I hope Barack Obama does have some qualms about America's WWII-era habit of directly targeting Japanese and German civilians for massive violence, and as a political realist I also hope he never needs to speak serious about them in public until sometime in the 2020s.
Made by Andrew Bacevich. Of course to Bacevich, opposition to the hubris of empire is part of what makes a conservative. And in a purely abstract sense, he may have a point. But actually existing American conservatism seems so committed to a project of militarism and coercive domination that Bacevich's case seems a bit precious.
Corby Kummer has a fascinating piece in the print Atlantic about the Nuestras Raices Farm in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a non-profit group that's helping to stabilize the economically depressed and crime-ridden town of Holyoke, Massachusetts by teaching people to farm.
Bloggingheadsing with David Frum, Jacob Weisberg explains that there's almost no content to George W. Bush's understanding of his Christian faith:
Of course one might note that there's little real content to Bush's understanding of anything, so it's no surprise that he has a vacuous take on faith as well.
The Clinton campaign's now putting it out there that Hillary Clinton "misspoke" when describing her fake death-defying landing at Tuzla, but it certainly seems to have occurred in her prepared remarks.
The fib itself isn't a big deal, but an exaggerated notion of Clinton's level of experience really is at the core of the Clinton campaign's argument.
I've been remiss in not linking to this thrilling article in which Evan "he's the future of the Democratic Party and he always will be" Bayh explains that superdelegates should consider ignoring Barack Obama's lead in elected delegates and the popular vote, and instead focus on the fact that Hillary Clinton would we winning if primaries were governed by the electoral college.
I believe that by the Duhem-Quine thesis there are actually an infinite number of arbitrary criteria we could devise to prove that our preferred candidate is "really" winning. For example, Obama's leads in delegates and votes are relatively narrow, but I bet that if we counted by mass his disproportionately male base of support would have a much larger edge.
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
Looks like Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is getting formally charges with "misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and perjury" including charges of "authorizing the city of Detroit to settle an $8.4 million lawsuit with several former police officers “with the corrupt motive” of preventing the release of text messages which would have revealed that he had lied under oath in the case." This, unlike last week's city council vote, may actually get the dude out of office.
The city of Detroit is obviously facing structural problems that go beyond any one person's conduct, but this sort of corruption among public officials doesn't help. Meanwhile, at the bottom of this post, Dave Weigel notes some Royce-esque re-election icononography.
Glad to see that the Sirius-XM merger got approval. The companies' competitors in the terrestrial radio industry had been making the self-refuting argument that a merged entity would face no competition on the theory, I guess, that satellite radio is a hermetically sealed market totally unaffected by the rest of the broadcasting and music industries.
Here's some unmitigated good news -- a huge victory for a labor/environmental alliance a the Port of Los Angeles that stands an excellent chance of improving air quality around the port while improving living standards for the people who work there. It'll also put pressure on the nearby Port of Long Beach to follow suit. This is the biggest port in the United States, so it's obviously a big deal, and a big organizing coup for the good guys -- the success of the labor/environmental is great news for the progressive coalition.
Abu Muqawama offers some of his thoughts on how Britain could have employed counterinsurgency theory more successfully during the American Revolution. As long as we're talking strictly hypotheticals, I'm not sure this namby-pamby COIN business is the way to go. What if in early 1776 the British had burned Boston to the ground before retreating to Nova Scotia?
Then you're in a position to communicate to the colonists the basic shape of the situation. Britain, obviously, is not in a position to occupy the entire territory of the 13 colonies. By the same token, the colonies are in no position to defeat British naval power. The colonies thus have a choice -- they can submit, withdrawing their delegates from the Continental Congress, at which point all will be forgiven, or else they can continue to resist in which case their cities will be subjected to sporadic invasion and burning-to-the-ground. Communicate to the Indians in-or-near Massachusetts, that the Crown considers that colony to be a lost cause and he's prepared to support with weapons and money any attempt by natives to dispossess the white population there.
UPDATE: Now needless to say, this would have been politically untenable in England. And, of course, as a person of conscience I wouldn't recommend doing it. Even on a strategic level, this kind of policy wouldn't make sense -- Britain's interests are best-served by training to stay on good terms with the colonies, ideally by reaching a compromise that keeps them in the empire, but failing that by letting them go independent and just making sure they don't become a pawn of some rival power. In general, the best policy when faced with a country that doesn't wants your country to just go away is to go away and try to secure your interests from afar.
Photo by Flickr user Cernavodo used under a Creative Commons license
Man, I sure am glad all our economic problems are solved now that new home sales are slightly up (though still way below where they used to be) on falling prices. It's a new day in America! These are some seriously bizarre times.
I guess John McCain thinks outsourcing his strategic thinking to Osama bin Laden is such a great idea that he wants to brag about it:
As you know, I was in Iraq, Jordan, Israel, France and England on my last visit. And a couple of days ago, as you probably know, an audiotape -- actually it was last week -- an audiotape was released where bin Laden said, and I have to quote bin Laden, ... 'the nearest field to support our people in Palestine is the Iraqi field.' He urged Palestinians and people of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to quote 'help in support of their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq, which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task.' Now my friends, for the first time I have seen Osama bin Laden and General Petraeus in agreement, and that is, the central battleground in the battle against al Qaeda is in Iraq today. And that's what bin Laden is saying and that's what General Petraeus is saying and that's what I'm saying, my friends, and my Democrat opponents who want to pull out of Iraq refuse to understand what's being said and what's happening, and that is, the central battleground is Iraq in this struggle against radical Islamic extremism.
There's no question that, as McCain points out here at some length, that bin Laden would really like to see an epic struggle in Iraq between the United States military and an array of al-Qaeda recruits who, inspired by the idea of a struggle against American occupation, will flood into that country. As McCain says, this is bin Laden's view of how events in the world are unfolding. Why McCain thinks the correct response is to do what bin Laden wants, I couldn't quite say. Possibly, he's just not very bright.
Hillary Clinton gets some pushback on her idea of letting Alan Greenspan solve the country's economic problems and replies:
Not only that, but the Fed didn't act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach. I think it would be wise to include him. And recently he's come out and vert smartly so that we have to deal with housing and maybe we need to have some kind of buyout mechanism for mortgages. So he's moved on his understanding and depth of the problem -- but you know you could pick three others. You just have to have some demonstrable involvement of presidential leadership.
Basically, she's the candidate of experience and policy substance, but when challenged on the particulars of her policies it's all "math is hard!" don't ask me how the magic works. But when Greenspan told people they should take out Adjustable Rate Mortgages, I think that was perfectly clear and understandable. And many of them probably felt that if the Delphic Greenspan believed that sort of thing was wise financial management, that maybe they should swallow their doubts and do it. And therein lay the genesis of at least some of our current problems.
Looks like Mexico is en route to surpassing the United States as the world's fattest nation. Note that Mexico has an impressive life expectancy at birth of 75.6 years despite being a pretty poor country without first class health care services and a diet that's not generally regarded as particularly healthy.
This is perhaps related to the so-called "Hispanic Paradox" in US health care outcomes, wherein inside the United States "which most Hispanic groups are characterized by low socioeconomic status, but better than expected health and mortality outcomes."
I've read it twice, and I don't really understand what George Packer's problem with Barack Obama's Iraq policy is:
Obama offers Iraq as the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home. There’s more than a little truth to this, but I can’t help wishing that his speech on Iraq in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Wednesday, had anything close to the level of complexity and depth shown in his historic speech on race the day before, in Philadelphia. There was no deep consideration of the fate of more than four million displaced Iraqis, the specter of growing Iranian influence in Iraq, the likelihood of a return to terrible levels of violence as American combat brigades are withdrawn, the border tensions between Iraq and Turkey, the future of Kirkuk, or a strategy for preserving the very fragile improvements of the past six months. Instead, the speech presented what sounded like a fairly cost-free, win-win plan.
Obama's key contention, as underscored by Packer, is that Iraq is "the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home." Now obviously if you don't buy that analysis, you're not going to like Obama's Iraq policy. But Packer doesn't seem to disagree with it. Instead, he says "there’s more than a little truth to" what Obama is saying. But so if Obama's right, then he right. Packer doesn't see it that way. He seems to think that Obama should have gone in for some more showy hand-wringing. But why should he do that? Packer's upset that Obama doesn't have a viable plan for Kirkuk, but that's just the point; Obama recognizes that nobody has a viable plan to solve Iraq's problems so he wants to put our resources where they can do more good.
A policy that puts over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq in order to not solve Iraq's problems isn't a close substitute for solving Iraq's problems. On the other hand, maybe Packer just liked Obama's race speech a lot more than I did.
I was on an email list yesterday where there was some talk of whether or not the mortar attacks on the Green Zone coming from Sadr-controlled territory indicated that Sadr's cease-fire days were done. The consensus was: No. But today it looks like that line of thinking may be overtaken by events, as this BBC report and this McClatchy report certainly make it seem like it's "fire away" time. Spencer Ackerman says:
At least one theory worth entertaining is that the Sadrists waited out the surge. I don't have remotely the evidence necessary to support it, but it's something to consider when Petraeus testifies before Congress early next month.
It could be or it could be something else. In an intriguing development it looks like someSadrists are calling for civil disobedience. Meanwhile, let me say that while it's definitely been U.S. policy to ally with the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades in order to try to fight the Iranian-backed Muqtada al-Sadr, it's never been clear that that's wise policy. So whether what we've been doing is a successful effort to crush Sadr or whether it's about to blow up in our faces in the form of a big increase in violence, I think it's all questionable policy -- a United States that wasn't determined to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq would have nothing in particular to fear from a populist nationalist like Sadr.
Robin Toner asks "Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?" Since I was on the radio this morning to talk about polarization, this came up. And here's how I see it. Can Obama bring Republicans and Democrats together and reverse decades of structural trends toward ideological polarization? No.
Then there's the other thing. One thing many liberals believe is that one important reason America hasn't embraced liberalism is that the country is trapped in a politics of cultural division, and especially racial division. The theory of the Obama campaign is that the time is right for the right person to push the country past that and that Obama is the right person. I don't know that I believe that theory (I've primarily always been an anti-Clinton voter in this primary and I think there are fully adequate other reasons to back Obama) but I don't think it's a crazy theory. If Obama were to wind up securing 52 percent of the vote, that would be a long way from "unifying the country" but it would still be the biggest progressive mandate the country's had in decades.
Donnie Walsh has definitely had some success over the years with the Indiana Pacers, but the idea of recruiting him away from Indianapolis and to New York seems a bit odd. Walsh will be leaving Indy on a sour note, after several seasons worth of his team being in decline. The Knicks seem like they need a guy on his upside, someone who's been having some success and now is going to take on a bigger job.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Larry Bird's plan for turning the Pacers around is? Trading away the team's unpopular-with-the-fans "bad character" guys in exchange for overpaid white guys who don't play basketball very well hasn't turned out great and it's hard to undue mistakes like that.
Eric Alterman has an in-depth piece in The New Yorker on the now-inevitable decline and fall of the American newspaper. I don't disagree with a thing Alterman says in the piece, but for whatever reason I can never muster the level of angst that it's apparently necessary to have to qualify as a really serious media person in America. To me, the most important thing to keep in mind about the transformation of the American media is here:
The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.
The Lippmanite newspaper has always been a phenomenon that was pretty sharply bounded both in time and in place, and I just see no particular reason to think that the United States in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a transcendent ideal of incomparable awesomeness. The future will be different; more like the past, or like present-day Europe, but it's not as if modern-day Britain (or Spain or Denmark or whatever) somehow fails to function as a society or a democracy. People will probably be happier with the media product they consume, and certainly the internet makes it possible for those who are interested to become far better-informed than anyone was fifteen or twenty years ago.
But if you want more hand-wringing, rather than less, Farhad Manjoo's new book True Enough is the place to go to get it.
Neat map of proposed new streetcar and bus rapid transit lines in the District. This is via Richard Layman who rightly suggests that 14th street (the current 52/53/54 lines) would also be a good candidate for rapid bus service.
About a year ago a process that I believe is technically called "getting old and uncool" began to take hold and I fell hopelessly behind the curve on music matters. I kept listening to music but it was, you know, the same music I'd heard before. But for whatever reason I was inspired to download the Raveonettes' Lust, Lust, Lust and it's good.
So good, in fact, that perhaps I'll be awakened from my dogmatic slumbers and start paying attention again to what the cool kids are listening to. Because everyone knows the cool kids are always right.
Sudarsan Raghavan did a great piece looking at American success in Fallujah in yesterday's Washington Post. As he lays it out, the successes are very real -- the city was once held by the insurgency, and now it's basically under control. Specifically, it's under the control of Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie who served in the Republican Guard, then served as a commander in the insurgency, and then got fed up with AQI's antics, and now serves, with American approval, as police chief of Fallujah.
He still doesn't like Americans, still doesn't like the Shiite government of Iraq, and still doesn't like democracy. But he is happy to take American weapons and money and to cooperate with the American military. It's not clear if his cooperation would continue if we asked him to cooperate by, say, running the town along liberal principles or submitting to the authority of the central government, but the local troops are trying to get along and he's willing to get along. And so there you have your success. It's real enough. It's also obviously not what we invaded Iraq to accomplish (after all, the Republican Guard was running the country already before we invaded) and it's not at all clear where it leads you.
If we leave, it seems to me that Colonel Zobaie will either govern wisely, or else he won't. He may use a reasonable mix of firmness and good government to maintain control over his town, or he might screw up and tip things back to the insurgency. He may reach a reasonable accommodation with the central government or else he might not. And if we stay, all those same factors stay true.
John Sides takes a look at the evidence that libertarianism is the future of American politics and finds it wanting.
The evidence, as I see it, just points to the public shifting somewhat to the left -- demanding somewhat more public spending, plus growing more friendly to both libertarian and non-libertarian aspects of things like the gay rights movement's demand for equality irrespective of sexual orientation.
Gallup reports that Barack Obama's troubles with Jewish voters may be overstated as in fact that Obama-Clinton Jew split is quite tight. Still, when you consider broader demographic factors I think this looks less good for Obama. Jews, after all, mostly fit into the upscale "wine track" category of Democrats in which Obama is doing well and historically Jewish voters have supported reformist liberals of Obama's ilk. Given those priors, Obama being near-parity with Clinton is Obama doing poorly, and I think shows some of the attacks on him over Israel and some of the smear campaigns have had some effect.
On Spencer Ackerman's recommendation, I checked out Frontline's "Bush's War" last night. It was, to me, physically difficult to watch. The idea of seriously sitting down to interview Richard Perle about Iraq -- your interviewer here, your cameraman there, etc. -- is, to me, vaguely repulsive. How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him? I dunno. Do I want to watch him talk on my television? Or John Yoo? Even in the context of a documentary that makes it clear that they're repulsive sociopaths? Not really.
The die-hards, though, at least stand by their war. It's puzzling to think about the rest of them. John McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA throughout the pre-war period, has a ton of reasonable things to say about Iraq and the decision-making process. You're sitting there thinking, this is a smart, knowledgeable, insightful guy if only he'd been a high-ranking government official of some kind maybe he could have stopped this! He could have quite and said "holy shit! the government's being run by crazy people, don't let these psychos invade Iraq!" Of course Richard Clarke and Rand Beers did resign and no good came of it. Maybe there was no stopping the madness.
Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations is taking suggestions about future episodes. See Spencer Ackerman's video proposal for a trip to sample the culinary delights of Iraqi Kurdistan (video's not strictly appropriate for children). I'd watch that.
Robert Gordon has a nice piece in TNR making the point that though it's good that crime demagoguery has largely dropped out of our politics it would actually be a good idea for politicians to address crime since, hey, crime rates are still really high in the United States and all this murdering causes a lot of suffering. Gordon further notes that the uneven successes of crime fighting efforts in the 1990s appear to have taught us some important lessons about effective policing techniques that could do a lot of good were the federal government to help underwrite their spread.
This is all correct, and we should do it. Also, I would say, federal money for more cops. Meanwhile, one effect of the Iraq War has been to take a lot of cops out of the field fighting crime at home and send them to Iraq as Army Reserve and National Guard members instead. That's hardly a knock-down argument against the war, but it's a reminder that these visions of endless "strategic patience" don't come without cost.
Chris Bowers sketches out a plausible and appealing scenario in which Barack Obama wraps up the nomination on May 6. Among other things that would be good about such a scenario, it's worth noting that at this point the main obstacle to a satisfactory resolution of the Florida/Michigan situation is that Clinton continues to be in the race. If she drops out and endorses Obama on May 7 or shortly thereafter, it'll be easy for Michigan and Florida to be "forgiven" in late May and allowed to fully participate in a rubber stamp convention in exchange for promising to never do it again.
This is what, I think, everyone believed would happen when the harsh sanctions were first announced. Only the fact that Hillary Clinton is trying to use the seating of the improperly selected delegates to actually overturn the results of the legitimate nominating process is creating a crisis situation that threatens Democratic prospects in the fall.
Anatol Lieven's departure from our fair shores to return to England was a huge blow for the DC think tank universe, but I'm glad to see he hasn't completely given up writing on our issues. Thus, I've been distracted from my efforts to write a long piece about how absolutely terrifying John McCain is on foreign policy by Lieven's brief piece on how terrifying McCain is. If we're lucky, McCain will only start wars with North Korea and Iran. If we're unlucky, we may need to add China or (more likely) Russia to that list.
I suppose nothing should surprise me anymore, but it seems that conservatives are using the recently-released Pentagon report showing (yet again) that there's no Saddam/al-Qaeda connection to prove the existence of such a connection. What's more, they're even telling the truth about the media not paying much attention to the report. Indeed, they're taking advantage of the fact that the media hasn't paid attention to the report to just mislead people about what it says.
Kirk Ellis, one of John Adams's writers is jumping intoTNR's exchange on the series, and provides some insight into the provenance of the accents on display in the series:
Steve, you also inquire as to origins of the "hybrid accents" we use in the series. From the beginning, we wanted to emphasize that independence was a battle between British Americans and their brethren in England, not, as so often depicted, a conflict that pitted Crown officers with plumy Oxonian accents against patriots with full-blown American dialects. All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations.
He says they provided capsule biographies of the different characters to the series' dialogue coach to help them come up with something appropriate, sometimes based on the insight "that one's residence in America frequently depended on one's point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia--in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region."
Ellis' participation in this, along with some other similar examples, does raise some questions about the changing nature of the critical enterprise in the internet era. My sense is that, traditionally, creators have tended to shy away from direct intervention into critical debates about their work. But something about the seemingly informal nature of internet commentary seems to have subverted that rule, so you're seeing much more of this kind of intervention. It has, I think, the potential for a distorting impact on our understanding of things since, at the end of the day, it's really not the creator's role to offer authoritative accounts of what a given work "really" was or is.
So apparently Hillary Clinton was "sleep-deprived" when she forgot that she'd never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All "misspoke" theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she's mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign. But maybe we have an explanation of her war vote -- maybe she was sleep-deprived when she authorized the war? Maybe she's been staying up all night studying the classified National Intelligence Estimate trying to get to the bottom of things? Well, okay, she wasn't doing that, but maybe it was something. Presumably her plan is to be well-rested during her freaky 3AM phone calls.
Indiana looks to be something we haven't seen in a while -- a state where either Clinton or Obama could genuinely win. Anne Kornblut takes a look at the terrain and he closely matched forces there. Since the outcome of the race is determined by delegates, and Indiana is virtually certain not to provide a large delegate advantage to anyone, the state isn't, literally speaking, particularly important to anyone. But the outcome may have a substantial impact on the confidence game Clinton's trying to run on superdelegates and party leaders.
Yesterday, I mentioned the theory that racial conflicts were at the root of a lot of our political disputes even when they're not explicitly mentioned. Then later in the day strolling through the Atlantic's archives looking for something else, I came across Thomas Edsall's May 1991 article on race in politics and didn't really make the connection until I clicked back over to it just now. But there it is -- a classic statement of the thesis.
As best I can tell, nobody can quite figure out what's happening in Iraq right now -- nobody sure who did what that led to the current fighting or exactly who's fighting whom. Thus we get reporting about how the fighting "threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war." Once a giant battle is already under way it seems a bit late to worr that a cease-fire might be threatened, but that's a sign of how confused the situation is.
The International Crisis Group's old report on Shiite politics in Iraq remains a vital backgrounder if you're interested.
Mark Helprin had one of those let's bomb Sudan and everyone who doesn't want to do so immediately is obviously complicit in genocide in Darfur op-eds the other day. The trouble, as Mark Goldberg from UN Dispatch points out, is that this is completely detached from the nature of the problem in Darfur, which wouldn't at all be solved even if the Sudanese government was "persuaded" by air strikes to withdraw its forces from the arena. What's needed to provide security are actual boots on the ground that can do some good, and "So far, the only organizations willing to take on this challenge are the African Union and UN peacekeeping, which Helprin dismisses as a 'camping trip to the tower of babble.'"
Now Mark's far too polite to point this out, but what you're seeing once again is that there's a certain set of people for whom Darfur is an interesting situation just insofar as it provides a venue for UN-bashing and a "more bombs would make the world awesome" worldview. It's obviously frustrating to contemplate how unsatisfactory current UN and AU efforts in Sudan have been, but the reality is that they've done much more good than anything else. The idea that if we would just cast off these shackles of multilateralism that an excellent solution is just around the corner is daft.
To say a bit more about the situation in Iraq, the details remain murky but the broad outline is that we're continuing to see conflict between the exile party ISCI, which has been cooperating with the US and Iran in post-war Iraq, and the domestic nationalist Shiite movement associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, which has received some backing from Iran and been mostly hostile to the United States. From the point of view of American interests, this seems to be a fight in which we have no dog. Our main interest in this rivalry ought to be simply that it not turn into a bloody fight that leaves our troops in the crossfire.
But that, of course, is exactly what's happening. Why are we letting ourselves get dragged into this? Spencer Ackerman explains:
Here's an answer. As long as Maliki is in the prime minister's chair, and as long as we proclaim the Iraqi government he leads to be legitimate, Maliki effectively holds us hostage. "I need to go after Sadr," Maliki says. "The situation is unacceptable! In Basra, he threatens to take control of the ports, and in Baghdad, he's throwing my men out of their checkpoints. Would you allow the Bloods or the Crips to take over half of Los Angeles?" And as soon as he says that, we're trapped. It simply is not tenable for Petraeus to refuse a request for security assistance from the Prime Minister to deal with a radical militia.
This is, of course, a big part of the problem with making an enduring American military presence in Iraq a key strategic priority of the United States. To do that, we need to make ourselves useful to some politically powerful horses in Iraq. But to do that we need to get sucked into our favorite horses pet political disputes. So now we're there to provide backup and air support for the Badr Brigade as they try to liquidate their foes in Sadr's political party. And if it doesn't work, we may need to find a new Iraqi politician (remember Iyad Allawi? Ibrahim Jafari?) to be our special friend.
Noah Feldman says it's awesome but his article seems deeply confused to me for roughly the reasons Noah Millman points out. Feldman's running a lot of different ideas together, and getting too cute by half.
“I like bad boys for the most part,” Meghan adds. “In the past, I have liked tattooed guys who wear Converse. But I’d be open to anyone as long as you have a sense of humor. I have also dated totally normal guys who look like you, I guess—D.C.-looking guys.”
How much of a bad boy does wearing Converse really make you? We also learn that Senator McCain bought a condo for his daughter as her graduation present (nice!) and that she likes The Big Lebowski which Jon Chait sees as a potential dig at her Walter Sobchak-esque dad.
Robert Reich sounds like he's had about enough of Bill and Hillary Clinton at this point. Of course, Reich has had his differences with the Clintons before, despite being an old friend of Bill's and having served as his Secretary of Labor, but still I think it's a sign that the non-die-hards are about ready to see this campaign brought to a close.
Repeated invocations of the concept of "victory" or "winning" in Iraq from the hawks continually raise the question of what the heck it is they think victory would look like. As Fred Kaplan points out, whenever you look at what the president means (or at least seems to mean) by this, it turns out he's just ensuring defeat. I would only extend Kaplan's analysis by noting that John McCain, like Bush, has firmly committed himself to a similarly vague and unrealistic vision.
I understand that McCain has cred and therefore deserve a free pass from every reporter on every issue you can think of, but given that McCain has decided to put Iraq at the center of his campaign you'd think someone on the campaign trail might find time for a little scrutiny of what he's trying to say about this.
Eric Martin rounds up some evidence that "should make US policymakers wonder whether, yet again, we are backing the less popular local elements simply because they tell us what we want to hear." That seems wrong to me. The would-be imperial power has to back the "less popular local elements." The key thing is to find groups that are strong enough to hold on to power with external support, but too weak to come to be in a position to kick the ladder of external support away.
Yes, it seems stupid for American soldiers to be risking their lives for the sake of Iranian-backed Islamist parties' struggle against a nationalist Islamist party, but that's the perverse logic of the situation. If ISCI had more popularity and legitimacy, they wouldn't need us. And if they didn't need us, we wouldn't want them, just as we don't really want anything to do with the self-confident Sadrists. The only problem is ginning up domestic political support in the United States for the gambit. Hence we hear a lot about Iranian support for Sadrist elements or even al-Qaeda, and very little about Iranian support for their primary allies in Iraq -- allies who just happen to be our allies too.
Check out this last of America's largest urban areas ranked by weighted density. You'll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn't especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters -- if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we'd have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.
Inspired by liking Lust, Lust, Lust I'm now listening to other new albums people are recommending. For example, The Kills' Midnight Boom? Good! Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals? Also good!
To echo Ilan Goldenberg and Shawn Brimley, I think it would be a disaster for the next President to appoint a Republican as Secretary of Defense. The symbolism -- a combination of "Democrats can't handle defense" and "Democrats don't care about defense" -- just sucks.
In general, I'm not so high on the idea of appointing Republicans to anything, but you especially want to keep them away from the national security realm. Now it's a different matter to give an appointment to someone who's an ex-Republican (or willing to become one). Actual party switchers who are willing to publicly articulate a narrative about switching are a valuable commodity and people like that should be shoved out in front of the camera whenever it's plausible to do so.
Kate Sheppard notes that the gap in life expectancy between richer and poorer Americans is growing: "affluent and better-educated people are more likely to have quality health insurance and be able to take advantage of medical advances, and are less likely to smoke, live in dangerous neighborhoods, or eat unhealthy foods."
I was certainly always taught that if you buy stocks and hold them for the long run, that's going to ourperform other investments. But via Ezra Klein, The Wall Street Journalpoints out that this hasn't held up recently:
The stock market is trading right where it was nine years ago. Stocks, long touted as the best investment for the long term, have been one of the worst investments over the nine-year period, trounced even by lowly Treasury bonds.
You can see the chart to the left. Dean Baker wonders what would happen if instead of Social Security benefits everybody retiring right now had just lost a bunch of money in the stock market. It's a good question. I suppose it's always also worth wondering amidst a downturn if the seemingly too-high risk premium that sticks have traditionally paid might just go away -- maybe the free ride is over.
I was a little bit confused initially by John McCain's plan to deal with the crisis in the housing markets because on first read there doesn't seem to be a plan there at all. On second read, there's just no plan. Rather, there's fear that there might be a plan. But John McCain's promising to put a stop to that. Ryan Avent remarks:
As best I can tell, he must figure that offering a mortgage policy solution that’s far stingier than that put forth by one of the least popular presidents in modern times will burnish his maverick image, thus earning him more press cred. And then maybe the press won’t really talk that much about his stingy mortgage policy? He’d better hope they don’t, because if the American public finds out that he feels Bear deserved its bailout and homeowners deserve nothing, they’re going to be pissed.
Right. McCain's thinking on economics seems driven by a kind of "eat your peas" moralism. The press, which always favors economic pain for people other than themselves, their owners, and their advertisers tends to like this sort of thing. Like when McCain tried to run in the Michigan primary by promising voters that he thought their state's economy was doomed. But actual voters don't much like that kind of thing; I think there's skeptical as to how much different government policy makes in their lives, but they want policymakers to be at least trying to make their lives better.
The most salient characteristic of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the eighteenth century was its decentralization. In fact, the Ottoman state can only be considered an empire in the loose sense in which the term is used to refer to such medieval states as the Chinese under the late T'and dynasty. Its administrative establishment, economic system, and social organization all call to mind the structure of a premodern state. On paper, Ottoman territory at the turn of the nineteenth century stretched from Algeria to Yemen, Bosnia to the Caucuses, and Eritrea to Basra, encompassing a vast area inhavied by some 30 million people [MY note: this was a lot at the time]. In practice, the reach of the Ottoman government in Istanbul rarely extended beyond the central provinces of Anatolia and Rumelia, and then only weakly.
What's more, to prove that even a seemingly far-afield topic can be turned into a book plug, consider that this sort of herky-jerky governance across the breadth of the Muslim world would be deemed intolerable today. Contemporary Americans feel -- and not wrongly -- that in the wake of 9/11 we can't just be indifferent to what happens elsewhere. Anarchic conditions, or worse nuclear weapons programs, in far-off places could get people killed right here in the United States. The Bush administration's proposal to deal with this reality is to try to turn the United States into a kind of universal empire that will tell other countries what they may not and must do, and will mandate compliance through military might. Well, it doesn't work. The alternative I advocate in Heads in the Sand is liberal internationalism -- governance by agreement, non-proliferation and other goals achieved through legitimate multilateral processes that respect the interests of others and are capable of gaining the adherence of others.
In the wake of 9/11, that path was abandoned out of a combination of the sense that it was too laborious and the sense that it was politically untenable. But we've seen for the past seven years that the "shortcut" alternative of universal empire is no shortcut at all -- casting off international restraint hasn't empowered us to do new and exciting things, it's been counterproductive at great cost. Politically, the path of cowardice and timidity didn't achieve anything noteworthy for Democrats in 2002 and 2004, and with the Bush doctrine discredited the moment is ripe to try and offer people some serious ideas rather than merely "Serious" ones.
Photo by Flickr user Coltharp used under a Creative Commons license
Harold Meyerson asks us to imagine John McCain getting a 3AM phone call about an al-Qaeda bombing somewhere in the world:
McCain takes a deep breath. "Character counts, my friend," he says. "Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb Iran."
There is a rustling of blankets, and, brushing aside Cindy McCain, a concerned Joe Lieberman rises from the bed. "Not Iran, Mr. President," he says. "They hate al-Qaeda."
"That's right," the president says. "I remember now." He sighs with relief. "Good thing you're here every night, Joe."
It's a disturbing image but, as Harold says, not nearly as disturbing as the idea of a President who we have to hope listens to Joe Lieberman.
I think Brendan Nyhan's right in his explanation of why Democratic Party leaders are unlikely to unite to push Hillary Clinton out of the race even though they'd all benefit if it could be done -- it's hard to coordinate, and nobody wants to bear the costs of alienating Clinton's still-sizeable fan base. Still, dribs and drabs of superdelegates could, in sufficient numbers, succeed in pushing her out by May 6 as long as Obama turns in a decent performance in the upcoming primaries.
James Poulos says we should keep the penny and kill the nickel, followed by giving the penny a promotion so that it's worth five cents. He makes a pretty persuasive case. Note that this would also be an expansionary monetary policy measure that, given the current situation, might be more effective than further interest rate cuts from the Fed.
I was listening to a bit of Energy earlier today and decided I needed to look something up on the Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. What did I discover but this other Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. Apparently the band is named after an actual operation, "the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole" taking place in the Pacific Proving Grounds on the Marshall Islands.
Two bombs were tested, Mike and King, with Mike holding the distinction of being the world's first hydrogen bomb. And now you know.
I have to say that I doubt threatening Nancy Pelosi to take their toys and go home if she doesn't urge superdelegates to do what they want is really the smartest way for Hillary Clinton supporters to try to win this election. It sort of re-enforces the case that the Clintons and their close allies are selfish people willing and ready to destroy the party in order to maintain control over it.
An excellent rundown courtesy of Matt Compton. I suppose this is an obvious point to make, but you've got to assume that some of the states who were so eager to move their primaries up to February 5 are having some regrets right now. New Jersey just kinda got lost in the shuffle back in the day as a Clinton quasi-home state, but if they had an April 8 primary we'd all be hearing about the unique challenges facing the Garden State right now.
AUDIENCE: My name is Sabah Elbardisi (sp) with Al Jazeera TV. Senator, Mr. Gephardt spoke on Sunday and said that Mr. Rumsfeld is not doing a good job, and he stopped short of calling for his resignation. He also said that the presidents cannot leave the responsibilities for their subordinates. Are you also calling for his resignation? Or what are you calling for?
McCain: No. I think there are certain things that happen with the elections; a president to select his team is certainly a part of that. I certainly would not advocate that.
This came in the context of a speech followed by Q&A in which McCain discussed problems in Iraq at length and didn't mention sectarianism at all and, indeed, he seemed to be unaware of the existence of a Shiite-Sunni split in Iraq.
UPDATE: "Attack" is too strong a word. The point, however, is that people were calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, McCain was asked about those people, and McCain said those people were wrong. For McCain to turn around and characterize that as him calling for Rumsfeld's resignation is highly dishonest.
Anthony Cordesman on the stakes in the current fighting, which he remarks "is as much a power struggle for control of the south, and the Shi'ite parts of Baghdad and the rest of the country, as an effort to establish central government authority and legitimate rule."
The US teams we talked to also made it clear that these appointments by the central government had no real popular base. If local and provincial elections were held with open lists, it was likely that ISCI and Dawa would lose most elections because they are seen as having failed to bring development and government services.
Basically, we're helping ISCI and Dawa use force in the south to lay the groundwork for them to hold onto power that they would otherwise lose at the ballot box. For more, check out this telling post at the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama which starts out by saying "You know who was cool? The Jam. What a great band. You know who isn't cool? JAM -- Jaish al-Mahdi. Those guys pretty much suck." But then by the end it says:
Why, some wonder, is the U.S. closer to the Iran-backed ISCI and Badr Brigades than it is with the Sadrites? Why does this make sense? Two Baghdad political veterans have ruefully pointed out to Abu Muqawama that while Sadr has more popular support, the ISCI crowd have something more valuable: they speak English. One former State Department veteran with whom Abu Muqawama spoke a few months ago pointed out that former Iraq honcho Meghan O'Sullivan was particularly vulnerable to falling under the sway of those politicians who didn't just speak in that confusing gutteral language where they write from right to left in co-joined letters. Ergo: they speak English, so they must be our friends! Hoo-ray, democracy!
It's always worth recalling that one major problem with U.S. efforts to micromanage political outcomes in foreign countries is that it tends to be way easier for Iraqi (or Pakistani, etc.) political actors to manipulate our leaders than it is for our leaders to manipulate political actors in foreign countries. Americans have more levers -- more money, more guns, more power -- but foreigners have a much better understanding of what's happening.
With Michael Bloomberg introducing Barack Obama at Obama's "major speech" on modernizing financial market regulation, has the time come to replace pointless speculation about a Bloomberg presidential bid with pointless speculation about a Bloomberg vice presidential bid? I say: Yes. What better way to balance a ticket headed by a lanky black guy from Hawaii/Chicago than by adding a short Jewish guy from Boston/New York? It sounds ideal to me. Plus if Haim Saban and friends follow through on their threat to cut off the flow of big checks if Hillary Clinton doesn't get her way, Bloomberg bucks could make up the difference easily.
[Pointless speculation over]
What I'd really like to see Bloomberg do with his career, though, is invest some of his vast wealth in starting up a new policy analysis and advocacy center focused on issues of big cities and urbanism. Outside of the sub-set of urban issues that have to do with inner-city education policy, there's almost no investment in these issues in the policy game. Alternatively, Bloomberg could leave NYC and move on to a second political career as the mayor of a more challenging city. He did a good job in New York, but can he tackle the more serious problems of a Baltimore? A Detroit? That'd be truly great mayoring.
Josh Kurlantzick reports that the People's Republic of China is using the olympic games as a pretext for a broad crack-down on various "enemies." It's always striking -- and humbling -- to look at the often-sorry fate of Chinese dissidents and minority groups and recall that for all the hubris of the U.S. domestic conversation about "democracy promotion" everyone knows that there's really almost nothing useful we can do about human rights in China even as it's clear that the internal Chinese situation is probably the single most important variable in looking at the future of democracy.
Lord knows I don't think much of John McCain's foreign policy vision, but Mark Goldberg's right to say that he deserves praise for this idea:
We should work to reduce nuclear arsenals all around the world, starting with our own. Forty years ago, the five declared nuclear powers came together in support of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and pledged to end the arms race and move toward nuclear disarmament. The time has come to renew that commitment. We do not need all the weapons currently in our arsenal. The United States should lead a global effort at nuclear disarmament consistent with our vital interests and the cause of peace.
Barack Obama and John Edwards earlier endorsed this same vision during the Democratic primary campaign. Hillary Clinton, somewhat distressingly, has never really managed to join Obama and Edwards in taking this important step. Instead, she offered up the idea that "Former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn have called on the United States to 'rekindle the vision,' shared by every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons" when, in fact, what they called for was what McCain and Obama and Edwards have all called for -- namely a move toward universal disarmament.
Unfortunately for the country and the world, other aspects of McCain's foreign policy make it very unlikely that he could realize this vision. The sort of confrontation McCain is envisioning with Russia, and his commitments to both national missile defense and unilateral preventive war as a tool of non-proliferation policy would almost certainly undercut this appealing aspect of his vision. See, for example, this critique from Heather Hurlburt and Rand Beers for the basic reality that McCain would be a dangerous, dangerous leader for the country.
National Archives photo of Operation Ivy courtesy of PING News
Ah, Brookings, where a diverse and bipartisan group of war supporters can debate "The Future of Iraq and Afghanistan." The 60-70 percent of the public who's to the left of the Pollack/O'Hanlon axis will just need to stay quiet. There's lots of good people at Brookings, but I think those people need to give some thought as to the direction the high-profile people working on Middle East issues are taking their brand.
Note that Brookings is by far the most cited think tank by the press, and by super-duper far the most-cited "left of center" think tank.
As I noted yesterday when you get right down to it, John McCain's mortgage "plan" is almost staggering in its callousness. Keeping with the general sentiment on the right that what's needed to rescue the GOP from the depredations of Bushism is a more dogmatic form of rightwingery, McCain basically proposes federal intervention to save giant financial services firms and bupkis for anyone else. As The New York Timescorrectly points out he's taking on straw men: "No one has ever proposed helping real estate speculators" but at the same time McCain refuses to help out homeowners of any sort he "seemed less concerned about the government helping reckless bankers, endorsing its role in preventing the bankruptcy of Bear Stearns."
The Times endorses Obama's plan as superior to Clinton's, but notes that either Democratic approach would be vastly preferable to what McCain is offering. In these days of bitterness, it's worth recalling that this is the overall pattern on domestic issues. On any given topic, either Clinton or Obama will have a smallish advantage over the other, but either option is much, much better than McCain ignorance and indifference.
Photo by Flickr user Mdiddulph used under a Creative Commons license
Rob Goodspeed brings us WMATA's least-used Metro stations. I go by the Waterfront-SEU station all the time because Sara lives across the street. The problem of underuse there is presumably influenced by the fact that the directly adjacent Waterfront Mall has been closed for a while and is currently a giant pile of rubble. In general, land use in that area has been deplorable (quintessential isolated "towers in the park" urban renewal gone wrong) but things are in the works to improve matters.
Mostly, though, I think this highlights the fact that though nobody wants to confront the construction costs it would really make a lot of sense to build some additional heavy rail tunnels through the center of the city rather than more Metro "spur" extensions. New tunnels and stations through the core would relieve crowding at the very crowded existing central city stations, and would also increase the usefulness of the currently under-utilized stations on the fringe. Yes, obviously, it's more expensive to build downtown, but it makes more sense to undertake expensive projects that meet real needs rather than to go in for cheaper projects that aren't useful.
Ed Kilgore reads Barack Obama's speech on financial regulation and says "what struck me most in a quick reading of the speech was Obama's distinctly 'third wayish' thematics on government's role in regulating the economy." What struck me was the digs at the actually existing third way regime of the 1990s, when a certain someone's husband was president, and when Obama says the powers-that-were betrayed the vision of a mixed market approach in favor of run-amok corporate power:
Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one – aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.
Deregulation of the telecommunications sector, for example, fostered competition but also contributed to massive over-investment. Partial deregulation of the electricity sector enabled market manipulation. Companies like Enron and WorldCom took advantage of the new regulatory environment to push the envelope, pump up earnings, disguise losses and otherwise engage in accounting fraud to make their profits look better – a practice that led investors to question the balance sheet of all companies, and severely damaged public trust in capital markets. This was not the invisible hand at work. Instead, it was the hand of industry lobbyists tilting the playing field in Washington, an accounting industry that had developed powerful conflicts of interest, and a financial sector that fueled over-investment.
A decade later, we have deregulated the financial services sector, and we face another crisis. A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business has changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.
I'll be interested to see what he has to say about it, but this reads to me like an effort to co-opt some of Bob Kuttner's critique of Clintonism by assuaging doubts that an Obama administration would mean more of the same, while still remaining true to a basically technocratic role for economic policymaking.
C.J. Chivers has a crackerjack piece of investigative reporting in The New York Times running under the weirdly low-key headline "Supplier Under Scrutiny for Aging Afghan Arms". The heart of the matter is that we're trying to stand up some Afghanistan security forces who can maintain some reasonable level of security and order in that country, but "to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur." And this doesn't turn out to be a heartwarming story where a fledgling company led by a 22 year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur do a bang-up job and we end the war. No.
On the contrary, "the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging . . . the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete . . . contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking . . . tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law." I won't quote any more in the hopes that you'll click through and let the Times internalize some of the rewards for their reporting, but suffice it to say that there's even more scandalous stuff in there.
Just one more example of how dangerous it is to have the government led by people determined to prove that government is corrupt and incompetent.
More hilariously over-the-top commentary on Knut the baby polar bear: "Knut the polar bear has turned from a cuddly cub into a publicity-addicted psycho, one of his keepers claimed yesterday . . . Mr Roebke added: 'The trouble is that he identifies himself as a human and not as a polar bear.'" Personally, I strictly identify as a polar bear.
Just to clarify the nomenclature for anyone who's confused, ISCI (i.e., the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) is the new SCIRI (i.e., the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) they rebranded themselves a little while ago as non-revolutionary, presumably because they're basically running the show in Iraq.
To echo Ezra Klein's point, nothing about the fact that John McCain (allegedly) "hates war" should blind us to the fact that McCain loves advocating for the initiation of wars. McCain has a healthy understanding of what war means -- healthier than my own or than George W. Bush's -- but also a radically unsound understanding of how international relations works. To most people, war is horrible but sometimes necessary. To McCain, war is horrible but frequently necessary. We do ourselves a disservice if we focus on McCain's understanding of the horror of war to the exclusion of his belief in its frequent necessity. This was all well summed up by McCain in March of 1999:
A firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price. Moreover, refusing to help ease the deprivations in the North, and hastening the collapse of the regime might have also resulted in war as the North's last desperate measure, or at least a very messy re-unification with the South. Instead, we have sustained North Korea long enough for it to develop missiles that might be capable of striking the United States, and allowed it to proceed with its program to develop nuclear warheads. North Korea is still inexorably nearing total collapse, and its leaders remain quite capable of launching in their country's death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much -- better armed.
His view was that Bill Clinton should have started a war with North Korea in 1994. Not because he doesn't hate war ("not without paying a terrible price") but because in his view, war with North Korea was inevitable so better sooner than later. Five additional years of non-war didn't change his mind. Indeed, in January of 2003 he was accusing George W. Bush of being too soft on Pyongyang. And there's every reason to believe that five years after that he still believes what he believed in 1994 -- namely that we should engage in brinksmanship and quite possibly war with North Korea not reluctantly, but at the soonest possible opportunity.
Immigration hater Mark Krikorian passes on rumors that John McCain may be working the phones to try to block some anti-immigration legislation in the House: "An unnamed McCain staff member denies it, but given Amnesty John's track record, that denial is not persuasive."
"Amnesty John" is all wrong. He's either "Juan McCain" or else he's "Captain Amnesty" -- let's get this stuff straight, "Amnesty John" isn't any kind of joke at all. Recall the lyrics. Restrictionists, I only kid because I love . . . everyone knows dudes with Spanish last names can never assimilate and must be stopped at all costs.
According to Dana Goldstein, "a study from Harvard University last year found that of 168 nations worldwide, the United States is one of only four whose government doesn't require employers to provide paid maternity leave." That's shocking stuff, especially considering the way the country spent 2003-2006 under the unrestrained rule of the country's pro-family political party. It's almost as if all that talk about religion and children is just a mask for an agenda of ruthless corporate exploitation leavened by the occasional dose of anti-gay hysteria and they don't really care about American families at all!
One hopes Democrats could get on this case. One disappointment of Barack Obama's presidential campaign thus far has been that I would have expected someone with Karen Kornbluh on his team to have something exciting to say about work-family balance issues, but he hasn't really distinguished himself on that front at all.
Uh-oh: "Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about seven times the size of Manhattan is 'hanging by a thread,' the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming." Just remember -- we can afford to pay any price for endless war in Iraq, but serious action to forestall catastrophic climate change is too expensive.
Apparently much of John McCain's language about how much he hates war was lifted from a 1996 speech by Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. Interestingly, back in 1996 McCain didn't love war nearly so much as he has for the past ten or so years. Since that time, though, no matter how much McCain may say he hates war, he also keeps advocating for things like a land invasion of Serbia, war with North Korea, war with Iraq, war with Iran, more troops for Iraq, a ratcheting-up of hostilities with Russia, etc.
UPDATE: And now it seems that perhaps Ziemer was plagiarizing from McCain, and McCain's just been using this sort of language since 1995.
Eric Martin has some further context for the 2007 SCIRI rebranding, observing that the point of changing the name to ISCI wasn't just to "de-revolutionize" the brand but specifically to re-Iranianize the party's image. Of course, the same Iran-backed leadership who spent the Saddam years in exile in Teheran is still running the party. And, yes, this is the horse we've backed in Iraq and for some reason it's considered very important that this particular gang of goons beat Muqtada al-Sadr's rival goon squad.
Here's a nice rundown of the Clinton campaign's Northern Ireland mumbo-jumbo. I think what her husband's administration did there was a very legitimate achievement and very much highlights some of the shortcomings of the George W. Bush approach which has no comparable examples of constructive U.S. engagement in the troubles of the world. It also highlights John McCain's catastrophically poor understanding of foreign affairs as, at the time, he denounced the Northern Ireland initiative as a sellout of a key U.S. ally doomed to failure.
So it's not a bad issue for Clinton to raise, in its way. But she wants to raise it as an example of her personal foreign policy chops and the evidence just isn't there. It's normal for a new president to have little direct foreign policy experience, and either Clinton or Obama would fit that bill. But Clinton seems determined to pretend she's some kind of seasoned hand that she isn't.
The present study examined the effect of feminist ascription on perceptions of the physical attractiveness of women ranging in body mass index (BMI). One-hundred and twenty-nine women who self-identified as feminists and 132 who self-identified as non-feminists rated a series of 10 images of women that varied in BMI from emaciated to obese. Results showed no significant differences between feminist and non-feminists in the figure they considered to be maximally attractive. However, feminists were more likely to positively perceive a wider range of body sizes than non-feminists. These results are discussed in relation to possible protective factors against the internalisation of the thin ideal and body objectification.
I suppose that's about what I would have expected -- ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception.
Charlie Black, who's been working as a senior advisor to John "Clean Hands" McCain, will be taking a leave of absence from his lobbying to work full-time for the campaign, the better to cash in once McCain's in the White House. I love cred.
If you read this Washington Post account of fighting in southern Iraq a couple of things become clear. One is that the United States is deeply involved:
U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.
The other is that nobody in U.S. policymaking circles really thinks we have a dog in this fight:
The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups -- the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq's largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor's seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.
Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," the administration official said.
Basically, we have our troops, risking their lives and killing people and all for the sake of helping some Iranian-backed militia groups fight some other Iranian-backed militia groups and, yes, the groups we're supporting initiated this battle without clearing it with us. But we need to back them, because George W. Bush has staked his precious credibility on his alliance with Nouri al-Maliki, so if Maliki says American blood and treasure will be expended fighting the Mahdi Army, then so it shall be expended.
Alternatively we could just leave and let this people sort out their own problems.
Via Andrew and Jon Chait, a Pew poll that quantifies the sense that some of the people who have a problem with Obama just don't like black people very much:
White Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating, and are more concerned about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values. In addition, nearly a quarter of white Democrats (23%) who hold a negative view of Obama believe he is a Muslim.
Obama's campaign has generally, I think, refrained from chalking up anti-Obama sentiment to racism because they know perfectly well that if he gets the nomination he needs to run in a country where the electorate's only about 10 percent black. Still, conservative views about race don't seem to be nearly as big an influence on anti-Obama sentiments as are conservative views about national security -- it's the "fight for U.S. right or wrong" crowd that's really heavily represented in the anti-Obama coalition. It's also fascinating to see that Democrats who agree that "men make better leaders" have a net negative view of Obama; apparently that kind of retrograde cultural conservatism sufficiently correlates with anti-Obama sentiments that even running against a woman doesn't turn those people into Obama fans.
New York Times: "Mr. Bush also accused Iran of arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces." Would it have killed the Times to point out that Iran is also arming, training, and financing the militias fighting alongside the Iraqi forces? After all, the government of Iran has extremely cordial relations with the government of Iraq and our main militia allies in Iraq were literally created in Iran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This context certainly seems relevant.
Meanwhile, is there any real precedent for the sort of repeated misstating the identity of the enemy that we've seen from the Bush administration? Recall that it took years for the administration to grudgingly acknowledge the existence of a non-AQI Sunni Arab insurgency even though this insurgency had long been the US military's primary adversary. But now we're supposed to believe that everyone we and our Iranian-backed allies fight are Iranian. Sure.
Tom Lee says we need to worry less about the over-hyped robot threat and focus more attention on the menace of pirates. I'm afraid, however, that as Tom ought well know, many of his precious Google Trends hits for "pirates" aren't about honest-to-God, parrot-wielding pirates at all, but rather "intellectual property pirates" and other such metaphorical pirates. Why Tom would choose to act as a dupe of Big Content and continue to leave the nation defenseless against the robot threat I couldn't quite say. Maybe someone needs to tell the world that his girlfriend's a cylon!
Photo by Flickr user jylcat used under a Creative Commons license
Is it really true, as a recent Gallup poll has indicated, that 28 percent of Clinton backers and 19 percent of Obama backers would vote for John McCain? Basically logic indicates that probably not, and now via Mori Dinauer, we've got some evidence from Brian Schaffner:
In March of that year, the Pew Center for the People & the Press released a report titled "Bush Pays Price for Primary Victory." Following Bush's victory in the 2000 primaries and McCain's exit from the race, the Pew survey found that 51% of those who backed McCain during the primary campaign would vote for Gore in the general election. Only 44% of his supporters said that they would be casting their votes for Bush. Furthermore, a significant share of Bradley supporters also said that they would be supporting Bush in the general election, including 39% of his independent backers.
No doubt there will, in fact, be some people (Clinton supporters who are serious foreign policy hawks or some newly minted Obama supporters who've never been involved in the political process before) who'll defect for McCain if their favorite Democrat wins, but one should expect this to be a pretty small number of people.
I heard a liberal Obama skeptic remark a couple of months ago that it would be a strange day in America when the correct answer to the question "who's the most electable" was "the black guy." I think that's right, and it's a reminder that though the cliché is to say that Democrats are torn between two very strong candidates, in some ways we're torn between two very weak ones. At the end of the day, I do think "the black guy" is the more electable of the two, because "Bill Clinton's less-charismatic wife" is an almost uniquely poor choice to try to expand the Democratic Party's appeal at a time when George W. Bush has brought the GOP into discredit. But in a primary election, where Clinton has formidable strength, it would have been extremely difficult for anyone other than "the black guy" to build a viable anti-Clinton coalition.
Given the extreme strong underlying pro-Democrat fundamentals, it's very hard for me to imagine how a "generic Democratic white dude" like Chris Dodd or John Edwards or, indeed, John Kerry would lose in this environment. Now of course given that white men are a pretty tiny slice of the Democratic coalition at this point, sooner or later the party is going to need to start nominating more women and non-white in competitive races or else they'll be shutting themselves off from too much of the available talent (see, e.g., Obama's formidable speech-giving skills) so it's probably just as well to spend a year with good fundamentals taking a chance and breaking down some barriers.
Charles Krauthammer, "The Shiite 'Menace,'" The Washington Post, May 2, 2003:
Before the war even began, the critics were predicting that Iraq was going to be the Bay of Pigs (plus "Desert One, Beirut and Somalia," said the ever-hyperbolic Chris Matthews). A week into the war, we were told Iraq was Vietnam. Now, after the war, they're telling us that Iraq is Iran -- that Iraq's Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic.
The critics were wrong every time. They are wrong again. Of course there are telegenic elements among the Shiites who would like fundamentalist rule by the clerics. But even the majority of Iranians oppose the rule of the mullahs and consider the Islamic revolution a disaster. The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.
These days, of course, Krauthammer would have nothing but scorn for anyone who doesn't want to see American troops fighting, killing, and dying for an indefinite period of time all for the sake of SCIRI's hold on power.
Another wine-sipping elitist gets on the Obama bandwagon, in the person of Bob Casey, Jr.
This highlights what is, perhaps, the ultimate madness of the Clinton superdelegate strategy -- all the superdelegate momentum is against her. She built up a huge lead months and months ago back when she was "inevitable" and has monotonically lost ground since then. And yet the whole premise of her campaign is that there's a secret wellspring of Clinton support among undeclared supers who are just dying to overturn the results of the primaries and give her the nomination.
Dean Barnett takes a butterknife to an intellectual knifefight with Spencer Ackerman over "The Obama Doctrine." Of course, it's precisely the fact that Obama's approach to al-Qaeda is antithetical to The Weekly Standard's bluster and ignorance approach that makes him an appealing figure.
What to think of "Conditional Engagement", the brief policy memo from Colin Kahl and Shawn Brimley of CNAS. Well, I'm not as skeptical as Kevin Drum. In essence, what I take them to be saying is that we should probably leave Iraq but if upon taking office the new President finds that key Iraqi politicians are all prepared to produce the pony we need then we ought to be willing to stick around. You can count me as very skeptical that this strategy would, in fact, produce a pony which is why I put emphasis on the idea of packing up our bags and going home but I don't think I disagree with their literal claim.
Now of course a lot comes down to the details. But beyond the details, a lot comes down to the purpose here. Do Kahl and Brimley really intend to quit Iraq if/when the pony doesn't materialize? Or is the real point here just to generate "a nuanced middle position between 'all in' or 'all out'"? Certainly, I've had about enough of policymaking where we decide first to find a nuanced middle ground and then second sketch out what that nuanced middle ground means. It seems to me that a lot of efforts have been expended essentially with the goal of avoiding the DFH conclusion that we ought to leave Iraq at all costs.
So I'm skeptical. But I'll be interested to see the longer version, because I don't have a huge literal disagreement with what they're saying and it sounds like the new report will be a big step in my direction relative to where "Phased Transition" had positioned CNAS.
It's not really much of a surprise at this point that Paul Krugman deemed Barack Obama's economy speech inadequate, but it is worth pointing out that Krugman's take on this is a little idiosyncratic within the larger world of liberal economics specialists. The speech I read was definitely a critique-from-the-left of the Clinton administration record, accusing them of going too far in joining with the GOP to gut the regulatory apparatus that's necessary to make American capitalism work.
Which is all by way of throat-clearing to introduce Bob Kuttner's column on the subject; Bob was a populist before it was cool, and hasn't been hesitant to slam Obama in the past, but he loved the speech.
There are no coincidences in something like a presidential campaign ad, so, no, I don't think it's reading too much into things to think that John McCain claiming to be "the American president Americans have been waiting for" is designed to imply that a certain opponent might be less-than-fully American.
Given what a mess the Republicans have made of things, it'll be mighty hard to actually argue on the merits that a souped-up Bushism is what the country needs to improve its national security but the foreign policy hawk can always take refuge in the idea that we have a patriotic obligation to follow an all-war, all-the-time course no matter what the results. Mix in Barack Obama's funny name, and the stage is set for the conservative critique of Obama as allegedly "post-American." Note that it's not just the tag line of McCain's ad -- the whole focus is on the idea that McCain really thinks America is a swell place and Americans are awesome people. Sure, he wants to bankrupt those people and get their kids killed in senseless wars, but he really likes 'em! Not like that whatsisname the Democrats are running.
Bob Casey, Jr. doesn't make much sense to me as a potential VP pick for Barack Obama. Conventional wisdom says you need to be pro-choice to be on a national Democratic ticket, and I think that CW is correct. Among other things, I assume that in a general election Obama's going to want to make the point that John Paul Stevens is even older than McCain, so if he wins then all your reproductive freedoms are belong to Sam Alito. On top of that, Casey doesn't seem like an especially skilled politician. He has no real virtues relative to Jim Webb, some of Webb's flaws, plus some additional flaws.
So Webb continues to be tempting, I think Sherrod Brown would make a lot of sense, and I also have a soft spot for the ballsy (metaphorically speaking!) idea of Janet Napolitano.
It seems Barack Obama has good things to say about congestion pricing. Good for him. It'd be nice to have a President whose background is in representing an urban area and perhaps has a personal sense of the importance of these issues. Hasn't happened since John F. Kennedy, I believe.
It seems that the situation in Somalia has completely collapsed. The Washington Post sees insurgents on the march and notes that "on Tuesday, 40 aid groups delivered a statement to the U.N. Security Council, which is discussing Somalia this week, warning of an "impending humanitarian catastrophe." Too bad the United States decided to help provoke this latest round of fighting and anarchy by supporting an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
About half of what I know about the Horn of Africa I learned from reading Jeffrey Gettleman articles so I shouldn't be too hard on him, but it was a little odd to read that when the TFG "came here to the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war, chaos and suffering." Certainly, to me it looked like the best chance to restart Somalia's ceaseless cycles of war, chaos, and suffering and I recall it looked the same to John Judis, to the International Crisis Group, and many others. Meanwhile, in addition to contributing to massive suffering in Somalia we've for no real reason picked a fight with a local Islamist movement that showed no particular sign of wanting to fight the United States.
Some very smart stuff about Iraq from Zbigniew Brzezinski a man who's not without his flaws, but whose Iraq advice we certainly should have taken in 2002-2003 then again in most every single one of the intervening years. A couple of key points:
The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.
I was thinking about this the other day as I found myself reading something about the tragic Lyndon Johnson administration. And it's really worth focusing on. The right has made a lot of hay out of the fact that some anti-war types to some extent understated the extent to which a North Vietnamese victory would be a humanitarian problem for many South Vietnamese people. Much less hay has been made out of the fact that the hawks had been quite literally arguing that there was a straight line between the Communistification of Vietnam and then the inevitable spread of Communism to Malaysia, Indonesia, all of Asia, and soon enough the United States itself. The argument really was that we had to fact them over there or else we'd be fending them off from our very shores.
And it was ridiculous and remains so today. And yet the essence of the case for staying in Iraq indefinitely really does hinge crucially on these lurid worst-case scenarios. And it's true -- if we leave Iraq in the most irresponsible manner possible and we suffer from a lot of bad luck and everything that could go wrong does go wrong and we don't respond to events intelligently, then these terrible outcomes might happen. But that's no reason to stay in Iraq forever -- if we stay and everything goes wrong, that'll be terrible, too.
Now as Zbig says, a serious effort to get out of Iraq is going to require a political and diplomatic component as well as the mere absence of U.S. troops. One of the good things about the Responsible Plan for Iraq from Darcy Burner and other House challengers is precisely its recommendation of the need for this kind of diplomatic engagement, which really is crucial to trying to minimize the inevitable fallout from the United States doing what needs to be done in military terms. I would note that on the diplomatic front, it's probably easier to get Iraq's neighbors to contribute constructively to stability in Iraq once we've decisively decided not to run together "stability in Iraq" with "Iraq becomes base for U.S. power projection and mad schemes to overthrow all the governments in the region."
More evidence that the Clinton campaign's desperate flailing to find some way to overturn the outcome of the primary process is causing her to lose ground. Here's Eli Sanders in The Stranger out in Seattle:
Karina Putnam-Kaminsky, a manager at a downtown Seattle restaurant, is fed up. She was elected as a Clinton delegate at the Washington State caucuses on February 9 but says she's become so frustrated with Clinton's win-at-all-costs-and-despite-all-odds approach that she's going to switch her support to Obama when the Legislative District caucuses take place on April 5.
"It's highly unlikely that Clinton will get the nomination," Putnam-Kaminsky said. She went on to criticize the "wild, crazy, incendiary claims" that have been coming from the Clinton camp in recent weeks and said the "final straw" was Clinton's push to get the results of Florida and Michigan's rule-violating primaries to be counted. "It seemed kind of desperate," Putnam-Kaminsky said.
This probably won't make a huge difference in the end, but the number of people who actually understand what the Clinton victory scenario entails and still want it to happen is pretty tiny. After all, most Democratic activists, whether or not they like Hillary Clinton, don't want to see the party burned down for her sake.
Spencer Ackerman: "Since he began running for president, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has embraced President George W. Bush's foreign policy. He has done so for a simple and understandable reason: it was McCain's policy first." You'll be reading more on this from me coming soon to a magazine near you, but yes -- Bush's worst moments have come when he's embraced an approach to foreign policy that McCain's been pushing for over ten years now.
A nice piece by Lisa Lerer in Politico makes the point that Phil Gramm, on whom John McCain says he'll be relying for economic policy advice, was one of the key architects of a piece of deregulation that's been a big contributor to the current crisis in the financial markets. Indeed, Gramm was, in general, one of the most hard-core far-right voices on economic policy all during his tenure in the congress. McCain, who neither knows nor cares about economic policy, decided during the primaries that he should tack to the far right by outsourcing his thinking to the Gramms of the world and based on the evidence thus far from his reaction to the crisis (roughly speaking: let them eat cake) he hasn't reconsidered that idea.
After all, to reconsider it he'd need to care about the issue, have some inclination to think about policy questions, and believe that public policy should benefit ordinary people and none of those things are true.
I'm going to a wedding in Chicago this afternoon -- my first-ever wedding-of-a-friend, in fact. But nevertheless it's good to learn that old fashioned cohabitation isn't problematic after all.
To revisit the five year-old Charles Krauthammer quote from yesterday about SCIRI, I should say that I don't think the point is that Krauthammer was "wrong" about SCIRI. He was, of course, wrong but he's been wronger about many things over the years. Rather, the point of highlighting his changing tune -- and the hawks' general switch on this -- is to underscore the vacuous nature of the hawks' strategic thinking on Iraq.
The fantasy camp theory of the Iraq War in which we were going to install a happy pro-American democracy that led rapidly to a tumbling of Iranian and Syrian (and maybe Saudi!) dominoes was always dumb but it's at least clear why you might find it appealing. But that collapsed into the ashes years ago, and ever since it did folks have been casting about for rationales. We've gotten stuck in an inane debate over whether or not the surge is "working" or whether or not Iraq is "going well" when in reality it's been years since we've had any coherent objectives at all.
The New Republic asked for my thoughts on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the appropriate U.S. policy response how to improve the NCAA tournament. Results here.
It's pretty small bore, but the idea of implementing "pay as you drive" car insurance, as proposed by Jason Bordoff in Democracy and various other worthies elsewhere seems like a no-brainer of a good idea. The basic concept would be that people who drive more would, ceteris paribus, pay more for their car insurance. After all, your odds of getting into an accident have something to do with how much driving you do. This would be a bad deal for half the people, but a good deal for the other half, and should help reduce congestion, air pollution, carbon emissions, etc.
Asked for the root of his hopefulness, Stern referred to “the wellspring of optimism that resides within me” and the “renewal presented by the draft” and the preseason. “And I do know that the ownership of the Knicks is committed to improving the team,” he said. “It’s just my perpetually optimistic self.”
I think Stern should start moonlighting as John McCain's Iraq spokesman.
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Heads in the Sand
